The Nazi Olympics

The 1936 Olympic Games played a key role in the development of both Hitlers Third Reich and international sporting competition. This volume gathers original essays by modern scholars from the Games most prominent participating countries and lays out the issues -- sporting as well as political -- surrounding individual nations involvement._x000B_The Nazi Olympics opens with an analysis of Germanys preparations for the Games and the attempts by the Nazi regime to allay the international concerns about Hitlers racist ideals and expansionist ambitions._x000B_Essays follow on the United States, Great Britain, and France -- three first-class Olympian nations with misgivings about participation -- as well as German ally Italy and future ally Japan. Other essays examine the issues at stake in Finland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and the Netherlands, which opposed Hitlers politics, despite embodying his Aryan ideal._x000B_Challenging the view of sport as a trivial pursuit, this collection reveals exactly how high the political stakes were in 1936 and how the Nazi Olympics distilled many of the critical geopolitical issues of the time into a contest that was anything but trivial. _x000B_