Nazi Games: The Olympics of 1936

A very well written book filled with about as much information about the 36 Olympics and the events leading up to it as anyone could have a right to expect. There's lots of various facts about the games, did you know that Jesse Owens was one of 19 Black American atheltes to participate in the games? Or that Owens felt more resentment against Roosevelt for failing to welcome him home after the games than against Hitler for refusing to shake his hand? However, if there is a villain in this piece, it's not Adolf Hitler, it's Avery Brundage, the head of the US Olympic committee and later the International Olympic Committee, who held steadfast against various efforts to boycott the 36 Games, and even removed 2 Jewish athletes from a US relay team just before the final event.

Historian David Clay Large has provided a brilliant overview of the carefully orchestrated machinations that went into producing the 1936 Berlin Olympics, a propaganda event meant to affirm the dominance of the so-called "master-race." Tracing out the development and planning of the 1936 games as well as the Olympic movement itself, Large leaves few stones unturned as he probes the way the Nazis twisted the symbolism of international sport to recast themselves as the modern embodiment of the ideals of the ancients. Large writes vividly, and although he is a serious scholar who knows this material as well as anyone alive, he never gets bogged down in minutiae. Reading 'Nazi Games' you feel as if you are right there in Berlin seeing the games as they really unfolded. Particularly chilling, for me, was Large's discussion of the surprisingly favorable way the 1936 Olympics were seen by many Americans, from Anne Morrow Lindbergh to Thomas Wolfe to respected writers for The New Yorker magazine. If you are interested in the history of the Nazi movement, the history of world sport, or just modern European history in general, this book is a must read.

While the author's prose is often too colloquial for my taste, his well organized, expertly researched account of the 1936 Berlin games is both interesting reading and valuable historical reference. He also provides a very good history of the modern Olympics leading up to the titled games and consequently gives the reader a valuable perspective from which to examine those that followed...including/especially the upcoming Beijing Olympics.

David Clay large has written a terrific book about the 1936 Berlin Olympics. He traces the history of the modern Olympics before and after Berlin, skillfully describes the failed effort to boycott the games, and presents a lively retelling of the games themselves. But it is the story of the political intrigues surrounding the competition that makes the book worth reading. With the 2008 Beijing Olympics fast approaching, this book will show how totalitarian states will pull out all the stops to host successful Olympics and score public relations victories.

Berlin's Olympics of 1936: The mother of all monuments to the unholy mix of sports and politics. For three weeks in the summer of that year (and earlier at the Winter Games, also held in Germany), the Nazis camouflaged (or nearly so) the ugly reality in favor of a happy face of Teutonic pride and prowess. In a tour-de-force of probing research and supple exposition, history professor David Clay Large (himself an accomplished distance runner) first sets the Olympics of 1936 in the context of Baron de Coubertin's revival of their Greek forerunner, and then delves into the unsavory brew of athletics and nationalism, which Berlin has come to epitomize. The picture isn't edifying, for many foresaw the implications. Though today the duplicity of Leni Riefenstahl's film "Olympia" is widely recognized (whatever its merits as innovative documentary), few know of the efforts of the American Jewish Congress, the NAACP, as well as labor, socialist, and communist organizations to thwart the Berlin games, or at least instigate a boycott by athletes. Large also sheds new light on the tale of "Hitler snubbing Jesse Owens." Not only are most accounts fundamentally mythic, Owens directed harsh words for withheld congratulations to FDR, not Hitler. Emblematic of Nazi propaganda aims was the campaign leading up to the Winter Games to rid the Garmisch-Partenkirchen area of anti-Semitic signs. The world, of course, soon learned all-too-well of the Nazis' commitment to Jewish extermination. (This was no drive to reform the population, such as seen in the recent move by the Chinese to curtail public spitting in advance of the 2008 Olympics in Beijing.) The role of Olympic Goliath, American Avery Brundage, receives a thorough bruising. Brundage's papers collected at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, prove a revealing trove. Not only did the leader of the U.S. Olympic Committee vehemently oppose the boycott proposals, he gave open support for racial explanations of African-American victories trumped up by the German hosts. (Not to mention Brundage's subsequent reward in the form of the construction contract for the German Embassy in Washington, D.C.!) Finally, in a well-considered epilogue Large explores the fallout from Berlin's 1936 Games. The U.S.'s "ill-advised" participation helped leverage Jimmy Carter's boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympics (in response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan), leading to the USSR's refusal to attend the Los Angeles Games four years later. In 1972, Avery Brudage, by then head of the International Olympic Committee, still suffering from the myopia exhibited in Berlin, ordered the Games in Munich to proceed a mere day after the killing of eleven Israeli athletes by armed Palestinians. Are there parallels between the Third Reich's propaganda triumphs of 1936 and the possibilities for China to mask its human rights abuses in the up-coming Beijing Olympics? "Nazi Games" frames the question nicely.