Hitler. 1936-1945: Nemesis

The summer of 1936 was, however, as Hitler knew only too well, no time to stir up a new antisemitic campaign. In August, the Olympic Games were due to be staged in Berlin. Sport would be turned into a vehicle of nationalist politics and propaganda as never before. Nazi aesthetics of power would never have a wider audience. With the eyes of the world on Berlin, it was an opportunity not to be missed to present the new Germany’s best face to its hundreds of thousands of visitors from across the globe. No expense or effort had been spared in this cause. The positive image could not be endangered by putting the ‘dark’ side of the regime on view. Open anti-Jewish violence, such as had punctuated the previous summer, could not be permitted. With some difficulties, antisemitism was kept under wraps. Manifestations thought distasteful for foreign visitors, such as anti-Jewish notices — ‘Jews not wanted here’, and other vicious formulations — at the roadside at the entry to towns and villages, had already been removed on Hitler’s orders at the insistence of Count Henri Baillet-Latour, the Belgian President of the International Olympic Committee, before the commencement the previous February of the Winter Olympics in the Bavarian alpine resort of Garmisch-Partenkirchen.⁸ The antisemitic zealots in the Party had temporarily to be reined in. Other objectives were for the time being more important. Hitler could afford to bide his time in dealing with the Jews.

Frenetic building work, painting, renovation, and refurbishment aimed at offering the most attractive appearance possible to Berlin, the city of the Games.⁹ The centre-point was the new Olympic Stadium. Hitler had angrily denounced the original plans of the architect Werner March as a ‘modern glass box’, and, in one of his usual childlike temper tantrums, had threatened to call off the Olympics altogether. It was probably a device to make sure he got his own way. And like pandering to a spoilt child, those around him made sure he was not disappointed. Speer’s rapidly sketched more classically imposing design immediately won his favour.¹⁰

Hitler was more than assuaged. Now fired with enthusiasm, he demanded at once that it should be the biggest stadium in the world — though even when under construction, and outstripping the size of the previous largest stadium at Los Angeles, built for the 1932 Games, he complained that everything was too small.¹¹

The whole of Berlin was wreathed in swastika banners on 1 August as the arrival of the Olympic torch signalled, amid spectacular ceremonial, the commencement of the XIth modern Olympiad — Hitler’s Olympics. Overhead, the massive airship Hindenburg trailed the Olympic flag. In the stadium, a crowd of 110,000 people had assembled in great expectation. Over a million others, it was estimated, unable to get tickets, lined the Berlin streets for a glimpse of their Leader as a cavalcade of black limousines conveyed Hitler with other dignitaries and honoured guests to the newly designed high temple of sport. As he entered the great arena that afternoon, a fanfare of thirty trumpets sounded. The world-famous composer Richard Strauss, clad in white, conducted a choir of 3,000 in the singing of the national anthem, ‘Deutschland, Deutschland über alles’, and the Nazi Party’s own anthem, the ‘Horst-Wessel-Lied’, before conducting the new ‘Olympic Hymn’ which he had composed specially for the occasion. As the music faded, the giant Olympic bell began to toll, announcing the parade of the competing athletes that then followed. Many national delegations offered the Nazi salute as they passed Hitler’s dais; the British and Americans demonstrably refrained from doing so.¹²

All around the stadium, cameras whirred. The camera teams of Leni Riefenstahl, the talented director who, after her success in filming the 1934 Party Rally, had been commissioned to produce a film on the Olympics, had been installed in numerous strategic positions, accumulating their material for a celluloid record of the stirring events.¹³