Nazi Germany’s persecution of Jews and Roma

Nazi Germany’s persecution of Jews and Roma appears in the Olympic narrative as violence obscured by a deliberately welcoming public spectacle. As foreign athletes arrived in 1936, the authorities removed visible signs of antisemitism and displaced people from the streets, while Roma and Sinti families were sent to a detention camp outside Berlin. The American rowers encountered a pleasant, orderly Germany; the reader is shown the persecution that this impression concealed, and the later fates of people they might have passed without knowing their danger.

The Olympic welcome and its concealed cost

When Joe Rantz drifted to sleep aboard the SS Manhattan, police and SA storm troopers were already carrying out arrests in Berlin. Roma and Sinti families living in shanties and wagons were taken from their homes and marched to a detention camp at a sewage-disposal site in Marzahn, away from the sight of foreign visitors. Their removal was part of a broader effort to manage what visitors could see. The narrative states that those detained would later be sent east and murdered.

The removals took place amid other measures intended to transform Berlin’s appearance. Signs barring Jews from public facilities were taken down and stored, and the antisemitic newspaper Der Stürmer was temporarily removed from newsstands. Joseph Goebbels’s propaganda paper instructed Berliners in how to behave toward Jews and how to welcome visitors, making public conduct part of the staging. The image was not simply one of festive decoration: it depended on regulating public space, controlling what foreign journalists could investigate, and keeping evidence of persecution out of view.

The presentation extended to the city’s practical details. Prices for visitors, from hotel rooms to street food, were controlled. More than fourteen hundred homeless people were removed from the streets, and the account also notes the seizure and examination of hundreds of prostitutes before they were released. Journalists received special accommodations, equipment, viewing positions, and secretarial services. If a foreign reporter tried to interview German Jews or investigate the so-called Jewish question, officials were to direct the reporter to the Gestapo for questioning and covert surveillance. Hospitality and restriction worked together: visitors were given abundant assistance, but inquiry into the persecution was not welcomed.

A public landscape remade

Berlin’s appearance along the visitors’ railway routes was altered as carefully as its newsstands. Grimy buildings were whitewashed; vacant apartments were rented cheaply; window boxes of red geraniums appeared even beneath windows of unoccupied homes. Swastika flags covered homes and railway stations, while Olympic flags also appeared. These changes made the city’s welcome highly visible while the people targeted by the regime became less visible. The contrast gives the Olympic setting its central tension: the spectacle was real, but it was also a screen designed to shape what outsiders understood about Germany.

That screen shaped the American rowers’ impressions. During their time in Köpenick and Grünau, the boys found the towns clean, friendly, efficient, and peaceful, and compared them favorably with places at home. They did not know that Roma families had been removed from Berlin, that antisemitic signs had been hidden, or that the local newspaper had been withdrawn. Nor did they know what had happened in Köpenick in 1933, or what was being built beyond their view. The narrative places their ordinary Olympic sightseeing beside a larger history, emphasizing how a visitor’s limited field of vision could make a dangerous political order seem benign.

The violence beyond the towns the athletes saw

In June 1933, SA storm troopers rounded up hundreds of Jews, Social Democrats, and Catholics in Köpenick. Ninety-one people were tortured to death, and their bodies were put into the Spree and Langer See. The account also points to Sachsenhausen, then under construction north of Berlin. The camp would hold Jews, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Roma, Soviet prisoners of war, Polish civilians, and Czech university students; tens of thousands would die there. These events and places were part of the reality that the pleasant Olympic towns did not disclose to visiting athletes.

Other signs of the approaching persecution were present in the everyday places the boys passed. Outside town, they could see the AEG Kabelwerk factory, but not the slave laborers who would soon work there making electric cables in twelve-hour shifts, living in nearby camps and dying of disease or malnutrition. They might have passed the synagogue at 8 Freiheit Street. The narrative looks ahead to its destruction by a mob during Kristallnacht on November 9, 1938. The ordinary factory and neighborhood street thus become landmarks in a history whose later stages the visitors could not foresee.

The Hirschhahns and the limits of the Olympic view

The Hirschhahns give this history a family and a place in the town. Richard and Hedwig worked in a clothing shop in Köpenick; their daughters, eighteen-year-old Eva and nine-year-old Ruth, served customers. The family was Jewish and worried about the direction of events in Germany. Richard had fought and been wounded in the First World War, and believed that his service meant Germany would not harm his family. Hedwig had recently returned from Wisconsin, and the family had begun considering a move there. American friends were staying with them in Köpenick during the Olympics.

The rowers might have looked into the shop and seen the family at work, but they could not have known what would later happen. Ruth, who had asthma and was too weak to work, would be taken to her death first. Eva would be made to work in a Siemens munitions factory; Richard and Hedwig would be forced to labor making military uniforms. In March 1943, Richard and Hedwig would be sent to Auschwitz. Eva escaped into Berlin, hid there, and survived the war—the only member of her family to do so. The family’s story exposes the distance between the brief view available to Olympic visitors and the futures closing in on the people around them.

The narrative does not treat persecution as an isolated episode that the Games temporarily interrupted. Instead, it connects the removals before the Olympics with violence already committed in Köpenick, the camp under construction, forced labor, the later burning of the synagogue, and the destruction of the Hirschhahns. The cheerful, carefully managed welcome and the concealed danger belong to the same setting. By returning to the ordinary streets, shops, and workplaces the athletes encountered, the account makes the gap between appearance and knowledge central to its portrayal of Nazi Germany’s persecution of Jews and Roma.