Wikipedia

1936 Summer Olympics

Games of the XI Olympiad, in Berlin, Germany

The 1936 Summer Olympics (German: Olympische Sommerspiele 1936) was a sporting event. They were officially called as the Games of the XI Olympiad. They were branded as Berlin 1936. The Olympics were from 1 to 16 August 1936. They took place in Berlin, Nazi Germany.[2]

Games of the XI Olympiad
Host cityBerlin, Germany
MottoI Call the Youth of the World!
(German: Ich rufe die Jugend der Welt!)
Nations49
Athletes3,963 (3,632 men, 331 women)
Events129 in 19 sports (25 disciplines)
Opening1 August 1936
Closing16 August 1936
Opened by
Chancellor Adolf Hitler[1]
Cauldron
Fritz Schilgen[1]
StadiumOlympiastadion
Summer
← Los Angeles 1932 London 1948 →
Tokyo 1940 →
Winter
← Garmisch 1936 St. Moritz 1948 →
Sapporo 1940 →
Olympic Stadium in Berlin, 1936

The 1932 Los Angeles games were very successful. Nazi Germany wanted to have a more successful Olympic Games than in 1932. Reichsführer Adolf Hitler built a new track and field stadium. The stadium had seats for 100,000. Hitler also built 6 gymnasiums. They also built other, smaller arenas. The Games were the first to be on TV. There were radio broadcasts to 41 different countries.[3] Leni Riefenstahl was paid by the German Olympic Committee to show the Games for $7 million.[3] She made a movie about the Olympics. This movie was called Olympia. It was important in techniques seen in making sports videos now.

Hitler used the 1936 Games to promote the Nazi government, racial supremacy, and antisemitism. The Nazi Party newspaper said that Jewish people should not allowed to be in the Olympic games.[4][5] German Jewish people were not allowed to be athletes in the games.[6] However, some Jewish female swimmers from the Hakoah Vienna sports club were in the games. Some Jewish athletes from other countries were not allowed to compete, either. This is because their countries did not want to offend the Nazis.[7] Lithuania was not allowed to be in the Olympics because they were very anti-Nazi.[8]

The games were thought to be successful. The costs of the games was mostly paid for by the German government.[9] The Germans earned 7.5 million Reichsmark from the tickets. (€16.1 million in 2017). This gave the Nazis a profit of over one million R.M.

During World War II, there were no Olympics for 12 years. The next Olympic Games were in 1948 in St. Moritz, Switzerland. The next Summer Games were in London, England.

Games

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Opening ceremony

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Parade of nations

The opening ceremony was in the Berlin Olympic Stadium on 1 August 1936. The Hindenburg showed the Olympic flag.[10] Adolf Hitler and Henri de Baillet-Latour went into the stadium. After that, the parade of nations started. Each nation had their own costume. Since Greece was the origin of the Ancient Olympics, they went into the stadium first. Germany went into the stadium last. Many athletes gave the Nazi salute as they passed Hitler. Some people gave Hitler the Olympic salute. The Olympic salute looked like the Nazi salute, but with the arm raised higher. United States, India, and China put their hats over their hearts.[11] All countries lowered their flags as the passed Hitler. The only countries that did not do this were the United States, the United Kingdom, Switzerland, and the Commonwealth of the Philippines.[10] Thomas Wolfe was at the event. He said that the event was almost religious. He also said the crowd screamed and cheered for Hitler.[12]

 
Adolf Hitler and Henri de Baillet-Latour enter the Olympic Stadium

The German Olympic Committee's president gave a speech. Hitler then said that the Olympic games were open.[10][13] Hitler said this from his own box in the stadium.

The Olympic flame was first used in the 1928 Summer Olympics in Amsterdam. However, this was the first time they used the torch in a relay. The Nazis invented running the torch from ancient Olympia to the host city. The "torch bearer", or the person who ran with the torch, ran to the top of the stadium. There, he lit a cauldron. This would light the torch for the rest of the games.[12][14]

Not everything wet to plan. According to Louis Zamperini, an American athlete, there was an issue with the pigeons. He said that the Germans released 25,000 pigeons. Right after that, they had shot a cannon. This scared the poop out of the pigeons.[12]

Events

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There were 129 events. There were 25 sports disciplines. These 25 disciplines made 19 different sports. The number of events in each discipline is shown in parentheses.

This was the first time that Basketball, canoeing and handball were in the Olympics. Handball was not in the Summer Olympics until Munich in 1972. There were two demonstration sports: baseball and gliding.[15] There were also art competitions for medals. In the closing ceremony, there were medals given for alpinism and aeronautics feats.[16] There were also Indian sports,[17][18] wushu[19] and motor racing.[20]

Participating nations

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A total of 49 nations sent athletes to compete at the Berlin games.[21]

Medals

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Volmari Iso-Hollo, 3000 m steeplechase gold medalist, 1936 Summer Olympics

These are the 12 nations that won the most medals at the 1936 Games.[22][23]

  *   Host nation (Germany)

RankNationGoldSilverBronzeTotal
1  Germany*383132101
2  United States24211257
3  Hungary101516
4  Italy913527
5  Finland86620
6  France76619
7  Sweden651021
8  Japan641020
9  Netherlands64717
10  Austria57517
11  Great Britain47314
12  Switzerland19515
Totals (12 entries)124114106344
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References

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Countries at the 1936 Olympics
  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 "Factsheet – Opening Ceremony of the Games of the Olympiad" (PDF) (Press release). International Olympic Committee. 13 September 2013. Archived (PDF) from the original on 14 August 2016. Retrieved 22 December 2018.
  2. ↑ Sports Reference.com (SR/Olympics), "1936 Berlin Summer Games" Archived 2008-07-07 at the Wayback Machine; retrieved 2012-7-24.
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 Rader, Benjamin G. "American Sports: From the Age of Folk Games to the Age of Televised Sports", 5th ed.
  4. ↑ Nagorski, Andrew. Hitlerland: American Eyewitnesses to the Nazi Rise to Power. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2012, p. 188.
  5. ↑ David Clay Large, Nazi Games: The Olympics of 1936, p. 58.
  6. ↑ "The Nazi Olympics Berlin 1936". Ushmm.org. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Retrieved 7 October 2016.
  7. ↑ "Jewish Athletes – Marty Glickman & Sam Stoller". Ushmm.org. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Retrieved 7 October 2016. A controversial move at the Games was the benching of two American Jewish runners, Marty Glickman and Sam Stoller. Both had trained for the 4x100-meter relay, but on the day before the event, they were replaced by Jesse Owens and Ralph Metcalfe, the team's two fastest sprinters. Various reasons were given for the change. The coaches claimed they needed their fastest runners to win the race. Glickman has said that Coach Dean Cromwell and Avery Brundage were motivated by antisemitism and the desire to spare the Führer the embarrassing sight of two American Jews on the winning podium. Stoller did not believe antisemitism was involved, but the 21-year-old described the incident in his diary as the "most humiliating episode" in his life.
  8. ↑ "Trial of Neumann and Sass" (PDF).
  9. ↑ Zarnowski, C. Frank. "A Look at Olympic Costs," Archived 2018-12-25 at the Wayback Machine Citius, Altius, Fortius (US). Summer 1992, Vol. 1, Issue 1, pp. 21-22 [6-7 of 17 PDF]; retrieved 2012-7-24.
  10. ↑ 10.0 10.1 10.2 Birchall, Frederick T. (1 August 1939). "100,000 Hail Hitler; U.S. Athletes Avoid Nazi Salute to Him". The New York Times. Retrieved 2016-10-13.
  11. ↑ "When Indian Olympians Refused to Salute Hitler and the Nazis". The Better India. 2020-08-19. Retrieved 2020-09-08.
  12. ↑ 12.0 12.1 12.2 Jesse Owens. TV documentary. WGBH Educational Foundation. 2012. Presented on YLE TV 1, 9 July 2014.
  13. ↑ Guoqi, Xu (2008). Olympic Dreams: China and Sports (PDF). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. pp. 226–227. ISBN 978-0-674-02840-1.
  14. ↑ "Hitler's Berlin Games Helped Make Some Emblems Popular". Sports > Olympics. The New York Times. 14 August 2004. Retrieved 27 March 2010.
  15. ↑ "Demonstration sports : history at the Olympic Summer Games / The Olympic Studies Centre". Olympic World Library. 2024-01-19. Archived from the original on 2024-01-19. Retrieved 2024-01-27.
  16. ↑ Kluge, Volker; Lippert, Thomas (2013). "The Olympic Alpinism Prize and a promise redeemed" (PDF). International Society of Olympic Historians. Archived from the original (PDF) on 27 January 2024. Retrieved 2024-01-27.
  17. ↑ "When a kabaddi team from India left Hitler, Mahatma in awe at 1936 Olympics", Business Standard, Press Trust of India, 2 December 2018
  18. ↑ Nag, Utathya (14 April 2022). "Kho Kho, a kabaddi-like sport linked with Indian epic Mahabharata - know all about it". Olympics.com
  19. ↑ Watta, Evelyn (2022-11-02). "The rise of wushu in Senegal and Africa ahead of Dakar 2026 Youth Olympics". Olympics.com. Retrieved 2024-01-27.
  20. ↑ Walsh, Mick (2019-08-01). "A Life in Cars". Classic & Sports Car.
  21. ↑ Taking part in the games for the first time were Afghanistan, Bermuda, Bolivia, Costa Rica, Liechtenstein and Peru.
  22. ↑ "1936 Summer Olympics Overview". Olympedia.
  23. ↑ "Berlin 1936 Medal Table". International Olympic Committee.

Further reading

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  • Barry, James P. The Berlin Olympics. World Focus Books.
  • Grix, Jonathan, and Barrie Houlihan. "Sports mega-events as part of a nation's soft power strategy: The cases of Germany (2006) and the UK (2012)." British journal of politics and international relations 16.4 (2014): 572–596. online Archived 6 March 2020 at the Wayback Machine
  • Hilton, Christopher. Hitler's Olympics: The 1936 Berlin Olympic Games. (2006)
  • Krüger, Arnd. The Nazi Olympics of 1936, in Kevin Young and Kevin B. Wamsley (eds.), Global Olympics: Historical and Sociological Studies of the Modern Games. Oxford: Elsevier 2005; pp. 43–58.
  • Krüger, Arnd, and William Murray (eds.), The Nazi Olympics: Sport, Politics and Appeasement in the 1930s. (Univ. of Illinois Press 2003).
  • Lehrer, Steven. Hitler Sites: A City-by-city Guidebook (Austria, Germany, France, United States). McFarland, 2002.
  • Large, David Clay. Nazi games: the Olympics of 1936 (WW Norton & Company, 2007).
  • Mandell, Richard D. The Nazi Olympics (University of Illinois Press, 1971).
  • Rippon, Anton. Hitler's Games: The 1936 Olympics. (2012) excerpt
  • Socolow, Michael J. Six Minutes in Berlin: Broadcast Spectacle and Rowing Gold at the Nazi Olympics. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2016.
  • Walters, Guy, Berlin Games – How Hitler Stole the Olympic Dream. (2006) excerpt

Other websites

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Wikimedia Commons has media related to 1936 Summer Olympics.
Summer Olympics
Preceded by
Los Angeles 		XI Olympiad
Berlin
1936 		Succeeded by
Tokyo/Helsinki
cancelled due to World War II
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