Berlin Olympics (1936): Jesse Owens and Nazi Propaganda

The 1936 Berlin Olympics, officially the Games of the XI Olympiad, were held in Berlin from 1 to 16 August 1936. Nazi Germany used them as a vast propaganda show to present itself as peaceful, modern and efficient, while hiding its persecution of Jews and other minorities. The Games are remembered above all for the American sprinter and long jumper Jesse Owens, whose four gold medals became a lasting symbol of sporting achievement in the face of racist ideology.

Background

The International Olympic Committee (IOC) chose Berlin over Barcelona in 1931, when Germany was still the Weimar Republic. The award was meant to welcome Germany back into the international community after the First World War. When Hitler became chancellor in 1933, many expected the Nazis, who had once denounced the Olympics as an international and “Jewish” event, to reject them.

Instead, propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels saw their potential. The regime poured money into a vast sports complex, the Reich Sports Field, centred on a new Olympic stadium for about 100,000 spectators designed by Werner March. Germany also hosted the Winter Olympics at Garmisch-Partenkirchen in February 1936.

The boycott debate

Nazi Germany’s exclusion of Jews from sports clubs and public life prompted calls for a boycott. The debate was fiercest in the United States. Jeremiah Mahoney, president of the Amateur Athletic Union (AAU), favoured a boycott, while Avery Brundage, president of the American Olympic Committee, argued that politics should be kept out of sport and claimed that German assurances were sufficient. In December 1935 the AAU narrowly voted to send a team.

To deflect criticism, Germany included one athlete of Jewish descent, the fencer Helene Mayer, who had lived in the United States and won silver in the women’s foil. The high jumper Gretel Bergmann, a German Jew who had equalled the national record weeks before, was left out. Some individual Jewish athletes from other countries chose to stay away, and a “People’s Olympiad” planned in Barcelona as an alternative was cancelled when the Spanish Civil War broke out in July 1936.

Staging the Games

The regime worked hard to impress foreign visitors. Antisemitic signs and newspapers were removed from public view in Berlin for the duration, and the persecution of Jews under the Nuremberg Laws was kept out of sight. Before the Games, police rounded up Roma and Sinti in Berlin and confined them in a camp at Marzahn on the city’s edge.

The Berlin Games introduced the Olympic torch relay, devised by the organising secretary Carl Diem: a flame lit at Olympia in Greece was carried by more than 3,000 runners across seven countries to Berlin. The Games were also the first to be broadcast on television, to public viewing rooms in and around Berlin. Around 4,000 athletes from 49 nations took part. Basketball, canoeing and field handball made their Olympic debuts.

Jesse Owens and the athletes

James Cleveland “Jesse” Owens, the grandson of enslaved people and a student at Ohio State University, had already broken several world records in a single afternoon in 1935. In Berlin he won the 100 metres on 3 August, the long jump on 4 August, the 200 metres on 5 August and the 4 x 100 metres relay on 9 August.

His long jump contest produced one of the Games’ best-known friendships. The German jumper Luz Long, who won silver, congratulated Owens warmly in the stadium. Long was killed in the Second World War, and Owens later kept in touch with his family.

Owens was one of 18 African American athletes on the US team, who together won 14 medals. Their success contradicted Nazi racial claims, although German newspapers were instructed not to emphasise the athletes’ race. The relay team selection caused controversy of its own: the two Jewish American sprinters Marty Glickman and Sam Stoller were replaced by Owens and Ralph Metcalfe on the morning of the race, a decision many saw as influenced by antisemitism or a wish to avoid embarrassing the hosts.

Myths and facts

Myth: Hitler snubbed Owens by refusing to shake his hand. On the first day Hitler congratulated several German and Finnish winners in his box. IOC president Henri de Baillet-Latour told him he must greet all champions or none, and Hitler then stopped congratulating winners publicly. Owens later said he felt more slighted by his own president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, who did not invite him to the White House or send congratulations.

Myth: Owens’ victories spoiled the Games for the Nazis. Germany won the most medals, the organisation was widely admired, and many foreign visitors left with a favourable view of the regime. Most historians regard the Games as a propaganda success for Nazi Germany.

By the numbers

The opening ceremony itself was a carefully staged spectacle. The airship Hindenburg flew over the stadium trailing the Olympic flag, and the veteran Greek runner Spyridon Louis, winner of the first modern marathon in 1896, presented Hitler with an olive branch from Olympia. Some national teams gave a raised-arm salute as they passed Hitler’s box, which the crowd took as the Nazi salute, although several teams later said they had made the similar “Olympic salute”.

Consequences and legacy

Leni Riefenstahl filmed the Games for her two-part documentary Olympia, released on 20 April 1938, Hitler’s birthday. Its camera techniques, including underwater and tracking shots, influenced sports filmmaking for decades, but it also glorified the Nazi state.

The calm of the Olympic summer was brief. Within weeks of the closing ceremony, antisemitic signs reappeared, and persecution intensified until the violence of Kristallnacht in 1938. Captain Wolfgang Fürstner, who had overseen the building of the Olympic Village and was removed from his post because of his Jewish ancestry, took his own life shortly after the Games. The Olympics did not return until the London Games of 1948.

Owens returned to a segregated United States, where he struggled financially for years before becoming a respected public speaker. He received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1976 and died in 1980. A street next to the Berlin Olympic Stadium was renamed Jesse-Owens-Allee in 1984.

Timeline

• 1931, 13 May: The IOC announces that Berlin will host the 1936 Summer Games.
• 1935, December: The US Amateur Athletic Union narrowly rejects a boycott.
• 1936, February: The Winter Olympics are held at Garmisch-Partenkirchen.
• 1936, 20 July: The Olympic flame is lit at Olympia and the first torch relay begins.
• 1936, 1 August: Hitler opens the Games in the Olympic Stadium.
• 1936, 3–9 August: Jesse Owens wins four gold medals.
• 1936, 16 August: Closing ceremony.
• 1938, 20 April: Riefenstahl’s film Olympia premieres in Berlin.

Why it matters

The 1936 Olympics are a classic case of a dictatorship using a global sporting event to improve its image. They raised questions about boycotts, propaganda and the responsibilities of sports bodies that still arise today. At the same time, Jesse Owens’ achievement gave the world an enduring image of individual excellence that racist ideology could not erase.