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 REVIEW Blood Sport A traveling exhibition sheds light on a tarnished Olympiad.
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The Nazi Olympics: Berlin 1936 Oregon Sports Hall of Fame Museum 321 SW Salmon St., 227-7466 $4.50-$6 Ends May 15 Until recently, Ernst Lee Jahnke was the only member to be expelled from the International Olympic Committee. His offense was nothing like the shady dealings of the present IOC: Jahnke was removed for taking a strong public stand against the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin. It's unthinkable in the post-Holocaust era that an American Olympic official would have been ousted because of his opposition to an Olympiad set to take place in Nazi Germany, but at that time the Third Reich's plans were only just beginning to unfold. Despite widespread debate, the United States did not boycott the Berlin Games; its team of 312 athletes was second in size only to Germany's, which numbered 348. The Nazi Olympics: Berlin 1936, currently on display at the Oregon Sports Hall of Fame, tells the uneasy history of Hitler's abuse of sport and the world's reaction to it. It's a subject that went long untaught in schools, which is precisely why this show deserves to be seen whether your interest is in history, art or sport. The Oregon Holocaust Resource Center has launched an extensive educational program in conjunction with the traveling show, which originated at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in 1996. Divided chronologically into five parts, the exhibition begins with 1933, the year the Nazis acceded to power. It concludes with filmed testimonials by five Jewish athletes. In between, video loops, text and artifacts tell the story of the Berlin Olympiad and the events that led up to it. In a brief introductory segment, The Nazi Olympics documents the rise of Adolph Hitler and the Nazi party; an exposition of the Nazification of sport follows. Viewers learn that not only did the Third Reich appropriate athletics as a means to strengthen the Aryan race and prove its superiority, but they also considered it a preparatory tool for war. Before Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels convinced Hitler of the 11th Olympiad's immense publicity value, the Fürher had little interest in. Hitler initially balked at the internationalism the Olympics represented, but in the end the German government provided full financial support--$8 million--for the Summer Games. Seizing control of the Olympics for good became part of Hitler's German expansion plan, and the IOC unanimously voted to return the 1940 Winter Games to Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany, host of the 1936 Winter Olympics. Of course, World War II prevented the staging of the games in 1940 and 1944. The Nazi Olympics goes on to present the American boycott debate and worldwide response, and it's here that one finds the show's most provocative visual artifacts. Although 49 countries participated, many Jewish athletes personally boycotted the games. Alternative sporting events were organized. Posters tell of the effort to stage the 1936 People's Olympiad in Barcelona; several thousand athletes arrived in July only to see the event canceled at the outset of the Spanish Civil War. Two stand-out pieces in the exhibition are photo-montages by Dadaist John Heartfield, an exiled German who Anglicized his name from Helmut Herzfeld in protest against Germany's role in World War I. Berlin Summons to the Olympiad shows an axe commingling with the five Olympic rings; Come and See Germany depicts Joseph Goebbels reining in five athletes, their noses pierced with the Olympic rings. Both images were published in the July 1936 issue of The Worker Illustrated Newspaper. These devastatingly honest images come into stark contrast with propaganda posters in the segment of the exhibit that deals with the games themselves. The posters advertising the Berlin Games used ancient Greek images to illustrate what the Germans perceived as their rightful inheritance of the classical Aryan culture. The official Olympic print by Nazi artist Frantz Würbel shows a Greek figure rising above the Brandenburg Gate. This Olympiad was the inaugural year of the pageantry now associated with the Games. Video footage shows a young man with Aryan features completing the final leg of the torch relay from Olympia, Greece, to Berlin, Germany; the torch run has been a part of the Olympics ever since. The lavish pageantry almost masked the Nazi agenda, as did the city's "beautification" program, the results of which can be seen in black-and-white photographs of a sparkling Berlin. While antisemitic banners were removed from the streets, so too were the Gypsies, who were interned in a camp at the edge of town. Reproduced pages of The Stormer show the Nazi newspaper's derogatory caricatures of Jews; this paper was removed from kiosks during the Games but continued to be published nonetheless. This false hospitality couldn't hide the fact of antisemitic discrimination. Propaganda posters promoted a peaceable nation, but the German Jews snubbed at the Berlin Olympics were later persecuted to the point of death: The exhibit concludes with the Games' ugly aftermath. The Oregon Sports Hall of Fame, now a year old, may finally get some recognition as the host of The Nazi Olympics. Though the space is low-ceilinged, gray and somewhat confining, it serves the exhibition's subject matter well, wrapping viewers in a cocoon of bleak times. At the end, you won't want to linger.
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