Exhibit on 1936 Berlin Olympics has echoes of current debate

Does participating in the Olympics risk lending legitimacy to a repressive regime? That was the debate ahead of the 1936 Berlin games, but parallels to the recent controversy over China are hard to ignore.

"The Nazi Olympics: Berlin 1936," a timely look at the issue, opens Friday at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.

A version of the exhibit first opened at the museum in 1996, ahead of the Atlanta games. It returns now after a 10-year tour, enhanced by all new artifacts, including medals won by Jesse Owens and other U.S. athletes, and a torch holder used for the torch relay, a tradition of the modern Olympics that began with the Berlin games.

The exhibit comes as this year's torch relay has been dogged by protests over China's human rights record in Tibet and elsewhere. British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and German Chancellor Angela Merkel will not attend the opening ceremonies, and senior U.S. lawmakers have urged President Bush to skip them, too.

Speaking against a boycott Wednesday, Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte said Bush "believes that it is important to show the Chinese people that we welcome their entrance on the international stage."

Curator Susan Bachrach noted that when the International Olympic Committee awarded the games to Beijing, few people were raising objections. "The current event we had in mind was that an Olympics was coming," she said.

The decision to hold the 1936 games in Germany also was not particularly controversial. In 1931, when that decision was made, Adolf Hitler had not yet come to power, and the games were considered an opportunity to welcome Germany back into the Olympic community. The country was supposed to host the 1916 games, but they were canceled because of World War I.

As 1936 approached, however, the direction Germany was heading was becoming clear. Concentration camps had been established for political opponents of the regime, and signs everywhere proclaimed Jews were not welcome.

But, as the exhibit documents, there was no consensus in the United States on how to handle the Olympics. Many groups, including the anti-fascist activists and some Jewish groups, said the United States should not send its athletes at all. But other Jewish groups worried a boycott could provoke an anti-Semitic backlash at home.

Blacks also were divided. Owens himself expressed doubts about going after the passage of the Nuremberg laws, which made Jews second-class citizens, though he ultimately changed his mind and went on to win four gold medals in Berlin. His performance and that of other black athletes undermined Nazi propaganda of Aryan superiority.

Many blacks felt it was hypocritical to boycott Germany because of discrimination there, when segregation was still alive and well in the United States. Indeed, many were treated better in Berlin than at home. Runner John Woodruff, whose videotaped interview is included in the exhibit, described how after returning home with a gold medal, Jim Crow laws prevented him from traveling with his team at the University of Pittsburgh to the Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md., for a track meet.

Ultimately, the games served as a propaganda victory for Hitler. A facade of tolerance was projected in Berlin for those two weeks, Bachrach said. The Nazis removed many anti-Semitic signs, and token Jewish athletes — ice hockey star Rudi Ball and fencer Helene Mayer — competed on the German team.

Even as Berlin was preparing this show of hospitality, the exhibit notes, the Nazis were building the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, just north of the city.

Two years after the games, the events of Kristallnacht, a well-orchestrated pogrom that swept the country, marked the beginning of the Holocaust.

Even after that, Olympic officials decided to return to Germany. When other hosts for the 1940 Winter Games fell through, the IOC asked Germany to host them in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, the Bavarian town where the 1936 Winter Games were held. In the end, however, the 1940 games were canceled because of World War II.

"A lot of us think of these as the Jesse Owens games — wasn't he the winner?" Bachrach said. "But in many ways, Hitler really took the prize."