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This summer, nearly 30 million viewers tuned in to watch the opening ceremony on the water. Paris Olympicsit’s safe to say that most people are not thinking of Adolf Hitler.
Malcolm Gladwell is not most people.
Author, journalist, and podcaster Gladwell explores the 1936 Berlin Olympics in the latest season of his podcast series, Revisionist History. Gladwell and co-host Ben Naddaff-Hafrey analyze the complex personalities and political developments that led to Nazi Germany hosting the Summer Olympics, and what motivated countries around the world to participate.
The nine-episode season, titled “Hitler’s Olympics,” introduces listeners to several of the key figures who played a key role in the run-up to the Berlin Olympics, while also featuring American track and field legend Jesse Owens. The show dissects Owens’ friendship with German long jumper Luz Long — a story the podcast suggests is largely a myth.
More broadly, Gladwell and Nadav-Havre argue, the Berlin Games will not only leave generations of sports fans with unforgettable visual images — like the scene of Owens and Long giving the Nazi salute on the podium — but will also, it turns out, reshape the Olympics themselves.
In an interview with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Gladwell also claimed that discussions leading up to the Berlin Olympics — including debates about boycotting and including Jewish athletes — echoed contemporary discussions about the participation and safety of Israeli Olympians, whose participation in the Paris Games resulted in death threats and calls for their disqualification. (Both Gladwell and Nadav-Havre are of Jewish descent.)
For Gladwell, the contemporary Olympic Games are inevitably political in nature. 1936 GameHe also believes that it is unfair, both in the past and now, to blame today’s geopolitical problems on athletes who focus solely on their sports.
“If someone has spent the last 10 years of his life training to long jump, what does the foreign policy goals of the current Israeli government have to do with that?” Gladwell said. “Nothing. It’s stupid. It’s as stupid as 1972, 1968 or 1936.”
Read on for our conversation, which has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Many of your works challenge people to look in new ways at a well-known topic – an ‘overlooked and misunderstood’ moment in history. What aspects of the 1936 Olympics do you feel have been misunderstood? Why do you feel the need to add to or correct the record on this issue?
I was surprised at how much debate there was about whether we should go to Berlin. I’m not a historian of the period. I naively thought that concerns about Hitler were pretty low in the early 1930s and didn’t really pick up until 1938 or 1939. But I was surprised that a large portion of the American population was already alarmed about what Hitler was doing by the mid-1930s, and that public opinion was equally divided about whether we should go to the Berlin Olympics.
It tells us about The Holocaust What’s even more heartbreaking and tragic is when you realize it’s not that we didn’t know about Hitler, it’s like, “Oh, we found out in 1944 that something bad was going on.” No, no, in 1934, 1933, and 1932, there were people coming back. [from Germany] He said: “This man is a complete lunatic. We must be careful when dealing with him and be careful not to be involved in the games he plays to a certain extent.”
In terms of the Paris Olympics, I’m curious what parallels you see between 1936 and now? Obviously, there were questions about the safety and participation of Jewish athletes. But having delved into 1936, what resonated with you when you were watching the Paris Olympics?
What is clear is that the Olympics that we have now, in the broadest sense, were created by Hitler and his cronies. They knew how spectacular the Olympics were. We forget that in the 1810s and 1920s, the Olympics were basically a glorified athletics competition. It wasn’t an international spectacle like it is now. Hitler really understood that the Olympics had a broader symbolic potential to elevate the status of the host country. In a sense, we still live in that world.
I don’t want to draw too much connections between 1936 and 1972 – when 11 Israelis were killed in the Olympic Village – but obviously the treatment of Israeli athletes at the Olympics has been a focus since 1972, especially this year with calls for a boycott and death threats against Israeli athletes at the Paris Games. How do you view this incident in 1936?
In 1936, the International Olympic Committee was faced with a choice. As the controversy around Hitler was growing in the mid-30s, one of the options they faced was to move the Olympics to a neutral site. If they had done that, they could have avoided generations of controversy. It would have made sense if you had moved the Olympics to a neutral site and said, “From now on, the entire country you represent is irrelevant. We’re not playing any geopolitical games. If you qualify, you can come here, everyone can compete, and we’re going to keep all the politics at home.” But the problem was, they wanted to take the politics out of it, even though they continued to hold the Olympics in places where there was a lot of politics.
You can’t hold Israeli athletes hostage… You can’t use them as a symbol of your feelings about the conflict in Gaza. It’s ridiculous. If someone has spent the last 10 years of his life training to do the long jump, what does that have to do with the foreign policy goals of the current Israeli government? Nothing. It’s stupid. It’s as stupid as it was in 1972, 1968, or 1936.
One story that really stuck with me was the story of Helen Meyer, a Jewish fencer, doing the Nazi salute. The story goes that she was told that doing the Nazi salute would help save her family from Nazi persecution, and she did it. I’m curious about how her story made an impression on you. What did you think when you first heard her story?
You can’t help but feel sorry for her in a way, right? That’s what happens when we completely confuse sports and politics. We put athletes in impossible situations. It’s one thing to put people on this stage who are trained or prepared for the public spotlight. They’re athletes. … Who knows what she knows about it? She lives in California, she’s a fencer, who knows what she knows about Germany under Hitler? It’s just ridiculous to put such a heavy burden on someone else’s shoulders.
One thing that struck me was that none of the four main characters in the podcast are Jewish. How do you see the role of telling this story and elevating Jewish identity and the Jewish experience of the time in this story, given that none of these four key characters are Jewish themselves?
At that time, the world we face was closed to Jews. They were not in leadership positions in the International Olympic Committee. It was the 30s, and there was a lot of discussion about Jews in the world we face, but it was not initiated by Jews. This is just a choice to tell the story of the 1930s. It is a reminder of the extent to which Jews were excluded.
Finally, this podcast is teaching people about the 1936 Olympics. But I’m curious, what lessons do you think people should take away from the 1936 Olympics?
If we are going to have this kind of grand event every four years with politics hopelessly mixed in with it…if you want to have a political debate or use it as an opportunity to learn about the rest of the world, then let’s do it sincerely. Maybe we should say that if every four years the world suddenly cares about how athletes perform, then let’s take this particular obligation or opportunity seriously. Let’s have a proper debate about the issues raised, not this half-baked, casual debate.
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