Hitler’s Olympics

Revisionist History

Pushkin Industries

Society & Culture, History

4.8 • 61.5K Ratings

🗓️ 21 June 2024

⏱️ 4 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Adolf Hitler swept to power in Germany in the early 1930s and soon set out to stage the most extravagant and spectacular summer Olympics yet: the 1936 Berlin Games. And countries around the world dutifully put together their teams and made the trip to Germany. Why?

In this new nine-part series Hitler’s Olympics, Malcolm Gladwell and Ben Naddaff-Hafrey explore the games behind the Games, the most consequential Olympics in history. Along the way, they meet a collection of the world’s daffiest aristocrats. A couple of American construction moguls. A legendary triple-jumper. And one discerning journalist.

Heroes and villains. The clear-eyed and the deluded. All of them going to Hitler’s Olympics.

Hitler’s Olympics launches June 27th. Subscribe to Pushkin Plus now to hear the first five episodes on launch day, or listen for new episodes every Thursday for the next nine weeks.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	One of my strongest childhood memories was the 1976 Olympics in Montreal, my homeland's first Olympic Games. I was a kid. My family didn't have a television,
0:15.9	but we rented one just for the occasion. Two rabbit ears on top of a grainy black and white set.
0:24.8	We put the TV in the fireplace because there was no other place for it and I watched everything. The Romanian
0:31.2	Nariakominich bewitching the world in gymnastics.
0:35.0	My running hero John Walker, powering away around the final curve to win the men's 1500 meters.
0:42.0	I still get nervous thinking about that race.
0:46.2	And the women's 4 by 100 freestyle relay may be the greatest swimming race ever. I fell in love with the Olympics that summer.
0:57.0	And these Olympics that I love,
1:01.0	and that so many millions of people around the world love might not exist if the games
1:05.9	had not been held in 1936 in Adolf Hitler's Germany.
1:12.1	The modern Olympics started in Adolf Hitler's Germany.
1:13.5	The modern Olympics started in 1886, and if you're gone to any of those early games, you would
1:18.5	think you were at some kind of sideshow.
1:21.2	It was the Nazis who gave us the Olympics we have today. They were really, really good
1:26.4	putting on a big show. Hitler, one of the games to be a showcase of Aryan supremacy, to rally the German people, to give
1:35.0	legitimacy to the band of thugs he had gathered around him, and to make the case that Germany
1:40.7	was a true world power and the United States went along with all of it. Why?
1:49.0	That's what the new season of revisionist history is all about. Hitler's Olympics.
1:58.0	Over nine episodes, my colleague Ben Nadaf,
2:00.2	Hafri, and I will tell the story of the games behind the games.
2:04.9	Not who won what, not how a stirring come from behind burst of effort led to victory.
2:10.9	Instead, we're exploring the furious machinations leading up to the Olympics, and the genuinely
	...

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