The 1936 Olympics

 

Berlin won the bid in April 1931 to host the 1936 Olympic Games over Barcelona, its number one contender. The bid for the games had been won two years before the Nazis were elected into office in Germany. When the Nazis came to power, American Jewish organizations immediately demanded that some other venue be chosen for the games other than Berlin. The American Jewish Congress and the Jewish Labor Committee staged rallies to oppose America’s participation in the games if the games were not moved out of Berlin. Avery Brundage, President of the American Olympic Committee, to his very great credit, decided, despite this pressure, that America would participate in the Games in Berlin as scheduled. International Jewry already had a propaganda campaign under way against the Nazis long before they came into office, and Brundage took the view that the attempted boycott of the Olympic Games was just another “Jewish-Communist conspiracy” against Germany, which, of course, it was. He stated that Jewish athletes were not being treated unfairly in any way by anyone. The Jews were nevertheless relentless.

The story most repeated about Hitler and the Olympic Games in Berlin, is that Hitler refused to shake the hand of the American black athlete Jesse Owens after he had won a race. This myth is widespread, and appears as fact in many journals and publications today, including, for example, in Microsoft’s Encarta Encyclopedia.

What actually happened is that Hitler personally attended the first day of the track and field competition on August 2, 1936, and personally congratulated the German athlete Hans Wollke, who was the first German to win a gold medal in the Olympics since 1896. Throughout the rest of the day, Hitler continued to receive Olympic champions, both German and non-German, in his VIP box.

The next day, August 3, the chairman of the International Olympic Committee, Comte Bailet-Latour, approached Hitler early in the morning and told him that he had violated Olympic protocol by personally congratulating each Olympic winner. Hitler duly apologized and said that he would hence forward refrain from shaking the hands of the winners. Later in the same day, when Jesse Owens won his gold medals, Hitler did not shake his hand… or anybody else’s, during the remainder of the games.

It is, therefore, utterly false to claim that Hitler deliberately chose to snub Owens. In his autobiography, “The Jesse Owens Story,” 1970, Owens recounted how Hitler had stood up and waved to him: “When I passed the Chancellor,” he wrote, “he arose, waved his hand at me, and I waved back at him. I think the writers showed bad taste in criticizing the man of the hour in Germany.”

During the afternoon of the first day, Hitler and his entourage left the stadium early because rain threatened. In fact, it had already begun to sprinkle. Coincidentally, the American black, Cornelius Johnson, had just barely beaten his American teammate in the high jump to win a gold medal shortly before Hitler left the stadium. The anti-German propagandists reported through the International Jewish press that Hitler had “stormed out” of the stadium in a tantrum because a black man had won an event. Hitler was much too sensitive to world opinion to have left himself open to negative publicity by any such inappropriate behavior.

But the facts would never stand in the way of a good anti-Nazi story. The Jewish owned New York Times carried on its front page, “Hitler greets all medalists except Americans,” the day after the first competitive events. The headline in the next day’s paper read, “Hitler ignores Negro medalists.” Not by coincidence, the New York Times had earlier led the movement to boycott the Berlin games. Other newspapers picked up the story. “Hitler Snubs Jesse,” read the huge, bold headline of a black Cleveland paper, Call and Post. The Baltimore Afro-American carried the headline “Adolf” Snubs U.S. Lads. These were deliberate lies. Nothing of the kind had happened.

Another story spread around about the 1936 Olympics by the anti-German press was that Owens’ victory “disproved the Nazi master race theory.” If anything, the Games supported that idea, if, in fact, such an idea even existed. Germany won 89 medals, while the United States, with two and a half times Germany’s population, won 56.

That Germany claimed to be the “master race” is another myth with no basis in fact; just more anti-German propaganda from the International Jewish press. The Nazis never made any such claim (though the Jews do claim to be God’s chosen people), and Hitler never used the term, “master race,” or anything close to it to describe the German people. Hitler used the term “Aryan” to represent all the Germanic peoples of Europe, including the British, Dutch, Swedes, Norwegians, Fins, Swiss, and all the other peoples of Europe of Germanic origin. Hitler believed that the Aryan people were culturally superior to most of the rest of mankind as manifested in all their achievements. He wrote in Mein Kampf: “All the human culture, all the results of art, science, and technology that we see before us today, are almost exclusively the creative product of the Aryan…” This idea was generally accepted by all Europeans at the time, and could hardly be disputed given the fact that almost all civilizational advances were accomplished by these people. The British have always considered themselves to be a superior race. The anti-German international Jewish press deliberately misinterpreted these general concepts to mean that the Germans considered themselves alone to be the “Master Race.” In fact, no such claim was ever made.

In what was to become an act of extreme irony, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, then running for re- election and concerned about the reaction of the southern states, refused to see Jesse Owens at the White House. Owens was later to remark that it was Roosevelt, not Hitler, who snubbed him.

Jesse Owens was the citizen of a country whose racism would have made Hitler blush. In Hitler’s Germany, Jesse Owens could share a bus or tram ride with white people. Treated equally in all respects before the law, he could sit in a movie theater next to whites, use public toilets, dine in restaurants, and stay in hotels without any discrimination being shown towards him. There were many things he could do in Hitler’s Germany that were forbidden at home in the United States. In the United States black athletes were required to eat separately from their white fellow athletes. If they were allowed to share the same hotel at all, which was unlikely, it would be necessary for them to use the service entrance. There were no blacks on any major league baseball team and there were no black swimmers. This was in the enlightened north. In the southern states there was no possibility of a black being allowed to participate in any sport, except to compete with other blacks. For the Jewish press to have smeared Hitler and the German people in general as “racists” was hypocritical in the extreme.

Jesse Owens evidently enjoyed his time in Hitler’s Germany immensely. In Germany he received a lot of pre-Olympic media hype and the German people idolized him. “Once at the stadium, the mere appearance of Jesse Owens’ head from some pit below the stands would cause sections of the crowd to break out in chants of, ‘Yes-sa Ov-enss! Yes-sa Ov-enss!’ “ — Richard D. Mandell. “The Nazi Olympics.”

“Some mornings at the Olympic village the athletic hero of the hour was awakened by amateur photographers who flocked outside his bedroom window to click at the athlete before he could gather poise for one of his many appearances before the mobs in Berlin.” -- Richard D. Mandell. “The Nazi Olympics.”

“Jesse Owens was cheered as loudly as any Aryan.” -- Lawrence N. Snyder; Jesse’s coach. Saturday Evening Post Nov. 7th , 1936

When Jesse Owens first returned to the states, he denied that he had been snubbed by Hitler or that he had been mistreated in any way. But he learned soon enough that he could use the “snub myth” to his own advantage. In his postwar interviews, postwar public addresses, and in his “ghosted” articles and books, he began to claim that Hitler had, indeed, refused to shake his hand, and he also began to repeat the lie that Hitler “left the stadium in a tantrum” when a black athlete won a medal, because that is what people wanted to hear. As he discovered that anti-Hitler stories resonated well with American audiences, he began to exaggerate his “mistreatment” stories even further. Such exaggerations finally became the central feature of his talks as he described how emotionally torn apart he was by the “snubs” and other mistreatment by Hitler and the “Nazis.” The reality is that Jesse Owens was given the warmest ovation of his life by the German spectators, including Hitler.

Yet another myth still commonly believed as the result of the anti-German propaganda is that American blacks “ran away” with the gold medals during the Berlin games. It is true that Owens won four gold medals, but outside of track and field, the Germans dominated the Olympic Games of 1936 by winning more medals than all other participants combined.

These are only some of the flagrant distortions about National Socialist Germany created by the International Jewish propaganda campaign. Since the victors write the historical accounts of events, Germany has been permanently smeared with these blatantly false stories.

Hitler’s “Film Expert to the National Socialist Party,” Leni Riefenstahl, made a documentary of the 1936 Olympic Games, called, Olympia, which nearly matched her earlier film, Triumph of the Will, in its propaganda value to the Third Reich. The film won many international awards.

Germany scored a huge propaganda coup with the 1936 Olympic games, despite all efforts of the International Jewish press to denigrate it. The world was able to see firsthand “the new Germany” which had been created by National Socialist rule. German hospitality won high praise from visitors from all over the world, and Adolf Hitler was seen as the man of the hour. Despite efforts being made by international Jewry to discredit Germany in every way possible, most objective reports were favorable to Germany as a result of the Games. Frederick Birchall reported in the New York Times that the Games put Germany “back in the fold of nations,” and even made them “more human again.”

But Jewish reporters consistently took only the most sinister interpretation of everything occurring in Germany. The Jewish journalist William Shirer, for example, regarded the “Berlin glitter on display for the world to see as merely hiding a menacing, racist, militaristic regime…. I’m afraid the Nazis have succeeded with their propaganda,” he wrote. “First, the Nazis have run the Games on a lavish scale never before experienced, and this has appealed to the athletes. Second, the Nazis have put up a very good front for the general visitors, especially the big businessmen.” The most well intentioned and even the most praiseworthy activities of the Germans were seen by Shirer and other Jewish reporters only as a “front.”

The Jewish propaganda of that time was designed to smear and discredit Germany and the National Socialists, not to present an accurate picture of actual events. Every event was deliberately twisted in the Jewish press to mean something it didn’t. Every word and gesture of Hitler or any National Socialist was deliberately misinterpreted to create a negative image. Sinister motives were attributed to every act and deed. When Hitler behaved in a courteous, considerate, statesmanlike manner, it was reported in the Jewish press that he was “wearing a false face,” and that he was “cynically manipulating world opinion for his own sinister purposes.”

Despite all that is now known to be true about the circumstances surrounding the 1936 Olympic Games, especially the personal conduct of Hitler himself, Jewish writers and historians continue, even to this day, to trot out the same old propaganda lies of the 1930s and 40s.

A good example of this is an article written by the Jewish sports writer Shirley Povich for the Washington Post on July 6, 1996, titled, “Berlin, 1936: At the Olympics, Achievements of the Brave in a Year of Cowardice.” The article was written to commemorate the sixtieth anniversary of the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games. (It is worth mentioning that the Washington Post is a Jewish owned newspaper, and was an enthusiastic participant in the international Jewish smear campaign against Germany during the 1930s and 40s. The Washington Post also participated in the effort to boycott the Berlin Olympic Games.) Povich begins his article by writing: “It is about the 1936 Olympics in Berlin that Adolf Hitler turned into a sickening pageant of Nazi propaganda, supported by submissive U.S. Olympic officials and craven American track and field coaches who, like Nazi cousins, kicked their only two Jewish athletes off the 4x100-meter relay team. And it is about Hitler’s snub of America’s victorious black Olympians in their triumph.”

Povich’s description of the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin is simply astonishing in view of what is known to be the real story about the Games today. In the article, he repeats the lie that our “own Jewish athletes were kicked off the team, in order to placate Hitler.” Not so! The two Jews who were removed were replaced by two blacks who outperformed them. He wrote that Germany did not permit German Jews to participate in the games. That was a lie. The Jewess Helene Mayer, for example, was a member of the German fencing team. He also repeats the lie that Hitler snubbed Jesse Owens and the other black American athletes. He preposterously states that Hitler “already had the killing of six million Jews in mind.” In the article, Povich accused Avery Brundage, head of U.S. Olympic Committee, of cowardice for refusing to participate in the attempted boycott of the Olympic Games. Povich claims that prominent Catholic, Protestant, as well as Jewish individuals and groups in the United States, were loudly clamoring for a boycott, as were, he says, trade unions and civic organizations. That was not true. The campaign to boycott the Olympics was a purely Jewish campaign. Catholics and Protestants had nothing to do with it, and did not support it. Trade unions did support it, but trade unions were totally dominated and controlled by Communist Jews. Povich states in the article that Germany was humiliated by the American black athletes. In reality, Germany, with less than half of the population of the United States, won 89 medals to America’s 56.

Hitler and the National Socialists were defeated and destroyed in 1945, yet half a century later the preposterous Jewish anti-German propaganda campaign continues unabated. Povich’s article was a reiteration of the blatant anti-“Nazi” propaganda spewed out of the Jewish controlled media during the National Socialist era, without a word of truth in it. The article totally mischaracterized events as they actually occurred, yet, his version of events has become the official history of the 1936 Olympic Games, the history taught to children in school.

The Myth of German Villainy

Benton L. Bradberry