Werner March

Werner March is the architect charged with transforming Berlin’s Olympic site for the 1936 Games. His brief encounter with Adolf Hitler reveals the scale of the commission: a limit imposed by the existing racetrack is answered with an order to clear it away and build a stadium for at least 100,000 people, surrounded by a vast sports complex. March’s role is consequential but carefully bounded in the narrative: he explains what the site permits, receives a radically enlarged assignment, and returns to his drafting table with plans due by morning.

Architect at Work

March is introduced as a thirty-nine-year-old architect working late in Berlin, hunched over a drafting table while, five thousand miles away, Al Ulbrickson studies freshmen at the shell house in Seattle. The parallel places March’s labor within a book that follows athletic preparation on both sides of the Atlantic. The crews are beginning their work; in Berlin, an architect is already shaping the place where the world’s athletes are expected to gather.

The scene gives March no extended biography or account of his private life. Instead, it establishes him through profession, age, setting, and the immediacy of his task. His drafting table is not merely a workplace: it is where an immense political ambition must be translated into preliminary plans before a deadline. The narrative’s focus is on what he is asked to design and on the pressure of doing so, not on any personal response he may have had to the commission.

The Stadium and Its Inheritance

The Olympic site carries a family and national history. March’s father, Otto, designed and oversaw the construction of the Deutsches Stadion, completed in 1916 as the largest stadium in the world at that time. The Olympic Games intended for that year were canceled because of the Great War. Two decades later, under March’s direction, the old stadium was being renovated for the 1936 Olympics, which Germany was to host. The project therefore revisited a structure associated with an earlier, thwarted Olympic ambition, while preparing it for a new international event.

The inspection on October 5 gives the site a sharply drawn geography. March accompanied Hitler and members of the Olympic and government leadership to ground about a hundred feet above central Berlin. The Grunewald Forest lay to the west; to the east, church spires and rooflines rose beyond trees colored by autumn. The old stadium stood beside a horse-racing track. March explained that this track prevented a major expansion, identifying a practical constraint in a setting presented as both historic landscape and future construction site.

A Commission Enlarged

Hitler’s response turned a renovation problem into a far larger undertaking. He ordered that the racetrack disappear and called for a stadium capable of holding at least 100,000 people. Beyond it, he demanded a surrounding sports complex with venues for a wide range of competitions, unified as the Reichssportfeld. He described the work as a national task and as a demonstration of German ingenuity, cultural superiority, and growing power. The design brief thus extended beyond the stadium’s capacity: the site was to convey a political image to the international audience expected in 1936.

The directive came within a changing Nazi policy toward the Olympics. Hitler had previously denounced the Games as an invention of Jews and Freemasons, and their ideal of athletes of different nations and races competing on equal terms conflicted with Nazi racial doctrine. Joseph Goebbels argued that hosting the Olympics could present Germany abroad as civilized and modern, and give Hitler time to persuade other countries of peaceful intentions while rebuilding German military and industrial power. March’s project was therefore being shaped by a regime that had come to value the Games not despite their international reach, but for the propaganda opportunity that reach provided.

Deadline and Narrative Significance

Five days after the inspection, March was still bent over his drafting table and had only until morning to put preliminary plans before Hitler. The account leaves the design’s later development and March’s own views unstated. What it does show is the compressed passage from explanation to command to drawing: he identifies the obstacle, Hitler dictates a new scale and purpose, and the architect is left with hours to turn that demand into plans.

March’s brief appearance connects the physical preparation for the 1936 Olympics to the political use of the event. The Deutsches Stadion’s earlier history, its proposed expansion, and the new Reichssportfeld converge in a commission intended to make a national spectacle visible to the world. Set against the crews training in Seattle, the Berlin scenes widen the book’s account of sport: athletic competition depends not only on those who row or race, but also on the institutions and built spaces through which a host nation presents itself.