Soccer During the War-A Form of Propaganda

In 2014 I lived in Berlin for a couple of months and on a bright warm day I visited the Olympic Stadium. Architectural ingenuity and aesthetic splendor aside I couldn’t help but think about why the stadium was built.  It could have been because I was studying the WWII era of German history but I thought about Olympia and an architectural style referred to as Nazi architecture. Both the architectonic features and the Olympic Games of 1936 were components of the Nazi propaganda machine under Göbbels. Germany won 89 medals during the 1936 Summer Olympics, 33 of which were Gold. The size and material are extremely reminiscent of a roman coliseum.  According to Christopher Thomas Gaffney, author of Temples of the Earthbound Gods: Stadiums in the Cultural Landscapes of Rio de Janeiro and Buenos Aires (2008)

Stadiums matter to us because they are places where we share common emotions in a common place in a limited time frame…Stadiums are the sites of unforgettable human dramas and mundane realities.  Jesse Owen’s victories in the Berlin Olympic Stadium did not halt Nazi advances across Europe, but they did diminish the glories of self-styled Aryan race.