UI Press | Edited by Arnd Krüger and William Murray | The Nazi Olympics: Sport, Politics, and Appeasement in the 1930s

The Nazi Olympics

Sport, Politics, and Appeasement in the 1930s

The preparation and presentation of the Nazi Olympics as seen by the host country and by the main competing countries

The 1936 Olympic Games played a key role in the development of both Hitler’s 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. The Nazi Olympics opens with an analysis of Germany’s preparations for the Games and the attempts by the Nazi regime to allay the international concerns about Hitler’s racist ideals and expansionist ambitions.

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 Hitler’s politics, despite embodying his Aryan ideal.

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.

"It's a pleasure to read the work of writers who really know their topic. This collection contains some masterful essays which impress the reader with their depth of information and their balanced judgments. There's real drama here and important questions to ask and answer."--Allen Guttmann, author of The Olympics: A History of the Modern Games

Arnd Krüger, a professor of sport science and head of the Sport and Society Section at Georg-August Universität in Göttingen, is the author of more than twenty books. He is also a former Olympian and has served as president of the European Committee for the History of Sports. William Murray, a Reader in History at La Trobe University, Victoria, Australia, is the author of The World's Game: A History of Soccer and The Old Firm: Sectarianism, Sport, and Society in Scotland, as well as several articles on sport and politics in the 1930s.