The modern Olympics are known for monumental arenas,
pomp, and grand spectacle,
a long way from their humble origins.
How did this transformation occur?
What turned the Games from a celebration of athletic prowess
into a global marketing phenomenon?
The modern Olympic era began with the 1936 Berlin Games,
during a time when Adolf Hitler's Third Reich
had secured their grip on Germany.
Under Hitler's regime, the Olympic legacy was changed forever.
And despite the defeat of the Third Reich in 1945,
their influence on the Olympic Games has echoed through the decades,
creating a blueprint
that all subsequent Olympic Games would follow.
The preliminary decision to hold the 1936 Games in Berlin
was made on the shores of Lake Grunau,
where members of the International Olympic Committee witnessed an event
staged especially for them.
The German Olympic organisers put together
some 2000 rowboats on Lake Grunau
in which they ferried around the various members of the IOC
as well as their friends and guests and entourages.
This has a way of influencing the IOC
and to persuade them that it might be a good idea
to vote for Berlin in the upcoming bidding for the 1936 Games.
The IOC members were astounded by the German presentation.
It was the the first time any nation had made
such an impressive Olympic bid.
There's no evidence that there were financial bribes by the Germans
but there certainly was a lot of behind-the-scenes pressure
through personal contacts and the rest of it,
glad-handing, wining and dining, special favours.
That was really something new
and it's become now standard practice for the Olympics.
The plan worked: almost unanimously,
IOC members voted to hold the 1936 Games in Berlin.
The men responsible for Germany's winning presentation
were Carl Diem and Theodor Lewald.
As co-chairmen of the German delegation,
in 1932 they travelled to the Games in Los Angeles.
When Lewald and Diem went to Los Angeles,
their reaction was almost one of fear and panic.
And as they went around Los Angeles with their notebooks,
scribbling down "Look at that, look at that,"
I think they realised that they had a very, very big mission indeed.
Diem and Lewald admired the buildings
the Americans had constructed,
including the large Olympic stadium and the new Olympic Village.
Many foreign athletes were unable to attend the Games
and many Olympic venues remained only half-filled.
Diem and Lewald knew their Berlin Games had to succeed
where the Los Angeles Games had not.
Diem and Lewald came out of the Games especially with this sense,
"Yes, we can do it better.
"We can organise it better. After all, we're Germans,
"we know something about organisation.
"We'll be very good at that."
They were convinced that they could do better.
Six months later, the Nazis came to power in Germany.
The country's new Chancellor was Adolf Hitler.
Hitler's ideological instincts
prompted him to reject an internationalism in search of peace.
And you have to understand
that the essence of a fascist foreign policy is war.
For Hitler, the only value of sports was physical fitness:
creating the perfect soldier.
The Nazi idea of Wehrsport is the preparation of soldiers
to throw grenades, to climb ropes, to make it over obstacles,
to swim across rivers, to march for 20 kilometres without stopping.
In this sense, sport has real utilitarian value
for military training.
And there was a second reason why Hitler was hesitant
to host the Olympic Games.
What would happen if his so-called master race of Aryans
was defeated by supposedly inferior races?
The Nazis genuinely felt
that black people and Jewish people were not human beings.
There was a lot of racial nonsense talked about
the shape of the heel bone of a black athlete being very different.
So, there was a feeling that if you were competing
as a white human being,
you were competing against an antelope or a deer.
The Nazi press demanded that black athletes be excluded from the Games.
These disturbing demands alarmed officials
at the headquarters of the International Olympic Committee
in Lausanne, Switzerland.
What would become of the 1936 Games that had been awarded to Berlin?
IOC president Henri de Baillet-Latour
was determined to clarify Hitler's position,
and German IOC member Theodor Lewald
requested a personal meeting with the Fuhrer.
Hitler did realise that maybe there was an opportunity
to promote Germany and Nazism on the world stage.
So, in many ways, he took a little bit of a bet
that maybe German athletes would do extremely well,
would beat the black athletes
and would then therefore show that his racial theories were correct.
In Hitler's mind, the Olympic Games represented a vital experiment
in the competition between nations and peoples.
The next day, newspapers across the world announced Hitler's decision.
IOC president Baillet-Latour received the news with relief.
He, along with other members of the IOC,
admired the Nazi movement's ideal for promoting the perfect body.
There was sympathy for Hitler amongst the Olympic movement.
The Nazis and the Olympic movement
drew their roots from ancient Greece.
You have this very Spartan ideal of a self-denying personality
who has tremendous will-power,
could endure hardship and enormous self-discipline
in order to make himself the perfect body,
achieve the best, be the winner.
There were these deep, deep roots in both Nazism and Olympism.
The Spartans had a tradition of fighting to the death,
never surrendering.
Another aspect was racial hygiene.
The Spartans did have the idea
that deformed babies should be killed, should be eliminated.
If you want to have a perfectly healthy, perfectly rigorous nation,
you have to be prepared to get rid of, to sacrifice,
the somehow less desirable, the less efficient.
That was what we would call eugenics.
But the Nazis' philosophy of eugenics soon became very real.
Discrimination against Jews in Germany
started with an official boycott of Jewish businesses,
organised by the government.
This put the IOC in an untenable position.
How could they justify holding the next Olympic Games
in a country that openly discriminated against Jews?
Such bigotry was impossible to reconcile with the Olympic charter.
The situation worsened when the Nazi press
began demanding that Theodor Lewald and Carl Diem
step down from the Olympic organisational committee.
Lewald and Diem both have Jewish ancestry and connections.
They are absolutely compromised by this.
And yet there they are organising the Olympics
within a state that is banning Jewish people from public life
and indeed sporting life.
This outraged the IOC and so they went to the Germans and they said,
"Look, if you continue with this policy, we'll move the Games."
That was the threat.
A showdown. Hitler weighed the consequences.
He considered the potential damage to his reputation to be too great
should he cancel the Games.
Ultimately he allowed Lewald and Diem to retain their positions.
They announced their victory in a telegram
but kept one detail secret.
Lewald was willing to sacrifice everything
for his dream of hosting the Olympic Games in Germany.
He becomes the consummate puppet in the hands of Nazi string-pullers
and in effect a secret agent for the Nazis inside the IOC.
A few weeks later, members of the IOC met in Vienna
for their annual conference.
The atmosphere was tense.
There were a lot of newspaper reports around the world
showing that Jews were being forbidden from sporting life.
And the IOC knew that to have their Olympic festival in Berlin
was highly problematic.
So, what did they want to achieve at Vienna?
They wanted to say to the German Olympic Committee,
"Look, you've got to have some Jews on the team."
In consultation with the IOC,
the German delegation released a public statement:
"As a principle,
"German Jews shall not be excluded from German Teams
"at the Games of the XIth Olympiad."
The statement, however, was deceptively worded.
The German delegation changed the original wording.
Their statement had promised the Jews would, quote,
"absolutely" not be excluded from the German Olympic team.
The change was a conscious decision
on the part of the German delegation.
You don't need to be a lawyer to realise that this meant nothing.
It was just a piece of paper.
It was there to hold up to the world and say,
"Look, we're doing our bit." It was an entirely cynical declaration.
But the statement satisfied the IOC.
The committee voted unanimously to award the Games to Berlin.
Meanwhile, planning was under way for the Olympic venues in Berlin.
Hitler paid a personal visit to the future Olympic campus.
Hitler liked nothing better than building.
He went out to the area
where they were starting to construct the stadium
and he was struck by the smallness of the operation,
the modesty, shall I say, of the operation.
This wasn't what he had in mind at all.
Hitler demanded his Olympics would exceed everything
that had been attempted before.
Architect Werner March fulfilled this wish
and came up with a new design.
What started out as something fairly modest turned out to be gargantuan.
The Nazis built the largest stadium complex - competitive complex -
in Olympic history up to that point.
The monumental design enticed the organisers of the Games.
The IOC were absolutely delighted when they knew
that Hitler was going to be building this huge stadium.
It was just exactly what the IOC wanted.
This was going to be something that all the nations of the world
would look at and go "Wow, what a place!"
Berlin 1936 marks the beginning of an architectural race
to build bigger Olympic stages,
setting a precedent that has been followed up to the present day.
Every host city seeks to outdo the one before it
in terms of size and scope.
Olympic stadiums have become symbols of grandeur
and a claim for global leadership.
The IOC was very much interested in having monumental structures
which would reflect the power of the IOC itself
and of the Olympic movement.
They did not want temporary structures
that could be torn down after the Games.
They did not want small, modest affairs.
They really wanted monumentality.
So, the fact that Hitler promised to build big
was another attraction for the IOC.
While construction was under way in Germany,
the next danger to the Olympic Games began taking shape in the US:
a boycott movement aimed to prevent Hitler from hosting the Games.
The goals were clear.
First let's try to get the Germans to change their policies.
If they don't, then try to get the IOC to move the Games away.
If that didn't succeed,
if the IOC persisted in its determination
to keep the Games in Berlin, then boycott them.
The American Olympic Committee, headed by Avery Brundage,
immediately took a stand against a possible boycott.
Brundage's goal was to intimidate American Jews
by threatening them with consequences.
Brundage's argument was that the Jewish protests
would inevitably lead to profound anti-Semitic reactions
in the United States.
In fact, they did not.
This is Brundage projecting his anger at the Jews
on to the American population.
Perhaps he was hoping
that the American Jews would get what was coming to them.
Ultimately, the proponents of the boycott
demanded that Brundage go to Germany to see for himself
what the discrimination against Jews looked like.
Brundage had already made up his mind before he left
that the Americans should go to Berlin.
He was not impartial.
So, he was looking for ways to justify American participation.
Brundage went to Germany for his inspection tour in September 1934.
During his six-day visit, his German hosts
showed him what Hitler's government was doing for the Olympic Games.
Brundage was enthusiastic.
It's all kind of very friendly.
Going to nice restaurants, looking at a couple of sports clubs
where there are two or three token Jews being allowed to participate.
It's like touring Potemkin villages.
Brundage met with representatives of the Jewish athletic associations
at the Kaiserhof Hotel in Berlin.
The fact-finding mission ended as a farce.
Now nothing stood in the way of American participation
in the Berlin Olympics.
The IOC was relieved, and praised Brundage for his efforts.
Brundage was very ambitious to be part of the IOC itself.
He wanted to have a seat on the committee.
He wanted power and I think that Brundage, even in the 1930s,
was looking to run the IOC.
Meanwhile, construction delayed on the Olympic building sites.
Hitler demanded a faster pace.
With the speed, the costs also went up.
But Hitler was willing to spend whatever was necessary
to get this done, I mean, basically he said,
"No holds barred. We'll spend whatever we need to get this built"
and so it became enormously expensive,
much more than the original projections.
Experts estimated the total cost of the Berlin Games
at 100 million Reichmarks,
equivalent to 450 million dollars today.
At the time, they were the most expensive Games ever.
It set an example for the future.
One of the big problems in the history of the modern Olympics
is cost, right?
I mean, each country, every city,
seems to try to outdo the one before in terms of outlay
and it just gets bigger and bigger and bigger,
but the model for that really comes from the Germans in 1936.
Then came another setback,
in the form of a series of attacks against Jews
on Berlin's prestigious Kurfurstendamm shopping street.
A group of SA men beat them up in broad daylight,
slugged women in the face.
This was an incredible demonstration of brutality
right in the middle of the city
that was projected to host the Games in one year hence.
These anti-Semitic attacks outraged people throughout the world.
In New York harbour,
5000 demonstrators stormed the German ocean liner 'Bremen'.
They took down the swastika flag and threw it in the water.
That incident had consequences.
In the US, there were growing calls
to boycott the Games in Nazi Germany.
Shortly thereafter, American IOC member Charles Sherrill
undertook a special mission to meet with Hitler.
Hitler rejected the suggestion, but Sherrill didn't give up,
pleading with Hitler to make an exception.
Finally Hitler backed down,
and Helene Mayer, a Jewish woman,
was given a spot on Germany's Olympic fencing team.
Helene Mayer did not look like
the unfair racial stereotype of a Jewish person.
She was blonde, she was tall,
she did look like what Hitler wanted Aryans to look like.
Mayer's appearance made it easy
for the Nazi press to conceal her Jewish ancestry.
Sherrill had gone out there
trying to get some quite significant representation
of Jewish sportsmen on the Olympic team.
He came back to the United States with the promise of one
and of course this is entirely cynical
because it's just a token, but of course when he came back,
he presented it as a great success, "I've done something."
All this occurred while the exclusion of Jews in Nazi Germany
was codified through the Nuremberg Laws.
With these laws,
the Nazis deprived German Jews of their political rights.
Sieg heil! Sieg heil!
EXPLOSION
Pressure was mounting to finish the construction of the Olympic venues.
There was less than one year left
until the opening ceremony of the Berlin Games.
Then, another delay: a serious accident
at the construction site of the suburban rail line
that would connect the Olympic stadium with the city centre.
A tunnel near Brandenburg Gate collapsed.
They tunneled too close to the surface,
there was a cave-in and 19 workers were killed as a result of this.
So this was a tremendous calamity, no doubt about that.
Although the press was initially allowed
to report about the accident,
the Nazi government soon prevented further coverage.
What would it look like if it turned out
that the accelerated pace of construction
had caused the death of the construction workers?
At the memorial service for the victims a few days later,
Propaganda Minister Goebbels
declared the deceased workers to be heroes
who died in service of the national Olympic effort.
It transpires that there were safety regulations
that had been disregarded because they were under pressure
to finish this project sooner than they should have.
But the public would not learn the real cause for the catastrophe
until after the Berlin Games.
Based on an expert's report, three construction engineers
were sentenced for involuntary manslaughter
and sent to prison for up to three years.
New York. At its annual convention,
the Amateur Athletic Union will make a final decision
on whether they should send American athletes to the Games in Germany.
If the AAU decided to withdraw its support from American athletes,
and not certify them to go to Berlin,
Brundage had a real problem on his hands.
Had the US stayed out,
I think it's pretty clear that the British would have stayed out as well
and then the French too and also the Canadians.
So had that been the case,
had those major countries all stayed out,
Hitler's party would have certainly been ruined.
To prevent that from happening,
Avery Brundage and IOC president Baillet-Latour
hatched a secret plan.
As an exceptional measure,
they would consider it enough if just the American Olympic Committee
certified American athletes, so that the AAU would be pushed aside.
But Brundage was fortunate.
The AAU voted 58.25 to 55.75 against yet another investigation
of the political conditions in Nazi Germany.
The decision went the way Brundage wanted.
It went to participation in Berlin.
For Brundage, the path to Berlin was now clear.
In the end, 49 countries agreed to take part in the Berlin Games,
more than ever before.
A boycott had been staved off.
And the five men who had given their all
to ensure the Olympics would be held in Nazi Germany,
had achieved their goal.
Spring of 1936. The monumental Olympic venues in Berlin
are completed just in time for the Summer Games.
Meanwhile, athletic preparations are in full swing.
Germany was absolutely keen on showing athletic superiority
across the board in every event possible
and, to that end,
they had a very meticulously prepared training program
and they wanted to suggest
a kind of Aryan racial superiority of the Germans,
especially over the Western democracies.
They saw this as a kind of anticipation
of coming military conflict, perhaps.
I think the 1936 Berlin Games
initiated the phase during which Olympic sport becomes a proxy war
between great powers.
Every athlete competing on behalf of Germany at the Olympic Games
must swear a vow of silence about the training program.
Instead of enforcing compliance with the amateur rule,
IOC president Baillet-Latour travelled around the world
dispelling doubts among those who still questioned the propriety
of participating in the Berlin Games.
At a dinner at the New York Athletic Club
he said anyone who opposed participating
did "not understand the Olympic spirit or the Olympic ideal."
Only a few athletes were brave enough
to oppose the decision of the IOC.
The case of three swimmers from Austria,
among the best their country had to offer,
caused an uproar.
All three Austrian swimmers were Jewish.
They were quite aware of what was happening in the Third Reich.
So they refused to be part of the Austrian team
even though they had been selected, and as a consequence of that,
they were stripped of their previous medals.
They were denied the chance to swim ever again on the Austrian team.
They were basically banned and excluded.
Judith Deutsch, Lucie Goldner and Ruth Langer
paid a high price for their personal boycott.
Their lifetime ban was intended to dissuade others
from following their example.
But the majority of athletes from all over the world
had already made up their minds to travel to Nazi Germany.
They had trained long and hard,
and the opportunity to achieve Olympic fame was too enticing.
Two weeks before the opening ceremony,
the first teams arrived in Berlin
and took up residence in the Olympic village.
The Nazi government took advantage of the Olympic anticipation
for a last-minute clean-up campaign.
Before the Games started, Goebbels, who was Gauleiter of Berlin,
ordered that the city should be "cleaned up."
Now that word means we hope just maybe painting a few buildings,
putting out some flags, but it also means 'cleaning up'
people who the Nazis found undesirable
and typically these are the Sinti and the Roma.
In a covert operation, some 600 Sinti and Roma
were deported to a so-called "gypsy camp"
on the outskirts of the city.
While Berlin was polished up and looking its best,
the displaced families suffered.
We know what happens to the Sinti and Roma.
They all get killed. They get gassed. They get murdered.
It's as simple as that
and this measure taking place against them
just before the Olympic Games,
you have to see in the context of essentially a genocidal act.
The Nazi regime achieved its goal
of presenting Berlin from its supposedly best side.
The removal of people considered to be undesirables
who are in the way of the Olympic show
has become standard operating procedure
in order to present a happier face for the Olympic Games.
The stage was set for the Summer Olympics, 1936.
The prelude to the Games was a spectacular innovation
never before seen in the history of the Olympics,
a torch relay from the ruins of ancient Olympia
to modern-day Berlin.
Thus the German organisers wanted to establish a symbolic tie
between Hitler's Aryans and the ancient Greeks.
The torch relay became an overwhelming success.
The IOC saw it
as a great propagandistic advertisement for the Games,
so much so that they made it a part of Olympic pageantry
for the rest of the history of the modern Games.
Again, we have to live with this whether we like it or not.
Though the torch run was invented by the Nazis,
the IOC was thrilled with the innovation.
The Olympic torch became the most prominent symbol of the Games.
Ever since, it has remained an indispensable part
of the Olympic protocol.
It shows the entire world
that the Olympics are much more than just a sport event.
They are a sacred movement.
But the torch relay was just the beginning
of a sanctification of sport
that stemmed from the cultic practices within the Third Reich.
The Nazis saw themselves as a kind of quasi-religious movement.
And they were very good at religious imagery
and manipulating religious sensibilities and the rest of it.
And so they wanted an Olympic performance, an Olympic theatre,
which would contain a lot of quasi-religious aspects to it.
And on through the Games there was always an element of cult.
On the day of the opening ceremony for the Berlin Olympic Games,
110,000 spectators squeezed into the overcrowded Olympic Stadium.
Everyone wanted to experience the grand Olympic spectacle
they had been promised for weeks.
And they were not disappointed.
Floating above the Olympic stadium was the Hindenburg,
this incredibly powerful symbol of German technological achievement,
and there it was above the stadium,
which is covered in Olympic flags and swastikas.
So, everything comes together perfectly for Hitler.
When the German Fuhrer entered the stadium
with IOC president Baillet-Latour,
the crowd burst into enthusiastic applause.
Then it was time for the Parade of Nations.
Never before had so many athletes come to the Olympic Games.
As the athletes marched past the VIP box,
many of them raised their arms in the direction of Hitler.
If you look at the parade of athletes,
you see them extending their arm out in a horizontal fashion.
People thought that everybody was giving the Hitler salute
when in fact that was not the case.
But there were also countries
that intended the gesture as a Hitler salute.
The excitement reached a climax
when the delegation from Austria, Hitler's birthplace,
entered the stadium.
The highlight of the opening ceremony?
The Olympic flame entering the stadium.
People were mesmerised by it.
It was absolutely transfiguring, apparently,
and that's another reason why I think this custom of a torch runner
coming into the stadium bearing this torch from ancient Olympia
would become standard in Olympic pageantry ever after.
To ensure that images of the ceremony
could be shown around the globe as soon as possible,
the Olympic organisers implemented their plan.
Live radio broadcasts were sent from the Berlin Olympics.
German engineers had erected new powerful short-wave transmitters,
ensuring that people around the world could receive reports
in 28 languages.
It was the largest radio audience in the history of the world,
300 million listeners to these broadcasts.
It was the greatest media event in history.
And yet another Olympic premiere took place during the Berlin Games.
The new technology of television had its debut.
In 25 so-called television salons, fans could follow the Olympics.
So popular was this, so exciting was it,
that it was sometimes harder to get a ticket
to get into one of the television rooms in Berlin
than it was to go to the stadium itself.
Obviously very important for the history of the Olympics
because ultimately what really saved the Olympics
as a commercial enterprise down the line was television.
And the Germans pioneered in that too.
It's very hard to think of anything in media terms
like the Berlin Olympics.
It's the first global media happening, we'd call it today.
Previous Games were nothing like it. This was modern.
It was fresh, it was new, it was huge, it was global.
The organisers left nothing to chance.
They went to great lengths
to make sure Olympic guests felt comfortable.
The Nazi regime was even willing
to bend its own strict rules from time to time.
The Nazis had shut down a lot of bordellos.
They had also outlawed prostitution in central parts of Berlin.
But they understood that for the Games
there would be lots of people coming in
who wanted some sexual excitement
and so they reinstituted something like 7000 prostitutes.
For the duration of the Games,
Berlin's prestigious boulevard Unter den Linden
was transformed into a promenade
where Olympic visitors were treated to a peaceful Germany.
This was useful from the standpoint
of changing some widespread perceptions
of what the Nazis were like,
of showing that they were less warlike
than many foreigners assumed they were.
Nearly all the international visitors were impressed
by the hospitality of their German hosts.
Most of them were not aware that the Germans were under orders.
Again and again, the Nazi regime had admonished the population
to "exercise real German hospitality!"
Everybody thought that Nazi Germany was just simply a fantastic place.
Where were all these horrible, horrible things
that they had read about in the newspapers? They weren't there.
Instead, they were presented with a city in festival.
It felt like the place to be, and the people who went loved it.
Each day, more than one hundred thousand visitors
converged on the Olympic venues in Berlin.
They all enjoyed watching the sports events.
No one suspected there was a huge surveillance apparatus
operating behind the scenes.
The fact is that behind the scenes, there was intense policing.
There were police everywhere. Now, many of them were plainclothes
because the Nazis did not want to look like what they really were,
namely a police state.
The security precautions were immense.
Hitler had an entire troop of bodyguards surrounding him
whenever he visited the Olympic venues.
However, there were some interesting lapses in the security.
People who came into the stadium were not screened for weapons.
There wasn't that kind of frisking that we... or metal detectors
or anything like that that we have today,
so one could have brought a pistol into the stadium
and in fact Hitler could have been shot.
A woman came dangerously close to Hitler at the swimming stadium.
But instead of a gun, she merely pulled out a camera.
Security was also tight in the Olympic village.
The foreign athletes' every move was monitored,
and every letter was read.
The regime had a special postal station
just to intercept messages
coming into the Olympic Village and going out.
So, every piece of mail that was coming in or going out was vetted.
The most important case of that was a letter to Jesse Owens.
That letter encouraged Owens to make a visible statement of defiance.
The author suggested the black superstar athlete
should protest the Nazis' racism by refusing to accept his medal.
Because that would show a great gesture from people of your race
and also be a great help to Jewish people as well
to show that you're against this Nazi state
and it will show the world that even though you're competing there,
you're against what Nazism represents.
Now, of course, Owens never gets this letter,
and the reason why we can read it today
is because the Gestapo intercepted it.
So there was nothing to disturb the smooth running of the Games.
STARTER'S PISTOL
The world's attention was focused on the sporting events.
Early on, the Americans took the lead in the medal ranking,
far ahead of Germany.
The Games don't go well for Germany
because the Americans are doing really well.
I mean, you've got Owens winning a lot of medals,
you've got all the track and field in which the Americans excel
and of course the Nazis start getting a bit worried about this.
But then Hitler's "sports army" began to catch up,
winning one medal after another.
In rowing, fencing, and gymnastics.
By the twelfth day of the Games,
Germany and the US were tied for first place.
The riding events would make the difference.
The Germans swept the equestrian field entirely,
won every one of the events, which was unprecedented,
with the ultimate consequence that the Germans,
for the first time ever, won the medal count.
The world was impressed by the superiority of the German athletes.
As a result of the Olympic Games,
there were a lot of people, especially Avery Brundage,
who saw the relatively poor performance of the democracies
as proof that liberalism and democracy
were allowing countries and people to go flabby,
and what was needed was the same type of arrangements
as were taking place in Nazi Germany.
In public, Brundage applauded Hitler's regime
and demanded that the US
"learn a lesson from National Socialist Germany"
and its true Olympic spirit.
The Games ended with an ostentatious closing ceremony.
The entire world was in agreement.
The Berlin Games had indeed exceeded all expectations,
just as Hitler had promised.
It is not surprising that the IOC considered these the best Games ever
because they were the most spectacular Games ever.
This was Olympism on the grand scale.
The Berlin Games completely changed
the way the Olympics were celebrated.
The display of pomp and pageantry continue to this day.
A once-modest sports event became a global spectacular
of epic dimensions.
All this was shaped by the collaboration of interests
between the Nazis and the IOC in 1936.
It raised the Olympic Committee
in terms of its own global stature and its own power.
After Berlin,
the Olympic Committee would always start to represent
a player on the world stage in a way that it never had.
The members of the IOC gloried in the success of the Games.
President Baillet-Latour
personally expressed his gratitude to Hitler
for his service to the Olympic ideal.
The atmosphere was
mutual backslapping and mutual congratulation.
Hitler, for his part, gave a speech
in which he thanked the IOC for the opportunity
to further the Olympic spirit of goodwill and understanding
and world peace.
In many ways it's a perfect marriage between Olympism and Nazism.
You can say that Nazism took Olympism,
hijacked it and made it its own.
Or you can be much more cynical about Olympism
and say that actually what the Nazis were delivering
was the ultimate expression of Olympism.
Unnoticed amid the euphoria
were IOC president Baillet-Latour's successful efforts
to eliminate his opponents.
He forced the American member Ernest Jahncke out of the IOC.
He was against the Olympics happening in Berlin
and he had made that very, very clear
but because the Olympics in Berlin were such a success,
Jahncke's position was absolutely unsustainable. He was voted out.
And they gave Brundage that job on the IOC as a big thank you.
Brundage's replacement of Ernest Lee Jahncke
certainly looks like a reward for Brundage
for taking the pro-Nazi political position.
I mean, it cannot have been anything else.
The Nazi regime also showed its gratitude to Brundage
for his support.
Avery Brundage also got another nice little reward for delivering the Olympics.
He mysteriously got the building contract
to construct the new German Embassy in Washington DC.
You don't need to be a conspiracy theory
to work out why that happened.
You can't see that in any other way apart from bribery.
Hitler's political strategy also paid off.
The enormous propaganda success he enjoyed in Berlin
bought him time.
So, it was not long after the Games
that Hitler instructed his aides to begin preparing for war.
In 1938, Hitler annexed Austria and invaded Sudetenland.
Then the synagogues in Germany were set on fire.
Some 400 Jews were murdered during the November pogroms,
and the Nazi regime deported another 30,000
to concentration camps.
And the IOC? It remained loyal to Hitler.
When Japan, the chosen host of the 1940 Winter Olympics,
forfeited the Games because it was at war with China,
the IOC began looking for a replacement venue.
If you want any more example of the utter cynicism of the IOC
and the fact that it was in cahoots with the Nazis,
you only have to look at what they did in June 1939.
They awarded the Winter Olympics to Nazi Germany.
This was after everything that Hitler had done
against the Jews in his own country.
We knew, the world knew, about the camps
and yet still the IOC went ahead and gave Hitler another present.
The Nazi press cheered the IOC's decision
to award the Winter Games to Germany,
even more so because Hitler already had threatened
the extermination of Jews.
On September 1, 1939, Hitler invaded Poland.
With the outbreak of World War II,
Nazi Germany was no longer tenable as the host of the Olympic Games.
IOC president Baillet-Latour
regretted that Hitler cancelled the Games.
In a letter,
he wrote that "the wonderful job" Germany had done
"to give the Games an even more impressive character than in 1936
"was in vain."
After Baillet-Latour died,
you need no further proof of how much esteem he was held by the Nazis
when they gave him a massive funeral.
There were swastikas on his coffin.
There were also Nazi soldiers
who stood honorary guard at the ceremony.
So, this is a fitting end
for this particular Nazi fellow-traveller
who did perform a real service for the Hitler regime.
And what about the other Olympic officials
who made it possible for Hitler to host the Games in Nazi Germany?
Theodor Lewald was forced out of the IOC by the Nazi regime
because of his Jewish heritage.
Carl Diem made propaganda speeches for the German Wehrmacht,
encouraging young people to sacrifice their lives for Hitler.
And Avery Brundage became president of the IOC after the war ended,
carrying on the work of his predecessors
by organising ever grander, ever more gigantic Olympic Games.
Every modern Olympics has elements of the Berlin Games in it.
If the '36 Olympics had happened in another country,
the Olympics today might not be the same thing.
But what the Nazis showed was that this event could be globalised
and nationalised and politicised
in a way that's always taken place since.
There is no doubt that Berlin is at the root of the modern Olympics.
You have to remember the IOC would go on in later years
to favour many authoritarian governments.
The IOC was not bothered by the fact that this regime was discriminatory,
that it abused human rights. That didn't seem to bother them at all.
What the IOC learned from putting on an Olympiad
with a dictatorial regime
was that the world at large would accept it.
If the show is good enough,
if the public relations manoeuvring of the dictatorship
is clever enough, then you can get away with it.
Captions (c) SBS Australia 2016