Köpenicker Blutwoche was a campaign of Nazi violence in Köpenick in June 1933, when Sturmabteilung storm troopers targeted hundreds of Jews, Social Democrats, and Catholics. The book gives the episode a significance beyond its immediate death toll: three years later, Olympic visitors encountered a town whose tranquil appearance concealed the recent violence and the persecution continuing around them.

Background and concealment

By the time the American rowers explored Köpenick during the 1936 Summer Olympics, signs barring Jews had been removed, Roma had been rounded up and taken away, and the antisemitic newspaper Der Stürmer had been withdrawn from tobacco-shop racks. The boys saw a clean, orderly, welcoming Germany; they did not know what had happened in the town or what was being hidden from their view.

The violence in June 1933

In June 1933, Sturmabteilung storm troopers rounded up hundreds of Köpenick’s Jews, Social Democrats, and Catholics. Ninety-one were tortured to death. Their bodies were dumped in the waters of the Spree and the Langer See, waterways that would later seem to visitors part of the town’s peaceful landscape.

The event’s place in the narrative

The account places Köpenicker Blutwoche within the gap between the Germany presented to Olympic visitors and the one they could not see. The boys’ impression of a pleasant, efficient country was not simply incomplete: the signs and newspaper had been removed, and the Roma had been taken away. The account of the 1933 killings makes that contrast concrete, showing how the ordinary streets and waterways of Köpenick carried a history absent from the visitors’ experience.