Hitler’s Olympics

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Speaker 1: One of my strongest childhood memories was the nineteen seventy six Olympics in Montreal, my homeland's first Olympic Games. I was a kid. My family didn't have a television, but we rented one just for the occasion. Two rabbit ears on top of a grainy black and white set. We put the TV in the fireplace because there was no other place for it, and I watched everything. The Romanian Nadya Komenich bewitching the world in gymnastics, my running hero John Walker powering away around the final curve to win the men's fifteen hundred meters. I still get nervous thinking about that race, and the women's ford by one hundred freestyle relay, maybe the greatest swimming race ever. I fell in love with the Olympics that summer, and these Olympic that I love and that so many millions of people around the world love might not exist if the Games had not been held in nineteen thirty six in Adolf Hitler's Germany. The modern Olympics started in eighteen ninety six, and if you've gone to any of those early games, you would think you were at some kind of side show. It was the Nazis who gave us the Olympics we have today. They were really really good at putting on a big show. Hitler one of the games to be a showcase of Aryan supremacy, to rally the German people, to give legitimacy to the band of thugs he had gathered around him, and to make the case that Germany was a true world power. And the United States went along with all of it. Why, that's what the new season of Revisionist History is all about. Hitler's Olympics. Over nine episodes, my colleague Ben that Haffrey and I will tell the story of the games, behind the games, not who won what, not how a stirring come from behind burst of effort led to victory. Instead, we're exploring the furious machinations leading up to the Olympics and the genuinely difficult moral questions that surrounded the Berlin Games. And along the way we're going to introduce you to an extraordinary cast of characters. There's Charles Cheryl, diplomat, athlete, internationalist, man of parts, the ranking American member of the International Olympic Committee. I have led the hapless life of anybody you ever met in your life. We'll spend time with Avery Brundage, champion athlete, self made millionaire, a man who saw in the thirty six Games a chance to expel his personal demons and seize control of the entire Olympic movement, and the irony of it is. The more important the Olympic Games become, the more problems we have. An incredibly clear eyed American reporter named Dorothy Thompson. I think that Hitler is appreciable Nera shooting us, and therefore I think we're appuciably Nera requlying. Then there's Jesse Owens, winner of four gold medals, the African American star of the nineteen thirty six Games. That was the beginning to the end of a very long dream. I'm sure you've heard of Jesse Owens. But Ben is going to tell you a story about Owens that I guarantee you have not heard. Not to mention side trips to a small town in Alabama, a seminar on a crucial but all but forgotten Supreme Court case called Giles v. Harris O, and a lesson from a legendary triple jumper. He didn't have a jiggle, We didn't have a change. No, he didn't have a jiggle or a gideayo. Yeah. Heroes and villains, the clear eyed, in, the deluded, the forgotten, and the misunderstood, all of them going to Hitler's Olympics. You will never see the games the same way again. Subscribe to pushkin plus to hear the first five episodes of Hitler's Olympics early and ad free. Find pushkin plus on the Apple show page for revisionist history or at pushkint f M slash plus