1936 Olympics

The 1936 Summer Olympics was a 1936 multi-sport international exhibition held in Berlin, Nazi Germany, formally known as the XI Olympiad Games. Berlin won a bid to host the Games over Barcelona, Spain, at the 29th IOC Conference held in Barcelona on 26 April 1931. This was the second and final time the International Olympic Committee gathered to vote for a town that did not host the Olympics as in the years to come the committee did decide to do so. Reich Chancellor Adolf Hitler had designed a massive track and field arena of 100,000 seats to match the Los Angeles Games of 1932, as well as six gymnasiums and many other smaller stadiums that would serve the different sports as part of the games. The games were first transmitted on television, and radio transmissions reached 41 nations. The German Olympic Committee hired Director Leni Riefenstahl for $7million to film the Olympics. Her video, dubbed Olympia, invented to this day many of the sport shooting techniques today common to Olympic sports. Hitler considered the Games to be a reason for promoting his White Supremacy and Antisemitism practises and beliefs, and the official Nazi party publication, the Völkischer Beobachter, claimed with the best possible words that Jews would not be allowed to participate in the Olympics. In a number of instances German Jewish athletes ' participation was omitted or banned while some Jewish sports club swimmers, Hakoah Vienna, took part. It seems to have been Jewish side-line players from other nations, to keep the Nazi party from being angry. Reichsmark's gross ticket sales were 7.5 million, profiting over RM 1 million. The approved budget did not require outlays from the City of Berlin outlays to the German National Budget. Hans von Tschammer und Osten played a major part as Reichssportführer, i.e. the president of the Reichsbund für Leibesübungen, the Reichs Sports Office, in founding and running the Olympics. This fueled the idea that the use of athletics would harden the German heart and unify German youth. At around the same time, he also said that sport was "a method of washing away the bad, the Jewish, and other undesirables." Von Tschammer assigned game organisation information to Theodor Lewald and Carl Diem, the former chairman and founder of the Deutscher Reichsausschuss für Leibesübungen, the Reich Sports Agency's predecessor. Among Diem's ideas for the Berlin Games was incorporating the Olympic torch relay between Greece and the host nation. It pioneered the new method of moving the flames that year in a relay network from Greece into the world's Olympic Stadium. Leni Riefenstahl filmed the relay for the 1938 film Olympia. The facility was repurposed at the close of the Olympic Games as the Wehrmacht Olympic Döberitz Hospital, which was used as such during World War II. In 1945 it was taken over by the Soviet Union and became a military base for the armies of Communist occupation. At the end of the 20th century, plans were made to rebuild parts of the old village but no progress was made. Until recently the DKB Foundation has handled with considerable results the vast majority of Olympic village properties; proposals are being made for reopening the site as a living museum. The dormitory building used by Jesse Owens, Weissen Hall, has been entirely restored, integrating in conjunction with the gymnasium and the pool. Big groups and students are also given tours at seasonal periods. In 1936 twenty-two venues were used for Summer Olympics. Most had been housed in a Reich Sportsfeld building. There were 129 events on the Olympic Calendar in 1936, in 25 disciplines and 19 sports.