Berlin 1936: The Nazi Olympics and the Boycott Debate

Timeline

1. 1931The IOC awards the 1936 Summer Olympics to Berlin.
2. Jan 1933The Nazis take power in Germany.
3. 1935The Nuremberg Laws strip Jewish Germans of citizenship rights; the U.S. boycott debate intensifies.
4. Oct 31, 1935Brundage issues the American Olympic Committee pamphlet "Fair Play for American Athletes."
5. Nov 25, 1935IOC member Ernest Lee Jahncke writes to IOC president Baillet-Latour urging that Americans not take part.
6. Dec 8, 1935The Amateur Athletic Union rejects an investigating commission, 58¼ to 55¾, and backs participation. Mahoney steps down as president.
7. Jun 1936Jewish high jumper Gretel Bergmann is dropped from the German team.
8. Jul 1936The IOC expels American member Ernst Lee Jahncke, who backed the boycott; the People's Olympiad in Barcelona is canceled.
9. Jul 16, 1936About 600 Roma in the Berlin area are arrested and interned at Marzahn.
10. Aug 1936The Berlin Games are held; Jesse Owens wins four gold medals.

The ethical issues

• Boycott vs. engagement: whether participation legitimizes oppression.
• Politics and sport: whether sport can be separated from politics.
• Discrimination: exclusion of Jewish and Roma athletes.
• Athletes' interests: the cost of boycotts to athletes.
• Propaganda: how regimes use sporting events.

Stakeholders

Stakeholder	Interests & obligations
Jewish athletes	Exclusion, persecution and their right to compete.
Athletes worldwide	Opportunity to compete.
The Nazi regime	International legitimacy.
IOC and national committees	The Olympic movement's principles.
Boycott advocates	Moral opposition to Nazi policies.
The public	Understanding what participation meant.

The case

In 1931, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) chose Berlin over Barcelona to host the 1936 Summer Olympics.^[1] Germany was then a democracy, the Weimar Republic. After the Nazis took power in January 1933, the regime saw the Games as a propaganda opportunity.^[1]

Background

The award itself was routine. At the IOC’s 1931 session in Barcelona, only Barcelona and Berlin remained of the cities that had shown interest. Members voted individually, many by post, and Berlin won 43 votes to 16. Barcelona’s chances were probably weakened by political uncertainty after the proclamation of the Second Spanish Republic days earlier.^[1] Germany had been due to host the cancelled 1916 Games, and the Reichssportfeld complex planned for them was completed in 1934–36.^[1]

The Nazi regime changed what the Games meant. The party newspaper, the Völkischer Beobachter, had argued that Jewish and Black athletes should be barred from the Olympics.^[1] The organizers also felt the effects of the regime’s racial laws. Theodor Lewald, president of the German Olympic Committee, had a Jewish grandparent and was sidelined from a leading role. Wolfgang Fürstner, an army officer who oversaw 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.^[1] In July 1936 the Interior Ministry authorized Berlin police to detain the city’s Roma and confine them in a camp at Marzahn.^[1]

The rules and governance

The decision rested with the IOC, a self-selecting body whose rules gave hosts wide latitude over their own teams. After the 1933 takeover, some IOC members privately discussed moving the Games, and the U.S. Olympic Association briefly suggested Rome. Hitler’s government gave assurances that Jewish athletes would not be excluded from the German team, and the proposal was not seriously pursued.^[1] The IOC accepted those assurances even as Jewish athletes were in practice pushed out, with Mayer as a token exception.^[1]

National Olympic committees and sports federations, not governments, decided whether to send teams. That is why the U.S. decision came down to a vote inside the Amateur Athletic Union, and why President Roosevelt could stay out of it.^[2] About 6,000 athletes from 49 countries registered in the end.^[1]

Exclusion

The regime excluded Jewish and Roma athletes from German teams. High jumper Gretel Bergmann was dropped shortly after equaling the German record in June 1936. The exclusions began well before the Games. In April 1933, an “Aryans only” policy was introduced in all German athletic organizations. The German Boxing Association expelled light heavyweight champion Erich Seelig that month because he was Jewish, and Germany’s top-ranked tennis player, Daniel Prenn, was removed from the Davis Cup team.^[3] Others kept off the Olympic team included the record-holding athlete Lilli Henoch and Sinti boxer Johann Trollmann.^[1] Fencer Helene Mayer, who had one Jewish parent and had emigrated to the United States, returned to compete for Germany and won silver. She was the only athlete of Jewish descent on the German team, an inclusion widely seen as intended to deflect foreign criticism.^[1]

The boycott debate

Boycott campaigns arose in Britain, France, Sweden, Czechoslovakia, the Netherlands and the United States.^[1][2] In 1933, Avery Brundage, president of the American Olympic Committee, said that the “very foundation of the modern Olympic revival will be undermined if individual countries are allowed to restrict participation by reason of class, creed, or race.” After a brief, tightly managed visit to Germany in 1934, he said Jewish athletes were being treated fairly.^[2]

Brundage then opposed a boycott, saying “The Olympic Games belong to the athletes and not to the politicians.” He wrote that American athletes should not become involved in the “Jew-Nazi altercation” and alleged a “Jewish-Communist conspiracy” to keep the United States out.^[2] Jeremiah Mahoney, president of the Amateur Athletic Union (AAU), argued that Germany had broken Olympic rules against discrimination and that taking part would endorse Hitler’s regime. Catholic leaders, Jewish organizations and political figures supported a boycott.^[2] President Franklin Roosevelt stayed out of the debate.^[2] In December 1935, Brundage maneuvered the AAU to a close vote in favor of participation, and other countries followed.^[2] The IOC expelled American member Ernst Lee Jahncke, who had opposed the Games, and elected Brundage in his place.^[2]

The pamphlet war and the vote

In late October 1935, after a mail poll of the American Olympic Committee’s 62 members, Brundage issued a pamphlet titled “Fair Play for American Athletes.” It promised that “full courtesy and hospitality in Germany are assured to Olympic athletes and visitors, no matter what race, creed or color.” It argued that the Games had been awarded to Berlin, not to Germany, that taking part would not endorse Nazism, and that it was too late to move them: “They will be held in Berlin in 1936 or not at all.” It invoked George Washington’s warning against meddling in foreign affairs and said the United States could be disciplined under the Olympic code if it stayed home. In a passage headed “Jewish Opinion,” it claimed that “many leaders of the faith” believed the agitation had harmed Jews. It did not name them.^[4]

The other side answered in kind. On November 25, 1935, Jahncke wrote to IOC president Henri de Baillet-Latour: “Neither Americans nor the representatives of other countries can take part in the Games in Nazi Germany without at least acquiescing in the contempt of the Nazis for fair play and their sordid exploitation of the Games.”^[7] Catholic voices were prominent in the boycott camp. Mahoney was Catholic, Al Smith of New York and Massachusetts governor James Curley opposed sending a team, and the Catholic journal The Commonweal advised against Games that would “set the seal of approval upon the radically anti-Christian Nazi doctrine of youth.”^[7]

The decisive vote came at the AAU convention in New York on December 8, 1935. A compromise motion from New York Supreme Court Justice Aaron Steuer, a delegate from the Jewish Welfare Board, would have sent a three-man commission to Germany to investigate conditions before the United States committed. It failed on a roll call, 58¼ to 55¾. The AAU’s 34 active associations actually favored the commission, 54¾ to 43¼. The allied bodies, voting 15 to 1 with the pro-Olympic side, decided the result.^[5] One former AAU president made the key speech for participation, arguing: “If it is found at the winter games that Germany violates any Olympic code, then we should withdraw from the Berlin games.”^[6] The convention then adopted a resolution supporting participation, qualified only by its refusal to endorse the Nazi government’s policies.^[5]

Mahoney declined to stand for any AAU office. “I believe the majority is wrong in this case,” he said, “and I couldn’t continue as president of this organization or in any other office and give my full-hearted support.” He said the vote showed that the American Olympic Committee was “afraid to face the facts.” Brundage was elected AAU president for a seventh term.^[5][6]

Spain’s government boycotted, and a “People’s Olympiad” was planned in Barcelona, but it was canceled when the Spanish Civil War broke out.^[1][2]

The Games

During the Games, the regime removed “Jews not welcome” signs and muted antisemitic agitation.^[1] On July 16, 1936, some 600 Roma living in and around Berlin were arrested and interned under police guard at Marzahn. Officials also ordered that foreign visitors not be subject to the criminal penalties of Paragraph 175, the statute criminalizing sex between men.^[3] Germany fielded the largest of the 49 teams, with 348 athletes. The U.S. team of 312 was second and included 18 African Americans. Nine athletes who were Jewish or of Jewish parentage won medals, five of them Hungarians.^[3] The regime also staged the first Olympic torch relay and the first televised Games.^[1] Jesse Owens won four gold medals, and Germany topped the medal table.^[1] Jewish American sprinters Marty Glickman and Sam Stoller were dropped from the 4x100-meter relay on the morning of the race. The decision has been widely attributed to a wish not to embarrass the hosts, though the reasons remain disputed.^[1]

Aftermath

At the opening ceremony some teams gave the Nazi salute or the similar Olympic salute as they passed Hitler’s box. The United States and a few others did not.^[1] Hitler’s only public statement during the Games was the formal opening declaration.^[1] The story that he snubbed Owens is not supported by the evidence. After Hitler congratulated some winners on the first day, IOC president Henri de Baillet-Latour told him to greet all medalists or none, and he thereafter received none publicly.^[1] Leni Riefenstahl’s two-part film Olympia, released in 1938, pioneered sports-filming techniques and carried the regime’s image of the Games abroad.^[1]

Once foreign visitors left, anti-Jewish measures resumed and persecution intensified. The Kristallnacht pogrom followed in November 1938, and the Second World War began in September 1939.^[1] Several 1936 Olympians were later murdered in the Holocaust, including Polish competitors Roman Kantor and Ilia Szrajbman, both killed at Majdanek.^[1] Historians still debate how much the Games helped the regime. Some stress propaganda; others stress the boycott movement’s failure and officials’ willingness to accept the regime’s assurances.^[1]

The core dilemma

Boycott advocates believed participation lent legitimacy to a regime persecuting Jews. Opponents argued sport should stay out of politics and that athletes should not pay for governments’ actions. Was participation a neutral act or an endorsement?

Competing values

• Moral protest vs. athletes’ opportunity: opposing injustice against athletes’ careers.
• Engagement vs. isolation: influence through contact against condemnation.
• Political neutrality vs. complicity: whether neutrality is possible.
• Short-term success vs. long-term judgment: how history views decisions.

Strongest arguments

For a boycott: the regime used the Games to burnish its image while persecuting Jews. Participation undercut criticism at a crucial moment.

Against a boycott: athletes had trained for years, and victories like Owens’s challenged Nazi racial ideology. A boycott was unlikely to change German policy.

Applying the frameworks

Rights

A rights lens centers on the Jewish and Roma athletes denied a place on Germany’s team and on the Roma confined at Marzahn. Those exclusions violated the principle, which Brundage himself had stated in 1933, that participation must not be restricted by class, creed or race. The lens also weighs the rights of foreign athletes who had trained for years. Should their opportunity to compete have been sacrificed to protest violations they did not commit?

Utilitarian

Consequentialists compare the likely outcomes. A boycott might have denied the regime a propaganda showcase and signaled international resistance, but it was uncertain whether one would have changed policy. Participation gave athletes their chance, produced Owens’s victories, and temporarily softened visible persecution. It also handed the regime a successful global event. In hindsight, the harms that followed the Games weigh heavily against the claim that participation did more good.

Kantian (duty)

A duty-based lens asks whether officials acted on principles they could universalize and treated people as ends. Accepting assurances they had reason to doubt, after a tightly managed visit, and dismissing boycott supporters with antisemitic language, fails that standard. The lens also questions “the Games belong to the athletes”: if political neutrality means ignoring persecution, it may be a way of avoiding duty, not fulfilling it.

Walk it through: the Simple Decision Model

1. Spot the issue. You are an AAU delegate in December 1935, about to vote on whether the United States should compete in Berlin. The stakeholders include American athletes (including Jewish and Black athletes), German Jewish and Roma athletes, the IOC, the German regime, the American public and religious and civic groups. The codes in play are the Olympic principle of non-discrimination and the AAU’s own rules.
2. Gather facts. What evidence do you have about how Jewish athletes in Germany are actually treated, beyond official assurances? How reliable was the 1934 inspection visit?
3. Test options. Options: (a) compete without conditions; (b) boycott; (c) compete only if verified conditions are met, such as a transparent German team selection; (d) send athletes while publicly condemning persecution. Weigh them using rights, likely consequences and duty.
4. Check codes and law. Test your choice against the spirit of the Olympic rule against discrimination and against Brundage’s own 1933 statement. Would you be comfortable explaining it to an excluded German athlete?
5. Decide and document. Record the evidence you relied on, the conditions you demanded, and any dissent.
6. Communicate and follow up. Explain the vote publicly, support athletes who choose not to go, and commit to monitoring and reporting on how the hosts treat athletes and visitors.

What’s settled and what’s contested

• Settled: the exclusions; the AAU vote; the Games’ propaganda use.
• Contested: whether a boycott would have mattered; the reasons for the relay decision.

Why this case matters

Berlin 1936 is the reference point for debates about awarding sporting events to authoritarian governments, and about whether sport can ever be separated from politics.

Key terms

Sportswashing

Using sport, through events, teams or sponsorship, to improve the reputation of a state or company and distract from wrongdoing.

Stakeholders

Everyone with something at stake in a decision: athletes, coaches, parents, officials, fans, employees, sponsors, media, communities and regulators, including the less visible ones.

Legal but unethical

Law sets out what can be punished; ethics asks what is right. Compliance is a minimum, so an action can be lawful and still wrong.

Agency

An athlete’s ability to make decisions and act independently about their body, career and voice.

Definitions from the Ethics Cases glossary.

Discussion questions

1. Brundage said politics had no place in sport. Was participation in Berlin a political act?
2. Would a U.S. boycott have changed anything? How should we evaluate a boycott's likely effects?
3. Owens's victories are often described as a rebuke to Nazi ideology. Does that justify participation?
4. Jewish sprinters Marty Glickman and Sam Stoller were dropped from the relay. What does this suggest about the U.S. committee's priorities?
5. What lessons does Berlin 1936 offer for awarding events to authoritarian governments today?

Sources

1. 1936 Summer Olympics — Wikipedia
2. The Movement to Boycott the Berlin Olympics of 1936 — United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
3. The Nazi Olympics: Berlin 1936 — United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
4. Brundage Issues Pamphlet in Defense of Olympics Participation (Oct. 31, 1935) — Jewish Telegraphic Agency
5. A.A.U. Votes American Entrance Into Olympics (AP, Dec. 8, 1935) — Associated Press, via USHMM History Unfolded
6. A.A.U. Votes for Olympic Games Participation (UP, Dec. 8, 1935) — United Press, via USHMM History Unfolded
7. The Nazi Olympics: Berlin 1936 — Against Participation — United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (exhibition)