Giles MacDonogh

Nazis and Narcissism

Berlin Games: How Hitler Stole the Olympic Dream

By

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Hitler’s abuse of the Berlin Olympics has become one of the great milestones of the 1930s and the descent into war. Everyone recalls the moment when the Aryan-supremacist Hitler was forced to watch his own athletes trounced by a mere Neger, in the person of sprinter and long-jumper Jesse Owens. But as Walters points out, in 1936 the Germans were impeccably well behaved, and were even happy to cheer him on, though their government had defined him as an Untermensch. 

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