In 1913, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) decided that the upcoming 1916 Olympic Games should be held in Berlin. Immediately after the Games were awarded to Berlin, the German Stadium was built on a horse racing track in Berlin's Grunewald forest. Due to the outbreak of the First World War in August 1914, the 1916 Olympic Games did not take place. After the First World War, the IOC excluded the German Empire from the Olympic community as the "official instigator of the war." This ban lasted until 1925. Berlin reapplied to host the Games, and on May 31, 1931, the IOC awarded the 1936 Summer and Winter Games to Berlin and Garmisch-Partenkirchen.
After the Nazi Party seized power in January 1933, the Olympic Games offered the National Socialists a unique opportunity to present the regime internationally in a positive light, portraying it as peaceful, progressive and strong, and to conceal the true political goals, such as territorial expansion through wars and the systematic persecution and extermination of Jews, Sinti and Roma, homosexuals and disabled people.
Contrary to the original plan to renovate the German Stadium in western Berlin for the Olympic Games, Reich Chancellor Adolf Hitler ordered the construction of a new, large stadium in October 1933. The aim was to create more space for mass spectacles and propaganda effects. The Maifeld, directly behind the Olympic Stadium, remains one of the largest enclosed and privately owned grassy areas in Germany and was designed for mass events with up to 250,000 people.
Even before the Games began, the inaugural torch relay from Olympia, Greece, to Berlin proved a major propaganda success. The idea likely originated with sports official Carl Diem, who served as General Secretary of the Organizing Committee and planned the relay down to the smallest detail. After the Olympic flame was lit by the sun's rays using a parabolic mirror in the ruins of Olympia at noon on July 20, 1936, the relay covered 3,000 km through a total of seven countries. Public festivals were organized in many cities. Only in Prague were there protests against the relay. The Nazi regime used the torch relay to foster identification with the national community; for example, a Nazi rally with 20,000 Hitler Youth and 40,000 SA men was held in a forest clearing near Berlin. On August 1, the opening day, the torch reached Berlin. As a crowning finale, the Olympic flame was lit with the torch on an altar during the opening ceremony in the Olympic Stadium.
For most visitors, the Olympic Games were a peaceful public festival. Even contemporary witness Sebastian Haffner remarked: "It is typical, at least for the early years of the Nazi era, that the entire facade of normal life remained virtually unchanged…"—but only for those who belonged to the ideologically constructed national community and were not excluded and persecuted by the Nazi regime.
Leni Riefenstahl's film "Olympia, Festival of Nations" propagandistically documented the mass spectacle, such as the Cathedral of Light designed by Hitler's chief architect, Speer – which, after the Olympic flame was extinguished, shone from the stadium using anti-aircraft searchlights. At the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin, art and staging were employed to a far greater extent than at previous Games.
The Olympic art competitions
The Olympic art competitions, also known as the "Art Olympiads," were an integral part of the Olympic Games from 1912 to 1948. The "Art Olympiads" were based on the idea of Pierre de Coubertin, the founder of the modern Olympic Games, who believed that sport and art were inextricably linked and that both embodied the highest human ideals. The competitions encompassed various artistic disciplines, including architecture, literature, music, painting, and sculpture, with all submitted works required to have a clear connection to sport.
The first art competitions were held at the 1912 Olympic Games in Stockholm. They were divided into five categories: architecture, literature, music, painting, and sculpture. The competitions awarded medals for the best works, similar to the sporting events. Over the years, interest in the art competitions grew, and the number of submissions steadily increased. After World War II, views on the role of art in the Olympic Games began to change. The last official art competitions were held in London in 1948. The IOC decided that the art competitions were no longer consistent with the amateur principles of the Olympic Games, as many of the participating artists were professional artists who earned their living from their art. In 1954, the art competitions were officially removed from the Olympic Games program.
The Nazi regime misused the Games for agitation and propaganda, and the design of the Olympic art competitions was also intended to be a nationalist triumph. Compared to the 1932 Games in Los Angeles, the art program had been expanded once again. The disciplines of literature and music were now each divided into three events. This resulted in a record number of 15 art competitions. The German organizing committee had even proposed several additional disciplines, including dance, goldsmithing and silversmithing, and film, but none of these proposals were approved by the IOC.
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The physical artworks were exhibited in Hall 4 of the exhibition grounds on Kaiserdamm from July 15 to August 16. During this one-month run, the exhibition reached 70,000 people. However, the art committees had more difficulty than before in finding submissions. Entries were slow to arrive, and deadlines had to be extended. Some countries were not represented at all in the art competitions, most notably France and Great Britain. Their absence was compensated for by a greater number of entries from the future Axis powers: Austria, Germany, Italy, and Japan.
Unsurprisingly, these nations swept the prizes. Germany alone won 12 medals, five of them gold. Italy won five medals (one gold), and Austria, Finland, and Switzerland each won one gold. No medals were awarded in three disciplines: literature, dramatic works; music, instrumental and chamber music; and painting, applied arts. Three other disciplines had no gold medal winners. Most of the participants are now completely forgotten.
The Bergisches Land region, where our museum is located, was represented in the music category of the Olympic Arts Competition. The German composer and choral conductor Kurt Thomas, born on May 25, 1904, in Tönning on the Eider River, and died on March 31, 1973, in Bad Oeynhausen, graduated from the Röntgen Gymnasium in Lennep. From 1925 to 1939, he was a lecturer and professor of music in Berlin, from 1957 to 1960 Thomaskantor in Leipzig (East Germany), and from 1961 to 1969 director of the Cologne Bach Society. Kurt Thomas was a significant figure in the German music scene of the 20th century, whose career was marked by both great successes and controversial discussions regarding his Nazi connections. He achieved second place in the music competition for his Olympic cantata. The list of artists also includes some surprising names, such as Gerhard Marcks. Marcks was a teacher at the Bauhaus in Weimar. In 1933 he was dismissed by the National Socialists and several of his works were defamed in the "Degenerate Art" exhibition.
Only a few, very far-sighted people suspected in 1936 that the Nazi regime would make good on all its inhumane threats three years later. Had they looked closely, they would have seen that the "wolf had eaten chalk" and that antisemitism and racism, used only for propaganda purposes, had paused for a few weeks to deceive. But despite the Olympic Games, which projected a message of tolerance, the hatred persisted.
A photograph taken by a British reporter showed a sign reading "Jews forbidden!" at the clubhouse of the Partenkirchen Ski Club, sparking international outrage. To avoid a scandal, the German government, just as in Berlin, temporarily suspended the persecution of Jews in the Garmisch-Partenkirchen area and ordered the temporary removal of antisemitic posters. These measures to appease international public opinion were met with little enthusiasm by local Nazis in Upper Bavaria. Antisemitism and racism repeatedly erupted during the Olympics.
Shortly before the opening of the Summer Olympics, newspapers in the German Reich published a caricature. They were aware of a counter-Olympics, protest exhibitions, and a boycott bid. The regime faced a dilemma. It couldn't ignore the boycott and counter-Olympics, but too much attention would have exposed the regime's fear that its propaganda success could be undone.
In December 1935, the "International Committee for the Preservation of the Olympic Spirit" was founded in Paris. It consisted of German intellectuals in exile as well as representatives of British, French, Dutch, Scandinavian, Czechoslovakian, and Swiss boycott campaigns. In the USA, a "Committee on Fair Play in Sports" operated with the same aim.
In June 1936, a "Conference in Defense of the Olympic Idea" took place in Paris, at which the exiled writer Heinrich Mann justified the call for a boycott. Heinrich Mann's speech at the conference was printed verbatim, among other places, by the Zurich newspaper "Volksrecht." He said: "A regime that relies on forced labor and mass enslavement; a regime that prepares for war and exists only through mendacious propaganda—how can such a regime respect peaceful sport and free athletes? Believe me, those international athletes who go to Berlin will be nothing more than gladiators, prisoners, and jesters of a dictator who already considers himself master of the world."
In the United States, the boycott movement was relatively strong. It was supported by, among others, major sports federations and the American Football Federation (AFL). Avery Brundage, chairman of the U.S. Olympic Committee and later president of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), was a staunch opponent of the boycott and orchestrated a narrow majority against it in the final vote within the U.S. Olympic Committee. The Soviet Union was not a member of the Olympic movement at that time, and consequently, its participation, as with all Olympic Games since World War I, was never in question. Despite worldwide opposition to the Olympics, the boycott movement failed. Unlike the two boycotted Olympics of 1980 and 1984, no major sporting nation was willing to stay away. Only Spain declined to participate in 1936.
People's Olympiad in Barcelona
A highlight of the protests against the Berlin Summer Olympics was to be the People's Olympics (Spanish: Olimpiada Popular) in Barcelona. Many nations were invited, and plans were in place to use hotels as the Olympic Village. The games were scheduled to run from July 19th to July 26th, thus concluding six days before the start of the Berlin Summer Olympics. In addition to the usual sporting events, competitions in chess, folk dance, music, and theater were also planned.
Around 6,000 athletes from 22 countries registered for this People's Olympics. The largest contingent of athletes came from countries including the United States, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Czechoslovakia. Teams from Germany and Italy, whose athletes were in exile, also announced their participation.
The Olympic poster was designed by Fritz Lewy, who was born in Essen in 1893. Lewy served as a soldier in the First World War and opened a graphic design studio on Kreuzstraße in Düsseldorf in 1919. He joined the artists' group "Young Rhineland" and designed stage sets for the Düsseldorf Playhouse. In 1927, Lewy became the chief graphic designer for West German Radio. In March 1933, he was dismissed because he was Jewish and emigrated that summer with his wife to Barcelona, where he continued to work as a graphic designer. In 1938, the couple managed to emigrate to Cincinnati, Ohio. Lewy became an American citizen in 1943. He died in 1950.
D.O.O.D. or the Olympics under dictatorship
The resistance reached its zenith with an exhibition that opened on August 1, 1936, in the De Geelvinck building in Amsterdam. The exhibition was the brainchild of the Artists' Association for the Defense of Cultural Rights (BKVK) and the Committee for the Protection of the Olympic Ideal (BOG). 256 works by 150 artists from the Netherlands, Belgium, France, England, Sweden, Czechoslovakia, and the United States were submitted for the exhibition. German artists in exile also contributed works.
Even before the exhibition opened, the German ambassador in The Hague and the German consul in Amsterdam protested. Amsterdam's mayor, De Vlugt, had several works removed before the exhibition's opening, including, in an initial act of censorship, the 1934 painting "Zeitbild" by Harmen Meurs. Following renewed German protests, a second act of censorship saw the removal of Karl Schwesig's drawings "Schlegelkeller," depicting his torture by the SA in Düsseldorf. Consequently, two catalogs were published in 1936: one with the original exhibition layout and a censored version. The exhibition's structure was surprisingly complex and, despite the censorship, politically unambiguous.
The exhibition "D.O.O.D. or the Olympics under Dictatorship" in Amsterdam was a significant art event organized as a protest against the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin. It featured works by numerous artists expressing their disapproval of the Nazi regime and its misuse of the Olympic Games for propaganda purposes. Here are some of the artists represented in this exhibition:
Max Ernst - A German painter and sculptor known for his surrealist works. Among other things, he presented the painting “The Horde” (1927).
Gerd Arntz - A German graphic designer and artist known for his stylized pictograms and his work in the field of isotypes, which visually represented social and economic data.
Karl Schwesig - A German artist who became known for his haunting drawings, which documented his own torture at the hands of the SA in Düsseldorf and revealed the brutal reality of the Nazi regime.
Fernand Leger - A French painter known for his cubist style. His works often focused on the modern city and the world of machines.
Otto Freundlich - A German painter and sculptor whose works were defamed as “degenerate” by the Nazis and murdered during deportation to Majdanek or Sobibor.
Robert Capa - A Hungarian-American photographer famous for his war photography, including iconic shots of the Spanish Civil War and the Normandy landings during World War II.
Christopher Nevinson - A British artist known for his depictions of the First World War. His work “The Twentieth Century” (1932) was on display in the exhibition.
Edouard Goerg - A French painter whose work “The Farmer's Happiness and Misfortune” (1936) was exhibited.
Frits Sieger - A Dutch artist who presented the painting “Zeitbild” (1936).
Willem van Leuden - A Dutch painter who was represented with his work “Hopelessness” (1936).
Henk Henriett - An artist who created the bitterly ironic work “The Jew is Our Unhappiness” (1936).
Henri Jannat - A French artist whose work “The Drowned Man” (1936) is known for its vivid portrayal of tragedies and victims of political persecution.
Peter Alma - An artist born in Indonesia who lived and worked in the Netherlands. He was known for his socially engaged art.
Nola Hattermann - A Dutch actress and painter who later lived in Suriname.
Augustin Tschinkel - A Czechoslovakian artist and printmaker known for his avant-garde works and his contribution to political art in the 1930s.
The exhibition showcased a wide range of styles and approaches. It united the artists in their resistance against the dictatorship and was the true embodiment of the Olympic spirit of freedom and justice.
In 1935, Heinrich Mann, writing from exile, incisively exposed the delusion of the murderous Nazi regime that it was a thousand-year Reich, declaring: “The eternity that Hitler’s Reich ascribes to itself is not the same as it deserves. It deserves a museum to preserve its atrocities […] The drawings and paintings of Karl Schwesig are worthy of adorning the museum. They should teach viewers to weep with shame.”
As part of preparations for an exhibition on the beginnings of documenta, two artworks from the collection of the Citizens' Foundation for Persecuted Arts were examined using art-historical techniques at the Institute for Restoration and Conservation Science (CICS) of the Cologne University of Applied Sciences. One of these paintings is "Desolate Street" by Felix Nussbaum, which was previously dated to 1928.
