(It is timely that I should talk about this, and not merely because it was almost nine decades ago today that the Olympics opened in Berlin with a ceremony presided over by the Third Reich’s head of state.)

[Postfascist] literature on physical education in Germany and Italy borrowed from Sontag’s work on fascist aestheticization to explore the ways fascist states used sports to transform their citizens into state tools, masculinize men and feminize women, promote régime legitimacy, and prepare their population for war.¹⁷

It also suggested that a contrary athletic opposition to ‘fascist athletic movement’ emerged in Europe’s [pseudo]democracies and the United States. From these studies, two distinct ‘types of athlete’ materialized — the fascist athlete and the antifascist athlete.

Thanks to Riefenstahl, these images have become an almost ubiquitous feature of the historic memory of the Berlin Games. Geraldine Biddle‐Perry contends that Riefenstahl helped to create the fascist and antifascist athletic through her production of images of the Berlin Games. ‘These two contrasting pictures,’ she says, ‘have come to dominate Olympic historical imagination [and] other bodies […] are less easy to recall.’¹⁸

[…]

Most critical readings ignore the reality of the thousands of committed antifascist athletes who gathered in Barcelona in one of the most quixotic challenge[s] to the [Third Reich’s] Games. In the summer of 1936, following the rise of Spain’s Popular Front government, several thousand left‐wing sportsmen and women organized a counter Olympics called the Barcelona People’s Olympiad set to run a week before to the Berlin Games. Unlike the Berlin Olympics, the People’s Olympiad was a ‘festival to reaffirm Olympic values’.²⁰

It would have included élite athletes, middling competitors, and complete novices. Competitors did not need to compete for a nation‐state. Athletes signed up as political exiles, including athletes from Italy and Germany, and under the flags of regions including the Basque region, Alsace‐Lorraine, and the Jews of Palestine. In addition, the Barcelona Games featured a variety of non‐traditional sports including Basque Pelota, table tennis, and chess.²¹

Unfortunately for the attendees, the Spanish Civil War, which started on July 19, forestalled the beginning of the Olympiad. Many of the athletes who signed up to compete found their entry to Barcelona barred or ended up in Spain with nobody to compete against them. Some athletes that arrived early remained to fight [alongside] Spanish communists.

[…]

If the Barcelona People’s Olympiad mostly reflected workers sport’s rejection of the [Fascist] Games, there was an equally prominent antifascist movement among sports stakeholders in bourgeois sporting organizations. In fact, in many ways, the Barcelona People’s Olympiad emerged because of the failure of the earlier American led international boycott movement.

Beginning as early as 1933, influential stakeholders inside of sports bureaucracies and religious organizations in the United States, responding to [the Third Reich’s] unjust treatment of Jews, pushed for the American Olympic Association to boycott the Games. In their efforts to pressure the International Olympic Committee to move the Games, they battled against recalcitrant sports administrators in the United States and in Switzerland who privileged apolitical sport.

The boycott debate raged inside of sporting organizations and in parliaments on both sides of the Atlantic; however, despite the righteousness of their cause, boycott advocate[s’] concerns were not widely shared among the elite éthletes.

In July 1933, the Denaturalization Law rescinded German citizenship for hundreds of thousands of Eastern European Jews, and the President of the U.S. Olympic Committee, Avery Brundage, issued a public report that assured the American public that the IOC would never hold the Games in Berlin if the Germans interfered with ‘the fundamental Olympic theory of equality of all races.’³⁰ The IOC reacted ambivalently to the [German Reich’s] new racial laws, but with alacrity to the possibility of an Olympics without the Americans.

The President of the International Olympic Committee, Henri de Baillet‐Latour, showed little private sympathy for Jews. ‘I am personally not fond of Jews and of the Jewish influence,’ he wrote to Brundage. ‘I know that they (the Jews) shout before there is reason to do so.’³¹ Despite his personal prejudices, Baillet‐Latour wielded the threatened American boycott in 1933 to win promises from the German delegation to permit German and foreign Jews to compete at the Games.³²

The American Olympic Association remained divided over the merits of participation in the Berlin Games. Many officials supported a boycott, but others privately shared Hitler’s suspicions about Jewish influence and wanted to limit their investigation of the Berlin Games to questions of prejudice in sport rather than in society.

Brundage acknowledged that, ‘the very foundation of the modern Olympic revival will be undermined if individual countries are allowed to restrict participation by reason of class, creed, or race’, but he tempered his criticism of the [Third Reich’s] domestic politics.

Brundage also considered the Jewish issue, which he called ‘the Berlin Problem’, a sideshow to the serious business of athletic competition. He viewed the boycott movement as a political ploy hatched by Jews ‘clever enough to realize the propaganda value of sport.’³³ He worried that a strong opposition to the Berlin Games would rouse American antisemites.³⁴

His skepticism was widely shared by other athletic organizers. Evan Hunter, the secretary of the British Olympic Committee, wrote Brundage, saying, ‘My own view is that we are pandering too much to the Jews.’³⁵

In May 1934, the IOC issued a pro forma report that announced that the organization was satisfied with German preparations for the Games, but Brundage still faced significant opposition Gus Kirby of the Amateur Athletic Union, who proposed the non‐certification of American athletes unless the [Third Reich] pledged to recruit and train Jewish athletes.

To quell domestic critics, Brundage visited [the Third Reich] as an official guest of the Games organizers, visiting numerous sporting facilities and clubs. He made only cursory examinations of the discrimination against Jews and met with only one German–Jewish athlete. The day after he returned to the U.S., he announced that the German Olympic Committee was living up to their promises.

[…]

Indeed, adventure and a healthy competitive spirit drove most of the athletes who left for the Games excited to participate. If they were aware of the international boycott movement, their excitement overwhelmed any trepidation they felt towards the competition and even afterwards many retained strong positive feelings towards Germany and the Germans.

Simone Schaller Kirin was an American hurdler who remembered the boycott debate. She recalled: ‘There was controversy in 1936 as to whether they would even send a team over because there was so much talk of war in Germany and overseas. We really didn’t know […] and it was quite controversial at the time’.⁶³

If they were aware of the boycott movement, and not all were, ambivalence to it was probably the most common response. Gordon B. Adam, an American rower, responded that ‘We, as athletes, or at least on my part, didn’t think much about the political aspects.’⁶⁴

Only a few of the athletes seemed to think deeply about whether their participation amounted to support for [Fascism]. The few athletes that addressed this issue explicitly arrived at it after community pressure, and none of the athletes interviewed experienced any explicitly negative interactions with German athletes or fans during the competition.

The American basketballer Frank Lubin remembered that ‘Everybody was warning us about going to Nazi Germany,’ he said, ‘but we didn’t think anything about that. Everything was so beautifully arranged. We could see nothing except the flags’.⁶⁵

The antisemitism, so troubling to boycott advocates, with its very real consequences for German sportsmen, barely surfaced in these interviews. Of course, [Berlin] attempted to keep its more pernicious policies invisible. All the same, a few athletes, including Lubin, remember seeing overt signs of anti‐Jewish sentiment. Lubin saw anti‐Jewish signs in stores after the Games.⁶⁶

Sportsmen and women around the world responded in similar ways to the Games. Canadian sprinters Tom Ritchie and Bill Christie, who attended the People’s Olympiad in Barcelona, would have ‘gone to Berlin if given half the chance’ and in fact tried to join the Canadian team headed to Berlin, hurrying to Paris to meet them before their train left.⁶⁷ While the decision to travel to Berlin was easy for many, even for those with qualms, the prestige of the Olympics generally outweighed any political concerns.

In fact, élite athletes’ testimonials highlight that for many athletes, even those aware of the boycott movement, neither participation in the Berlin Games nor boycott were obvious solutions. Jewish participation in the Berlin Games presents particularly thorny questions. How should we think about Helene Mayer, the German–Jewish fencer, who competed for [the Third Reich] and even gave a Hitler salute on the medal podium? She later resettled in the United States and defended her participation saying it was necessary to save her family from persecution.⁶⁸

The existence of many Jewish athletes at the Games suggests the multiplicity of possibilities. As Marty Glickman later said, at the opening of an exhibit about the Games at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, he did not take Hitler seriously before the Games: ‘I thought of Adolf Hitler as here today, gone tomorrow.’⁶⁹ He also did not feel much pressure to boycott the Games. ‘Not one organization, not my rabbi, not my Jewish friends, not one member of any organization […] nobody said, Marty, “don’t go,” including my folks.’⁷⁰

(Emphasis added. Other upsetting findings I omitted from this excerpt only to keep it at a manageable length.)