Reichssportfeld

Reichssportfeld was the immense sports-and-assembly complex planned for the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin. Designed by Werner March and built under Nazi rule, it joined athletic spectacle to political display: a site of monumental construction whose scale and architecture served the regime’s ambitions, while the rules governing its workers exposed the exclusions beneath its public message of youth and national greatness.

Origins and Propaganda Design

The complex took shape as the old Olympic stadium was being demolished. In spring 1935, March’s plans envisioned a replacement and surrounding grounds spanning more than 325 acres. The design fitted both Adolf Hitler’s ambitions and Joseph Goebbels’s objectives for the games: Reichssportfeld was not simply a collection of facilities for competition, but a setting through which the state could organize and present the Olympics as a national spectacle.

That political purpose extended beyond the buildings themselves. In January and February, Goebbels formed committees within the propaganda ministry for press, radio, film, transportation, public art, and the budget. Each was assigned a distinct part of the work of extracting propaganda value from the games, from managing foreign media to decorating the city. At one committee meeting, a minister proposed a torch relay carrying a flame from Olympia in Greece to Berlin, an image intended to link the Third Reich to the authority and ancestry it claimed from ancient Greece. The proposed relay shows how the complex belonged to a broader system of planning: architecture, ceremony, communications, and public imagery were treated as connected parts of the Olympic project.

Construction and Scale

After Hitler visited the site in the fall of 1933, the 325-acre grounds were transformed. By the summer of 1935, more than five hundred companies contracted by the Nazi state were working there. Hitler had decreed that virtually all labor be done by hand, including work machines could have performed more efficiently. The labor force was also restricted to workers who were nonunion, compliant, German citizens, and classified as Aryan. The project’s scale therefore rested not only on engineering and materials but on a political definition of who could build it and under what conditions.

The stadium itself made that scale legible. Its great bowl had been excavated to a floor forty-two feet below ground level, and the central field was already green with grass. Around the perimeter, 136 evenly spaced square pillars had been erected for a two-story colonnade. Forms for 72 tiers of seating were being prepared to accommodate 110,000 spectators; 17,000 tons of concrete were being poured, and 7,300 tons of sheet metal were being welded together. More than 39,000 cubic yards of natural stone had arrived, and stonemasons covered the exterior with ivory-colored Franconian limestone.

The wider grounds were conceived as a network of venues and public buildings rather than a single stadium. A hockey stadium, swimming stadium, equestrian stadium, gymnasium, Greek amphitheater, tennis courts, restaurants, administrative buildings, and an enormous exhibition hall were all at different stages of construction. Their cladding drew on stone from across Germany: limestone from Franconia, basalt from the Eifel hills, granite and marble from Silesia, travertine from Thuringia, and porphyry from Saxony. The use of these materials gave the project a deliberately national reach, gathering resources from different regions into one monumental setting.

Maifeld and the Call to Youth

West of the stadium, workers leveled the Maifeld, a vast, flat assembly ground, and began erecting a limestone bell tower. Planned to rise just over 248 feet, it would bear a great bell inscribed, “Ich rufe die Jugend der Welt!”—“I summon the youth of the world!” The inscription condensed the complex’s public promise into a direct address: the games would gather young people from across the world, but within a space designed and controlled by the Nazi state.

The narrative places that invitation beside the project’s labor restrictions and the regime’s wider use of culture and sport for propaganda. The architectural language of stone, colonnades, and monumental gathering lent permanence to the state’s claims; the call to international youth gave the grounds an outward-facing ideal. Yet access to the work itself was restricted by citizenship, race, and union status. The contrast makes the complex’s universal-sounding Olympic message inseparable from the exclusions on which its construction depended.

A Monument Shadowed by Its Future

The account of Reichssportfeld’s construction is also framed by what the site would mean less than a decade later. In the last desperate days of the Third Reich, boys from the Hitler Youth, some only ten or eleven, would crouch beneath the bell tower among blocks of Franconian limestone and the rubble of the buildings being erected in 1935. They would shoot at advancing Russian boys, many not much older; some German boys who cried, refused to shoot, or tried to surrender would be lined up against the limestone slabs and shot by their own officers.

That later violence changes the force of the tower’s inscription without erasing its original purpose. The complex was planned to summon youth for an international sporting spectacle and to stage the Nazi regime’s claims to power. The same monumental ground would become part of Berlin’s final destruction, its stonework sheltering children in combat and marking the place where refusal could be punished with death. The narrative’s movement from green fields, precise quantities, and coordinated construction to rubble and execution turns Reichssportfeld into more than a venue: it is a built record of a regime’s spectacle and of the violence that outlasted it.