Olympics T-shirt marking 1936 Berlin Games raises eyebrows

A commemorative T-shirt on the Olympics online store marking the 1936 Games in Berlin under Adolf Hitler‘s National Socialist, or Nazi, government caught the eye of German media on Wednesday. 

The shirt shows a man wearing a laurel wreath, the quadriga chariot drawn by four horses atop the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin and core details like the dates and location of the Summer Games in the capital.

It’s part of a collection of shirts for each of the modern-era Games, but, nonetheless, references probably the most politically contentious ones.

There are no references to Hitler’s government or its symbols and iconography on the shirt.

Early TV and radio-era games, first Olympic torch relay

The Games had already been awarded to Germany before the Nazis came to power, but hosting both the winter and summer events in 1936 provided Hitler’s regime with a stage to showcase the government and country internationally. 

Technological advancements like television and radio enabled the propaganda-reliant regime to double down on these efforts, with Joseph Goebbels paying particular attention to the event. 

The 1936 Games included the first Olympic torch relay of the modern era, a fact that the International Olympic Committee (IOC) commemorated online in 2020 to considerable public backlash because it used Nazi propaganda footage to recall the event.

Berlin Games took place as repression was starting to scale up

The Nazis tried to put a respectable foot forward for the event, removing antisemitic slogans and graffiti from Berlin’s streets and shop windows, moving those it deemed “undesirables” out of the capital, and toning down the rhetoric in its racist newspaper Der Stürmer.

But, nevertheless, the first signs of the coming Holocaust and of Hitler’s ambitions for wars of conquest were starting to materialize for those watching Germany closely. 

In the run-up to the Berlin Olympics in 1936, Nazi Germany remilitarized the Rhineland area on its western border, which its forces had been ordered to vacate after defeat in World War I. It implemented the “four-year plan” designed to prepare the economy and the military for war.

It stripped Roma and Jews of their voting rights that March, a month after the Winter Games in Garmisch-Partenkirchen. The leader of the SS black shirts, Heinrich Himmler, was named the chief of German police a few weeks before the summer’s Berlin Games.

Internationally, Hitler’s government signed its first treaties with future “Axis” allies Japan and Italy in 1936, and provided support to the nationalists under General Francisco Franco in Spain’s civil war.

Only a partial propaganda success for Hitler

The event did not prove satisfactory for Hitler. 

Although Germany led the overall medal tally, the United States dominated some of the highest-profile track-and-field events at the Olympic Stadium in Berlin. 

Hitler had wanted to attend and award all German winners with their gold medals, but only the German winners. He was reprimanded by the IOC when he left the stadium to avoid shaking the hand of high jumper Cornelius Johnson as he won the first US gold medal.

The head of the IOC at the time told Hitler he could either congratulate all the gold medalists, or none, so the dictator elected to honor none for the remainder of the Games.

This meant that Hitler never shook the hand of the most successful athlete of the Games, 22-year-old Black US athlete Jesse Owens, who won gold in the 100 meters, 200 meters, the 4×100-meter relay and the long jump. 

Edited by: Sean Sinico