The Summer Olympics held 90 years ago in Germany loom so large in memory—with Nazi-governed Berlin hosting, Adolf Hitler imperiously presiding, and U.S. sprinter Jesse Owens flouting Nazi racism by winning four gold medals—that the Winter Olympics from that same year has mostly faded to a historical footnote. Yet the Olympic Games that began on Feb. 6, 1936, were likewise hosted by Germany—and they offer an even more dramatic vantage point on Nazi ideology.
Before the sporting world congregated in Berlin, it came to the snow-enveloped Bavarian hamlet of Garmisch-Partenkirchen—just an hour and a half drive from the concentration camp of Dachau that was already fully operational. The Winter Olympics, only in its fourth iteration, lacked the eminence of the larger and time-honored summer games, with their Greek heritage. Yet the winter spectacle was meticulously orchestrated by the Nazis to showcase Germany’s ostensible civility—in other words, to mask its nefarious intentions—as well as to test-run for the Summer Games.
The Summer Olympics held 90 years ago in Germany loom so large in memory—with Nazi-governed Berlin hosting, Adolf Hitler imperiously presiding, and U.S. sprinter Jesse Owens flouting Nazi racism by winning four gold medals—that the Winter Olympics from that same year has mostly faded to a historical footnote. Yet the Olympic Games that began on Feb. 6, 1936, were likewise hosted by Germany—and they offer an even more dramatic vantage point on Nazi ideology.
Before the sporting world congregated in Berlin, it came to the snow-enveloped Bavarian hamlet of Garmisch-Partenkirchen—just an hour and a half drive from the concentration camp of Dachau that was already fully operational. The Winter Olympics, only in its fourth iteration, lacked the eminence of the larger and time-honored summer games, with their Greek heritage. Yet the winter spectacle was meticulously orchestrated by the Nazis to showcase Germany’s ostensible civility—in other words, to mask its nefarious intentions—as well as to test-run for the Summer Games.
The Winter Games were an add-on for Germany, which was awarded the summer event in 1931 (over Barcelona’s bid) before the Nazis took power two years later. Until 1925, post-World War I Germany had been excluded even from Olympic competition, and the award of the Games was recognition of democratic Germany’s reentry into the law-abiding international community.
At left, a publicity postcard for the 1936 Winter Olympic Games shows a ski jumper in front of the Bavarian Alps. At right, a sign reads “Juden Zutritt Verboten!,” forbidding entry by Jewish people to the 1936 Winter Olympics. Michael Nicholson/Corbis/Getty Images and FPG/Archive Photos/Getty Images
But the Nazis’ rise to power in January 1933—and abolition of the Weimar Republic—upended that rationale and provided the International Olympic Committee (IOC) with more than enough evidence to renege on its hosting offer. Almost immediately upon taking power, in early 1933, the Nazi regime established its first concentration camp in the foothills of the Alps in Bavarian Dachau, at first to incarcerate political prisoners and then for transgressors of racial ideology and “social hygiene,” including the likes of homosexuals and Roma. Many Jewish Germans were among the “politicals” (socialists, communists) in Dachau and eventually other camps prior to the wholesale imprisonment and mass murder of Jews that unfolded later.
The Nazis’ repertoire was worrying enough that the American Olympic Committee sent its president, Avery Brundage, to Germany in 1934 to investigate the conditions of Jewish athletes and Nazi policies regarding the Olympic Games. Talk of a boycott was growing in North America and Europe as the Nazi policies took shape.
Brundage favored Germany as host—there were fascist sympathies on several sides in the IOC—and his visitation didn’t change that in spite of the fact that across Germany by 1934, including in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, graffiti and signs had been placed outside of Jewish-owned shops, with messages that read “Don’t buy from Jews” and “The Jews are our misfortune.” A boycott of Jewish businesses eventually turned into a persistent, organized campaign against Jews of all professions who were stripped of German citizenship. In Garmisch’s motor vehicles office, Brundage would have seen a poster that announced “Juden Zutritt Verboten,” and as of 1934, Jews were banned from buying property in the district, which had voted overwhelmingly for the National Socialists in 1933.
Despite the in-your-face evidence, Brundage’s report to the IOC testified that Jews were not discriminated against in Germany or German sports. As for the ubiquitous antisemitic signage, Brundage brushed it aside, infamously quipping, “In my club in Chicago, Jews are not permitted either.” His report tipped the scales within the United States’ Amateur Athletic Union, which narrowly voted—58 yea votes to 56 nays—to participate in the games rather than boycott.
The Nazis were betting everything on the presentation of a respectable Germany. They feared that a Jewish onlooker or athlete might be attacked in the streets, which would doom the summer event, the Nazis’ real prize. Thus, in Garmisch, all antisemitic signage was dismantled before half a million guests descended upon the Alpine resort in February 1936, smashing the record set four years previously in Lake Placid, New York.
Contrary to Brundage’s testimony, by 1935, Germany had purged Jewish athletes from its sporting leagues, a fact that could, in the course of the competitions, come to light. This is one of reasons, but only one, that the German Jewish hockey star Rudi Ball—who had led the Germans to bronze in Lake Placid—landed on the German Olympic squad again. Since Nazi rule, Ball had played in an Italian league that had gladly snapped up the 5-foot-4, 140-pound right wing, one of Europe’s very best players.
The German ice hockey team (left), of which Rudi Ball was a member, lines up alongside the U.S. ice hockey team ahead of a first-round game at the 1936 Winter Olympics in Garmisch-Partenkirchen on Feb. 6, 1936. European/FPG/Archive Photos/Hulton Archive/Getty Images
He was, however, such a superior scorer that the German team wanted him, and a former teammate, Olympic team captain Gustav Jaenecke, insisted that he wouldn’t participate if Ball didn’t. Moreover, since Ball was only Jewish on his father’s side, perhaps, this greased the rails. But Ball posed conditions of his own: He’d play for the Germans only if the Nazis agreed to allow his family to leave the country, which they did.
With pomp and marching bands, the 10-day Olympics commenced at the new ski stadium when Hitler, in a long, black leather coat and surrounded by the IOC brass and Nazi higher-ups, opened the Games that morning. Today, above the Olympiahaus Restaurant at the foot of the original ski jump, one can see the terrace on which Hitler and his cronies stood. The winter events spanned figure skating; speed skating; men’s hockey; bobsled; cross-country skiing; and, for the first time, downhill skiing. The 646 athletes from 28 countries, including Japan, Turkey, and Yugoslavia, made it the largest Winter Games ever at that time.
So closely did the Nazis equate physical prowess with national greatness, they expected to emerge as the Games’ overall champion. This didn’t happen, although Germany did finish second. Norway collected the most medals, led by speed skating legend Ivar Ballangrud and the world’s finest figure skater, Sonja Henie. The United States took home gold only in the two-man bobsled event.
Men’s hockey, which played out mostly on a natural ice rink on Lake Riessersee, took turns that no one anticipated. Germany didn’t make it past the second round—although Ball helped it win two first-round games with goals against Italy and Switzerland. After that he was on the sidelines with an injury, sealing the team’s fate. Hitler, probably because of Ball, refused to attend a single hockey match. In the finals, the favorite—Canada—lost to dark horse Great Britain 2 to 1.
Ball’s Olympic record probably spared him the gas chamber. He survived the Holocaust and played again for his former team, the Berliner Schlittschuh-Club, after the war. But he didn’t stay long, joining his family in South Africa where he went into business and died in 1975 in Johannesburg at the age of 64.
The 1936 Winter Olympics counted as a slam dunk for Hitler: The international extravaganza played straight into his wheelhouse, postponing the day that the world would condemn the regime. On the day of the closing ceremony, propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels wrote in his diary: “Everyone is praising our organization. It was also dazzling. A wonderful picture at the end. Framed by the eternal mountains. Then the fire goes out. The Winter Games are over.”
German propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels and Hitler sign autographs at the Winter Olympic Games on Feb. 25, 1936. The Print Collector/Print Collector/Getty Images
Bavaria, particularly its capital city of Munich, had a reputation as the “cradle” of National Socialism and a hotbed of right-wing extremism, acting as a crucial breeding ground for Hitler’s early rise. In Garmisch-Partenkirchen, officials tacked up the antisemitic bans again, and as of 1937, noted explicitly in its tourist brochures that “Jews [are] not wanted.” One year later, the last Jews living in the village were ordered to leave. “Now we are among Germans once again!” the local newspaper crowed.
After the seamless opening act, the next propaganda victory was already in Germany’s sights: the Summer Games in August in Berlin, the Nazi capital. Nine times as many ticketholders flocked to the Olympiastadion, built according to the Nazis’ colossal aesthetic. This time around, Germany won the most medals, even if the victories of African American sprinter and long jumper Jesse Owens defied Hitler’s theories of Aryan supremacy.
As in Garmisch, immediately after the Games, the Nazis shed any veneer of tolerance, intensifying the persecution of Jews, accelerating rearmament, and repurposing the Olympic village for the military—and Germany began constructing camps that dwarfed Dachau for the murder of Europe’s Jews.
