The 1936 Summer Olympics (German: Olympische Sommerspiele 1936), officially the Games of the XI Olympiad (Spiele der XI. Olympiade) and branded as Berlin 1936, were an international multi-sport event held from 1 to 16 August 1936 in Berlin, Germany. Berlin won the right to host the Games over Barcelona at the 29th IOC Session in 1931. The 1936 Games were the second and last occasion on which the International Olympic Committee (IOC) chose a host by a ballot in which the bidding cities themselves could vote; later rules barred cities that voted from being selected.
The Games had been awarded to Germany during the Weimar Republic, but by 1936 the country was governed by the Nazi regime, and Adolf Hitler's government treated the Olympics as an opportunity for propaganda. To project an image of a peaceful, tolerant Germany, the authorities temporarily removed antisemitic signage and softened the most visible forms of persecution for the duration of the Games. At the same time, the German Olympic authorities barred nearly all Jewish and Romani athletes from the national team; the fencer Helene Mayer, who had one Jewish parent, was the only such athlete to represent Germany. A movement to boycott or relocate the Games developed in several countries—Czechoslovakia, France, the Netherlands, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States—but it ultimately failed. Forty-nine nations competed, the largest number at any Olympics to that point.
These were the first Games to be televised and the first to feature a torch relay carrying the Olympic flame from Olympia to the host city—a ceremony devised for Berlin that became a permanent Olympic tradition. The filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl recorded the Games for her two-part film Olympia, which pioneered techniques still used in sports cinematography.
Jesse Owens of the United States won four gold medals in the sprint and long jump events, and became the most successful athlete to compete in Berlin, while Germany was the most successful country overall with 101 medals (38 of them gold); the United States placed a distant second with 57 medals. These were the final Olympic Games under the IOC presidency of Henri de Baillet-Latour. For the next 12 years, no Olympic Games were held due to the immense world disruption caused by the Second World War. The next Olympic Games were held in 1948 (the Winter Games in St. Moritz, Switzerland, and then the Summer Games in London, England).
At the 28th IOC Session in Berlin in May 1930, fourteen cities indicated an intention to bid for the 1936 Summer Olympics. By the 29th Session, held in Barcelona in April 1931, only Barcelona and Berlin remained in contention; the other cities—Alexandria, Budapest, Buenos Aires, Cologne, Dublin, Frankfurt, Helsinki, Lausanne, Montevideo, Nuremberg, Rio de Janeiro, and Rome—had withdrawn. Several of these cities later hosted the Games: Helsinki in 1952, Rome in 1960, Barcelona in 1992 and Rio de Janeiro in 2016.
The 1936 Games were the first for which the host was decided by a vote of each individual IOC member rather than by the assembled Session alone. The deadline for ballots was 13 May 1931, two weeks after the Barcelona Session. Of 67 voting members, 19 cast ballots during the Session and 40 by post to the IOC headquarters in Lausanne; eight abstained. The result was 43 votes for Berlin and 16 for Barcelona. Barcelona's prospects were probably weakened by the political uncertainty that followed the proclamation of the Second Spanish Republic days before the Session.
After the Nazi seizure of power in 1933 and the regime's early antisemitic measures, some IOC members privately discussed moving the Games, and the US Olympic Association briefly suggested transferring them to Rome. Hitler's government gave assurances that Jewish athletes would not be excluded from the German team, and the proposal was not seriously pursued.
Background and political context
Awarded to Berlin in 1931 under the Weimar Republic, the Games took on a new character after the Nazi takeover of January 1933, as the regime grasped their value as international propaganda.
Nazi propaganda and the "beautification" of Berlin
Hitler regarded the Games as a chance to promote his government and its ideology of Aryan supremacy. The official Nazi paper, the Völkischer Beobachter, had argued in the strongest terms that Jewish and black athletes should be barred from the Olympics. As the Games approached, however, the regime worked to soften Germany's international image: signs reading "Jews not welcome" (German: Juden unerwünscht) were taken down from public places for the duration, and overt antisemitic agitation was muted.
The effort extended to the removal of people the regime considered undesirable. In July 1936 the Ministry of the Interior authorised Berlin's police to detain the city's Romani and confine them in a special camp at Marzahn, on the city's outskirts. Five months before the opening ceremony, in March 1936, Germany had remilitarised the Rhineland in breach of the Treaty of Versailles, heightening international tension in the months before the Games.
Exclusion of Jewish and Roma athletes
In line with Nazi directives, the German Olympic Committee effectively barred German athletes who were Jewish or Roma, or of such ancestry, from competing. The most prominent excluded athlete was the high jumper Gretel Bergmann, who was dropped from the team shortly after equalling the German record of 1.60 m in June 1936. Others kept off the team included the record-holding track-and-field athlete Lilli Henoch, the tennis player Daniel Prenn, the boxer Erich Seelig and the Sinti boxer Johann Trollmann. Helene Mayer—already an Olympic champion who had emigrated to the United States—returned to fence for Germany and won a silver medal, the only athlete of Jewish descent on the German team, a token inclusion intended to deflect foreign criticism.
The exclusions also reached the organisers. Theodor Lewald, president of the German Olympic Committee, had a Jewish grandparent and was sidelined from a leading role, while Hauptmann Wolfgang Fürstner, who had overseen construction of the Olympic Village, was reclassified as a Jew under the Nuremberg Laws and demoted shortly before the Games; he took his own life days after they ended.
Overall responsibility for the Games lay with Hans von Tschammer und Osten, the Reichssportführer, though the detailed organisation was handled by Theodor Lewald and Carl Diem, the former president and secretary of Germany's Olympic sports body; Diem, as secretary-general of the organising committee, was the chief promoter of the torch relay from Olympia to Berlin. The Games' emblem, designed by the artist Johannes Boehland, originally combined the Olympic rings, the German eagle and the Brandenburg Gate; on Lewald's suggestion its lower part was opened out into the shape of a bell, and the resulting Olympic Bell, inscribed with the motto 'I call the youth of the world', became one of the Games' lasting symbols.
Although the Olympic flame had been reintroduced at the 1928 Summer Olympics, Berlin staged the first torch relay, carrying a flame kindled at Olympia in Greece to the host city through seven countries. The concept, organised by Diem, established the modern convention later used at every Games, and Riefenstahl incorporated the relay into Olympia.
The Olympic Village lay at Elstal in Wustermark, about 30 km west of central Berlin, and comprised low dormitories, a large "Dining Hall of the Nations", training facilities and a swimming hall. After the Games the site was absorbed by the Wehrmacht and later used by Soviet forces as a military camp; parts of it, including the dormitory used by Jesse Owens, have been restored more recently.