Stealing Hitler's Show.

• Author: KELLEY, TIMOTHY
• Position: Germany, Olympics, 1936

At the 1936 Olympic Games, an American demolishes Nazi racial theories

Put yourself in the shoes of history's most notorious racist dictator, Adolf Hitler. You've spent a ton of your country's money to host the biggest, gaudiest Olympic Games ever, and you want them to prove that your white countrymen are the world's master race. If one athlete is to win a record number of medals, what color would you like that athlete to be?

This September, when men and women from around the world meet in Sydney, Australia, to compete in the 27th Olympic Games, the pride of many countries will be running high. But almost certainly the Games will lack the bitter prejudice at play in 1936, when Germany's Chancellor Adolf Hitler welcomed the world to his capital, Berlin.

The Olympics had long been a peaceful outlet for competitive national feelings, and Hitler spared no expense in trying to make the Games a propaganda coup for his three-year-old National Socialist (Nazi) regime. For the Nazis, nationalism was tied up with bigotry. They blamed Jews for many of Germany's problems, and believed "Aryans"--non-Jewish white Europeans--were superior to all other racial groups and should therefore win international athletic competitions. But the superstar of that year's Olympics turned out to be a black American, Jesse Owens.

In 1936, people did not yet know that Hitler's aggression would plunge the world into its most destructive war (World War II, 1939-1945). But they knew he had come to power advocating racism and an all-powerful Germany. In his 1925 book Mein Kampf (My Struggle), Hitler had set forth with remarkable candor his plans for ruling his nation and conquering the world in its name. He had also made clear that, while reserving his bitterest hatred for Jews, he had extreme contempt for blacks too:

From time to time illustrated papers [report] .. that some place or other a Negro has for the first time become a lawyer ... or something of the sort ... the Jew shrewdly draws from [this] a new proof for the soundness of his theory about the equality of men that he is trying to funnel into the minds of nations.... It is criminal lunacy to keep on drilling a born half-ape until people think they have made a lawyer out of him, while millions of members of the highest culture-race must remain in entirely unworthy positions.

When Hitler came to power in January 1933, his policies quickly proved that the book was no bluff. In the Nazis' first year, Jews in Germany...