Hitler praised the virtues of sport, especially its effect on young people. “What wonderful bodies can be seen today!” He commented on one occasion, after looking at a photo of a swimmer. But when it comes to physical exercise, it cannot be said that he led by example. “He refused to play any sport,” he writes in his Memories Albert Speer, the favorite architect of the Fuehrerconfidant and Minister of Armaments of the Reich: “He also never mentioned having done it in his youth.”
To the Nazis, however, what interested them in sport was its capacity as a weapon of mass manipulation. Major sporting events, such as football matches, scenes of passionate passions, were the ideal occasion to inoculate fascist ideology among the crowds. The exhibition gives a good example of this. Sport. Masse. Macht. Fußball im Nationalsozialismus (Sport. Masses. Can. Football during National Socialism), which is on display at the Berlin Sports Museum, in a building built by the Nazis within the Olympic complex whose stadium will host the Euro final at a time when the rise of the far right—AfD was the second largest force voted in the European elections on the 9th—is worrying on the continent.
“Football was already a mass sport in the 1920s. Every weekend thousands of people of different ages and social classes gathered in the stadiums to watch games. For the Nazis, these mass spectacles were an ideal way to seek the support of a majority that they did not yet have,” explains Julian Rieck, historian and curator of the exhibition. “In football specifically, an atmosphere of unity was created in the public that allowed mass practice of gestures and rituals such as the Nazi salute,” he adds.
The exhibition shows how sport was used to create a common identity and as a propaganda tool abroad. Based on abundant documentation, historical photographs and newspaper clippings, the exhibition traces the fate of dozens of Jewish football clubs during the rise of National Socialism and reveals a little-known aspect of the Nazi concentration camps: how football was also played there. . And how some of his prisoners saved their lives thanks to that.
The incredible story of Saturnino Navazo from Burgos stands out among the many examples of athletes’ lives cut short by Nazism. Navazo had been a second division player before enlisting in the Republican army during the Spanish Civil War. In 1939 he escaped over the Pyrenees to France, where he was interned in the Argelès-sur-Mer camp until the French Government decided to send Spanish Republicans to work for the Nazi arms industry.
In Mauthausen he ended up being the captain of the Spanish soccer team and probably thanks to that he saved himself and an 8-year-old Jewish orphan, Siegfried Meir, whom he passed off as his son when the camp was liberated. “Biographies such as that of a Spaniard who arrives at a German concentration camp and saves a Jewish child from Frankfurt show that Nazism was born in Germany but affected all of Europe. With the exhibition we want to connect those stories and teach the public that comes to the European Championship that this is, in the end, a European story,” says Rieck.
One of the notorious cases of propaganda through sport is the clash between the English and German football teams held on December 4, 1935 in London, precisely at White Hart Lane, the stadium of Tottenham Hotspur, a team with a notable Jewish hobby. For that occasion, the Nazi Government organized the movement of 10,000 fans who would display the Nazi salute during the meeting.
The London newspaper Jewish Chronicle analyzed the intention of the event thus: “There is little doubt that the ulterior purpose is to present to the world the spectacle of an Anglo-Nazi fraternization, to silence protests against Nazi tyranny (…) and to give the impression that this country is “has reconciled with Nazism and everything that that implies.” As soon as the call became known, the party unleashed a wave of protests by anti-fascist groups. Rallies were organized and posters were distributed calling for the event to be suspended. One can be seen in the exhibition: “Propaganda for war, propaganda for racial hatred and savagery is the purpose that Hitler sees fulfilled with this proposed visit.”
But the greatest event of Nazi politicization through sport was the organization of the Berlin Olympic Games in 1936, for which the venue that today houses the exhibition was built. “The sports festival became a propaganda show,” says the commissioner. The regime was thus able to hide the restrictions on freedom of the press, the persecution of Jews and Gypsies and the construction of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, a few kilometers from the stadium, which went unnoticed by many Germans and visitors.
Prominent and independent intellectuals already warned of ideological manipulation. “The Olympic Games seem hateful to me because they are not a question of sport, but rather a completely political enterprise,” wrote, for example, the notable philologist Victor Klemperer, author of The language of the Third Reich, an influential analysis of the perversion of language under the Nazi regime.
The Reich commissioned the regime’s best filmmaker, Leni Riefenstahl, to shoot the Games film, the documentary Olympia (1938), whose purpose was to exalt the supposed athletic virtues of the Aryan race. However, a young black prodigy from the deep south of the United States shattered the dream of Aryan athletic supremacy: 22-year-old Jesse Owens won four gold medals in the 100 and 200 meter events, 400 meter relay and long jump, and obtained two Olympic records.
The Nazis, however, did not give up and in their national community (Volksgemeinschaft) there was only room for Aryan purity. The Aryanization of sport, as in the rest of society, led first to the exclusion and then to the detention of Jews and Gypsies. In 1938, Jews were prohibited by law from participating in sports activities. With the invasion of Poland by the Third Reich and the progress of World War II, the Nazis destroyed Jewish football clubs throughout occupied Europe. The exhibition displays reproductions of the shirts of 11 clubs destroyed by the Nazis and allows you to read examples of the so-called Aryan paragraphstexts added to the club statutes that vetoed “non-Aryan” members.
During the war, athletes also lived stories of heroism and misery, which the exhibition briefly highlights. Like that of Otto Harder (1892-1956), two-time champion of the German league with Hamburg and international with the German national team, converted into commander of a concentration camp where hundreds of people died. Visitors can also see and hear five current athletes present on video the biographies of as many elite athletes (Lili Henoch, Heinz Kerz, Béla Guttmann, Eddy Hamel and Julius Hirsch) whose careers and lives were destroyed by the Nazis. Their stories represent millions of victims across Europe.
The exhibition also follows the relationship between politics and sport during divided Germany and after reunification, until reaching the present day, when it provides an illuminating fact: almost 20% of the seven million members of the German Football Federation (Deutscher Fußball -Bund, DFB) are immigrants or children of immigrants; a fact that shows an integrative and multicultural Germany through sport.
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