FEATURE5 COVER-UP OR SINCERE CHANGE?
The Bavarian ski resort Garmisch-Partenkirchen, which played a major role in whitewashing Hitler’s persecution of the Jews, is applying to co-host the 2018 Winter Olympics.
A German government delegation will head to Vancouver next month to set out the joint bid with Munich and a formal submission will be made to the International Olympic Committee in March.
But if the Germans are to stand a chance, they will have to conduct a serious re-branding of Garmisch, which is still wallowing in its past glories – and the time that Adolf Hitler came to stay.
On the surface, Garmisch resembles a typical picture postcard Alpine community, with wooden chalets, flower tubs and the ice-clad Zugspitze mountain looming over the valley, and it is still proud of the last time that it was the site of a Winter Olympics -1936.
In the 1930s, though, the town was rabidly anti-Semitic, so much so that worried sports managers ordered a cover-up lest bad publicity jeopardise the success of the Summer Olympics in Berlin which Hitler wanted to be a showpiece of Aryan superiority.
The organiser of the summer Olympics, Carl Diem, visited Garmisch in 1935 and did not like what he saw. Nazi party rallies were stirring up hatred against Jews, he said, and the anti-Semitic newspaper “Der Stuermer” was on sale everywhere.
“As a result there is concern that action taken against domestic and German Jews could not only cast a shadow over the Winter Games but also threaten the holding of the Summer Olympics,” said Mr Diem, in a letter to Karl Ritter von Halt who had been given the task of staging the Garmisch events.
What ensued was a comprehensive clean-up to present the sunny face of Nazi Germany. All anti-Semitic banners were removed from sports centres, Jews and foreigners were served again in pubs – apres-ski drinking was again allowed to be “cosmopolitan”- and Der Stuermer disappeared. Signs like “Jews forbidden” or “Business must not be conducted in the Jewish language” were unscrewed and stored for later use.
The Games were to be photographed by Nazi-Party approved German photographers. The Nazi censorship bureau the ruled on which pictures could be released to the foreign press. Any hint of repression against Jews was to be removed from the papers for the duration of the games in case foreign visitors get wind of a less-than-tolerant Germany. “It is strictly forbidden, in the light of the Winter Olympics, to report about any clashes with foreigners or with Jews, “ said a memo sent from the Propaganda Ministry to German editors on January 27, 1936.
Even after the end of the Games – with Germany coming second to Norway in the medals table – the propaganda ministry of Joseph Goebbels kept a tight watch on “anything that could be construed abroad as hypocrisy on our part.” German papers had within days of the end of the Garmisch games attacked the half-Jewish ice hockey player Rudi Ball. The British ice hockey team had infuriated German commentators by taking the gold medal, ahead of the Canadians.
By 1937, the mask had slipped. The “Jews not welcome here” signs were put up again, tourist brochures made plain that guest houses would not be opening their doors to Jews and on the Night of Broken Glass, in November 1938, with Nazi pogroms raging across the country, the last fifty Jews were driven out of town
The Garmisch games were hailed as a success and, indeed, the Germans were later approached with the offer of staging the 1940 Winter Olympics – the Games never took place because of the outbreak of war. This international accolade, rather than the elaborate propaganda spin operation mounted by the Nazis, is what Garmisch city elders still hold to be the most important outcome of 1936, and the reason why it would be a strong candidate for 2018. New hotels are to be built, the rail link with Munich improved.
“People here do not feel the need to look into that part of the town’s history, “ says Alois Schwarzmueller, a former Social Democrat councillor and a local amateur historian.
The 2018 bid is being led by the son of Willy Bogner who delivered the Olympic oath in the presence of Adolf Hitler. And a commemorative book about the Garmisch games, which is still being promoted by the town council, turns out to have been published by a historian who was under investigation by the German equivalent of Special Branch for allegedly printing a book by a Holocaust denier.
(roger boyes, Times Online, 22January2010)
