Tue. Aug. 2 at 8pm on WKAR-HD 23.1 | See how the Nazis and the IOC turned, to their mutual advantage, a relatively small, elitist sports event into an epic global and mass media spectacle that, despite the IOC’s determined attempts to forget, continues to this day.
The grand themes from the 1936 Games are repeated with every quadrennial reprise: architectural grandiosity, catastrophic budget overruns, corruption, bribery, collusion with unsavory characters–including dictators and autocrats–and the unrelenting myth of heroic physical achievement.
Despite the modern Olympic Games being “revived” in 1896 in Athens, the Games as we have come to know them were shaped by the collaboration of interests between the Nazis and the IOC in Berlin in 1936. The Olympic temple is not as virtuous as its acolytes insist, and in fact, it is merely a façade that hides earthly, and often insidious, actors who see collusion with the Nazis was a first step in a global deception.