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Nazi Germany Olympics

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In August of 1936, Nazi Germany held the eleventh (XI) summer Olympics in Berlin in which they displayed their power and dominance (Martin, 1992). The hosting of the 1916 Olympics was supposed to be held in Berlin but was canceled due to World War I. In addition, the 1936 summer Olympics was planned to take place in Barcelona, Spain. However, it was also called off during that time due to the Spanish Civil War (Martin, 1992). During the German 1936 summer Olympics, All German people that were of any Jewish descent or of color, were banned from attending the event. However, that law didn’t apply to other athletes or attendees that were from other countries. Russian athletes known as the Soviet’s, never participated in the Olympic Games held at Berlin. The main reasoning why Germany …show more content…
Lastly, the massive stadium of where the Olympics took place was advertised to be the Coliseum. The German Olympics created the modern ritual of having a single runner carrying the Olympic torch to the podium for the start of the Olympic Games (Berghoff, 2003). This ritual was taken from the Ancient Roman Empire in Olympia, Greece. The Nazis’ intentions were to portray Germany as the world empire. The Nazi party held the Olympics in order to create easement rather than tension by distracting the world from their aggressive militaristic and “eugenic” expansion. Though German athletes won most of the medals, United States athletes including African American Jesse Owens dominated the men’s running event with the most gold medals. Hitler never congratulated any other race that won medals except for the whites (Milford, 2012). Germany won 89 medals while the United States won 56. Germany’s domination during the Olympics gave dignity back to the German people. That success gave the Nazi party the confidence to authorize euthanasia programs in order to purify the German race to Aryan (Milford,

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