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The Olympics’ Tainted Torch

Posted on 31. Jan, 2010 by Kerry Banks in Living, teaser

OLYMPICS UPDATE

Historians remind us of the unsavoury origins of the Olympic Torch

by Kerry Banks

The Olympic torch relay is rapidly nearing the end of its 100-day journey across Canada. One of the most popular Olympic rituals, it is an ideal vehicle for media consumption and corporate sponsorship and, judging by the crowds of cheering and smiling celebrants now greeting its appearance prior to the 2010 Olympics and Paralympic Games, the torch also has an inspirational power. Ironically, according to historians this symbol of hope and friendship arose from very dark origins – origins that are, for obvious reasons, not well-publicized by VANOC, which states on its website that the birth of the torch relay can be traced to ancient Greece and that the first Olympic torch relay took place in Oslo, Norway, in 1952.

According to historical reports both statements are  a tad misleading. Experts note that the Olympic torch relay was actually invented by the Nazis in 1936 as a propaganda device to popularize fascism throughout Europe and within Germany. As author Tony Perrottet notes in his book The Naked Olympics: “The torch relay is so ingrained in the modern choreography that most people today assume it was a revival of a pagan tradition – unaware that it was actually concocted for Hitler’s Games in Berlin.”

A sacred flame did burn 24 hours a day at Olympia, and Greek runners did pass pass a torch to light a sacrificial cauldron at some ancient festivals. But the Greeks opened their Olympics by word of mouth, sending heralds – not torchbearers – racing through the streets. The tradition of carrying the Olympic torch to the main stadium at Olympic Games did not become a fixture of the Games until 1936, when a 12-day run opened the Summer Games in Berlin.

The idea for the torch relay came from German sports minister Carl Diem, who intended to link Nazism to the civilized glories of classical Greece (which the Reich’s academics were arguing had been an Aryan wonderland). But Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels envisioned it as something more: an opportunity to make a bold political statement. The 1936 relay, which took German runners through Greece, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Hungary, Austria and Czechoslovakia (welcomed enroute by pro-Nazi demonstrations), was nothing less than a rehearsal of the Nazification of Europe. In fact, in an editorial at the time, the New York Times wrote that the relay was “a strategic highway that traced the line of the German Drang Nach Osten – the drive to the East that the Kaiser sought in the First World War,” and which Adolph Hitler was soon to put into practice.

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Hitler’s propaganda machine covered the torch relay in great detail,

broadcasting radio reports from every step of the route and filling the Games

with the iconographyof ancient Greek athletics.

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In fact, Hitler took personal interest in the ritual and pumped funds into its promotion. His propaganda machine covered the torch relay in great detail, broadcasting radio reports from every step of the route and filling the Games with the iconography of ancient Greek athletics. In Berlin, the flame was carried the last kilometre along the city’s main boulevard by a runner named Siegfried Eifrig, who was watched by hundreds of thousands as he transferred the flame to a cauldron on an altar surrounded by huge flags adorned with swastikas. And despite its political overtones, the event was an unqualified success for the organizers and was immortalized by director Leni Riefenstahl in her 1938 film Olympia.

Diem and Riefenstahl were also responsible for popularizing the five interlocking rings as the symbol of the Games. The ring symbol had been designed in 1913 to symbolize the first five Olympics, but nobody made any use of it until the Nazis in 1936. And for the opening segment of Riefenstahl’s film, Diem had the Olympic rings carved into the sides of a stone altar at the ancient Greek city of Delphi, thus spawning the myth that the symbol dated back more than two millennia. When visiting Delphi in the late 1950s, two British authors Lynn and Gray Poole then saw the stone and reported in their History of the Ancient Games that the Olympic rings-design came from ancient Greece. And so, with Hitler’s influence, the rings became part of the Nazi pageantry at Berlin, and have come to symbolize the Olympics ever since.

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Though America’s Avery Brundage was expelled from the America First

Committee for his Nazi sympathies, he was elected a vice-president of the International Olympic

Committee in 1945, and in 1952 became president, a position he would hold until 1972.

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Interestingly, Germany hosted both the Winter and Summer Olympics in 1936. It had been awarded the honour in 1931 as a means of welcoming the country back into the European fold, a gesture that backfired when Hitler came to power in 1933. As the racist and brutal policies of the Nazi regime became known, Jewish groups and others in the United States called for a boycott. But America’s own Avery Brundage, president of the U.S. Olympic Committee at the time, actively undermined the boycott campaign, dismissing the protest as a “Jewish-Communist conspiracy,” and succeeded in having the USOC reject it in a committee vote. (In 1941, Brundage was expelled from the America First Committee for his Nazi sympathies, though he remained a staunch defender of Germany during and after World War II. Even so, Brundage was elected a vice-president of the International Olympic Committee in 1945, and in 1952 became president, a position he would hold until 1972.) Meanwhile, in order to make the Games a success and legitimize Hitler’s regime in the eyes of the world, Germany in 1936 took great efforts to camouflage the evil nature of the Nazi regime. Anti-Jewish slogans were removed from walls and roadsides and every sign of racial, religious or political persecution was temporarily hidden. Though incredibly, the German Ministry of the Interior built a concentration camp scarcely a half-hour’s journey from the new Olympic Stadium, where it jailed 80,000 Jews, gypsies and socialists.

Germany would dominate the competition at the 1936 Summer Games, winning 89 medals (33 more than the second-place USA), though the greatest individual performance was turned in by Afro-American sprinter Jesse Owens. Debunking Hitler’s belief in Aryan supremacy, the 22-year-old claimed gold in the 100- and 200-metre dashes, the long jump and the 400-metre relay, with each victory greeted by loud applause from the crowd. Yet despite this setback, Hitler was pleased with the results. He ordered architect Albert Speer to draw up plans for a colossal, 400,000-seat stadium in Nuremburg, saying, “In 1940, the Olympic Games will take place in Tokyo. But thereafter they will take place in Germany for all time to come.”

Fortunately, this was one Nazi prediction that did not come true.

>>Interested in learning more?

Check out the current exhibit at the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre entitled “More Than Just Games: Canada and the 1936 Olympics.” Its display of photographs, documents and artifacts demonstrates how Hitler’s Third Reich turned the Games into a showcase for Nazi propaganda, and how Canadians became part of the spectacle.


Address: Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre: #50 – 950 West 41st Avenue, Vancouver, B.C.

Contact info: 604-264-0499; info@VHEC.org

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Tags: 2010 Winter Olympic Games and Paralympics, History of the Olympic Torch relay, Nazi Germany and the Olympic Torch Relay