Adolf Hitler

Adolf Hitler is presented as both the architect of a spectacle and its most visible performer: he helped turn the 1936 Berlin Olympics into a showcase for Nazi power, while the Games’ carefully staged welcome concealed persecution, exclusion, and military ambition. The book places his public image against the American oarsmen’s unassuming collective effort, culminating in a race whose result Hitler watched but whose later meaning he could not recognize.

Rise and Political Purpose

The book introduces Hitler as the leader brought to power in January 1933 by the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, a movement already associated with thuggish behavior. He was determined to rearm Germany despite the Treaty of Versailles. Although most Americans paid little attention to European affairs, the prospect that the Great War’s horrors might recur remained a troubling possibility. Hitler’s early appearance in the narrative therefore links domestic uncertainty in the United States with a European political danger that many people still found difficult to assess.

At first, Hitler rejected the Olympics. The ideal of athletes of different nations and races competing on equal terms conflicted with Nazi racial doctrine, and he objected to the prospect of Jews, Black people, and other visitors coming to Germany. His reversal was not a change of principle. Joseph Goebbels persuaded him that hosting the Games could present Germany to the world as civilized, modern, friendly, and powerful. The international gathering might buy time for the regime to cultivate an image of peaceful intent while rebuilding Germany’s military and industrial strength.

That calculation shaped Hitler’s approach to the Olympic site. In October 1933, he inspected the old Deutsches Stadion with architect Werner March and other officials. The existing racetrack, March explained, prevented a major expansion; Hitler ordered that it be removed and demanded a stadium capable of holding at least 100,000 people, surrounded by a unified Reichssportfeld for many kinds of competition. The complex was to embody German ingenuity, cultural superiority, and growing power. The Games were not merely to take place in Berlin: the setting itself was to make a political argument to the world.

Propaganda, Architecture, and Image

Goebbels’s influence made the Olympics useful to Hitler as a communications project as well as a sporting event. Goebbels was dismantling what remained of a free German press, imposing racial restrictions on who could practice journalism and directing editors to serve the state. A separate measure threatened death for publishing articles judged treasonous. In this environment, the regime could control what Germans read at home while using an international event to manage what foreign visitors saw and heard.

The 1934 Nuremberg Rally demonstrated how spectacle could concentrate political authority. Hitler’s arrival by airplane, the mass formations, speeches, monumental architecture, banners, and torchlit procession were arranged to suggest that the Nazi Party was invincible and that political loyalty to it approached religious devotion. Albert Speer designed the rally’s immense setting, Goebbels managed its propaganda, and Leni Riefenstahl filmed it for an audience far beyond the hundreds of thousands who attended. Her resulting film, Triumph of the Will, made the rally’s imagery widely influential. Hitler had already been impressed by her earlier film The Blue Light, which he read as a visual expression of the party’s blood-and-soil ideology; he subsequently asked her to document the 1933 Nuremberg Rally as well.

Hitler’s attention to images continued at the Olympic complex, where architectural scale was part of the message. By the summer of 1935, work had transformed the 325-acre site. The stadium was planned for 110,000 people, with a large colonnade and extensive use of German stone; additional venues included facilities for hockey, swimming, equestrian events, and other activities. The regime required the project’s workers to be German citizens of Aryan race and to be nonunion. The apparent spectacle of national achievement was thus built through an explicitly exclusionary labor policy.

At the 1935 Nuremberg Rally, Hitler introduced laws that defined citizenship by German or related blood and prohibited marriages and sexual relations between Jews and non-Jews, among other restrictions. The citizenship law stripped German Jews of citizenship and associated rights beginning in January 1936. In March 1936, Hitler sent 30,000 troops into the demilitarized Rhineland, openly defying the Treaty of Versailles and the Locarno Pact. Britain and France did not respond militarily. The episode convinced Hitler that the Western powers’ resolve was weak, but it also created a public-relations problem: the regime needed to appear civilized rather than barbarous. The Olympics offered what Nazi leaders regarded as an ideal occasion to stage that alternative image.

The Olympic Masquerade

As the Games approached, the regime temporarily softened the public presentation of its antisemitism. Goebbels’s ministry sanitized press coverage, promoted Germany as peaceful and hospitable, and instructed Berliners in how to receive foreign visitors. Signs barring Jews from public facilities were removed from display, and the antisemitic newspaper Der Stürmer was taken off newsstands. These measures did not represent a change in policy; they made the city resemble a carefully prepared stage on which persecution could be hidden from arriving guests.

The concealment had a human cost. On the dawn of the American team’s arrival in Berlin, police and SA storm troopers had begun rounding up Roma and Sinti families from the shanties and wagons where they lived. The families were taken to a detention camp at a sewage-disposal site in Marzahn, away from foreign visitors. The book identifies this removal as part of the larger effort to conceal the reality of Nazi rule during the Olympics, and notes that the victims would later be sent east and murdered.

Avery Brundage and his allies in the American Olympic Committee helped ensure that the United States would attend. Brundage maintained that politics should not interfere with sport and argued that American athletes should not lose their opportunity to compete. After a supervised tour of German athletic facilities, he publicly accepted assurances that Jewish athletes were being treated fairly. The book also describes his own antisemitic prejudices and the distinctions he drew between Jews and Americans. In December 1935, the Amateur Athletic Union rejected a proposal to send investigators to Germany by a vote of 58.25 to 55.75, effectively ending the last serious American boycott effort. Hitler benefited from the decision: the Games could proceed, and the regime had evidence of how readily its assurances could be accepted abroad.

The opening ceremonies made the performance visible on a grand scale. As Hitler traveled from the chancellery to the Reichssportfeld, crowds filled the route, many extending Nazi salutes. At the Maifeld, the American athletes watched his arrival; the Washington crew remained seated on the grass and waved as he passed. Inside the stadium, 110,000 people stood and saluted as Hitler descended toward the field. A child presented him with flowers before he took his place of honor. The orchestra played the German national anthem and the Nazi Party anthem, and the teams filed past him, dipping their flags and offering a range of salutes. The crowd’s varying enthusiasm registered how closely each gesture appeared to match the Nazi salute. The ceremony made political loyalty part of the sporting pageant without making every national delegation’s response identical.

The Race and Its Reversal

The same political staging continued at the rowing regatta on the Langer See. Hitler arrived at the grounds with a large entourage, spoke with the president of the international rowing federation, and took his place on the balcony of Haus West. Joseph Goebbels and Hermann Göring stood nearby. As the first races unfolded, German crews won gold in the first five events. Each victory brought another Nazi flag and another performance of national celebration, while Hitler watched through binoculars and acknowledged the German wins.

The men’s eight final offered a different contest. In difficult wind, the American crew fell behind and by the 800-meter mark was last. Italy had moved into a narrow lead over Germany by halfway; the Americans were nearly five seconds behind the leaders. From Hitler’s balcony, the boats came into view as they approached the finish, while the American coach Al Ulbrickson watched from a neighboring balcony. The crowd’s chants and the leaders’ position made the German and Italian boats appear to have the advantage.

In the American shell, coxswain Bobby Moch urged stroke oarsman Don Hume to raise the rate, but the crew initially continued at 35 strokes per minute. Near the stands, the noise of the crowd drowned Moch out. He then struck the wooden knockers against the ironbark boards at the sides of the hull, giving the rowers a signal they could feel. The crew responded by pushing beyond its previous rate, reaching 44 strokes per minute as the American, German, and Italian boats surged together toward the finish. All three crossed within a second of one another; at first, nobody knew who had won. Hitler raised a clenched fist as Goebbels leapt up and down, but the scene’s uncertainty belonged to the competitors and spectators alike. The eventual American victory gave the race its lasting significance: the Nazi display of national supremacy had been challenged by a crew whose result depended on coordinated effort under pressure.

Retrospective Significance

A later visit to the regatta grounds places Hitler’s Olympic presence in a longer historical frame. From the balcony of Haus West, where Hitler had watched the race, the narrator looks out over the Langer See and considers what Hitler failed to understand in the American crew’s fight back from last place. The boys, described as loyal, committed, and persevering rather than privileged or favored, become in retrospect heralds of the American soldiers who would later return to Germany. The book does not suggest that Hitler could have anticipated that future; the force of the reflection lies precisely in the gap between his immediate triumphal setting and the history that followed. His Olympic spectacle sought to present Nazi Germany as the future of civilization, while the race supplied an image of collective character that outlasted the pageant and its maker.