Original subtitles

In 1931, the

city of Berlin was awarded the auspicious task

of hosting the 1936 Summer Olympic Games.

What no one could have predicted was that these games would be

used as a tool for some of the slickest propaganda

by one of the most tyrannical regimes the world has ever seen.

By the early 1930s and before Hitler came to power,

the world was very willing to try and embrace Germany once again.

The idea was that the Olympics would bring people together.

Propaganda for the Nazis was not just an instrument of government,

was the air they breathed.

It was the medium of governance.

From the moment the Nazi Party assumed power in Germany,

a systematic persecution of Jews took place, and no exception was made.

The persecution would stop, but only for the two week duration of the games.

Whilst the eyes of the world focused on Berlin.

What happens is

what's called an Olympic pause, in which Berlin is cleaned up.

Anti-Jewish signs were removed.

Everything was done to create the impression

that this was a hospital implement.

Such a policy was not necessarily that inimical to many of the visitors

who shared the same prejudice as the Nazis.

The African-American athlete Jesse Owens would make Olympic history there.

He would win four gold medals and become the most popular man

in Nazi Germany at the time, and win the G.

Germany went wild for the Americans, and it went particularly wild for Owens.

He was described by almost everyone who saw him as beautiful.

His form was flawless,

as smooth as the West Wing.

It would be the first time a host nation

would project his political ideology and power onto the world.

This stunning act of propaganda

would be emulated by all subsequent Olympics.

It was an operatic production, lavish in scale.

It really invented Olympic ritual for all time to come.

The five Olympic rings being held by the talons of the German Nazi eagle.

Never could you have a more obviously symbolic depiction

of the German and Nazi hold on the Olympic movement.

The 1936 Olympic Games gave the world

theater pageantry and excitement, all under the banner of the swastika.

This was Hitler's Olympics.

World War

One had left Germany a ravaged nation.

It was shut out by the rest of Europe, and its economic

and political situation was in tatters.

The people were broken, and a whole generation of men

had effectively been wiped out.

Germany

in the 1920s was in a lot of turmoil.

There was a revolution.

There is fighting in the street between the left and right.

Germany was in a parlous mess, frankly.

Of course, there was this

huge amount of war reparations that Germany was made to pay for.

The Treaty of Versailles.

And this fundamentally crippled the German economy.

The Weimar Republic

operated without the full mandate from the people.

There was a lot of dissatisfaction with the economic situation.

And then, of course, the great inflation

and the final hammer blow, which was the Wall Street crash,

which created unemployment of about 7 million in Germany.

Suddenly, even the most gilt edged securities are practically valueless.

The stock market crash has come, and the Great Depression

has begun.

The ranks of the unemployed grew, and there are long lines for soup kitchens.

A lot of Germans were in despair about the future.

It was.

It was a very, very difficult period.

The anti-German sentiment

was widespread throughout Europe from the fallout of World War One.

This was manifest in the banning of German participation

in the 1924 Olympic Games, which were held in Paris.

The man who had the ultimate power to sanction this ban was Pierre

de Coubertin, the founder of the modern Olympic Movement.

It was his idea in the late 19th century,

to bring about a recrudescence of this old idea of the Olympic Games.

They were founded on the idea that they would foster international goodwill.

Until then, the only thing like it had been the Olympic

with the K games up in Shropshire, playschool, Much Wenlock.

He was also very,

very much a massive fan of the kind of English public school system.

And he thought that these are the Anglo-Saxon kind of white way of doing

things was the correct way to approach sport as improving the soul and

the spirit of bringing people together was the catalyst

for Berlin winning the Olympic bid.

The games were awarded to Berlin in 1931.

However, they were first awarded to Berlin

in 1912, to be held in 1914,

and even though at the time it was felt, as in ancient Greece,

that the Olympics would continue despite the fact that countries were at war.

The invention of mustard gas and so on and so forth

put paid to this idea of a civilized war.

There was a great chance of rehabilitating

Germany into the community of nations and,

civilizing it, taming it,

giving it something to be pleased about.

After all the years of horror.

One of the key figures for securing the Olympic Games for Berlin

was a German sports official, Doctor Theodore Lowveld.

He would become the chairman of the organizing committee for the games,

a position that would soon be dramatically compromised.

Peter Lawford was a pillar of the German sports community.

He was a very capable administrator, and he was well known

because going all the way back to the 1904 Olympics in Saint Louis,

he had been a representative of Germany.

He was someone well respected in the international Olympic community.

He's a tremendously powerful figure in German sport,

and it's him and his protege, Carl Diem, who are successful

in lobbying the Olympic movement to get the Olympics to Berlin.

He was a member of the International Olympic Committee,

and they wanted to give the games back, in a sense, to the ball.

And that's one reason why they chose Berlin as the host city in 1931.

However, Laval has a problem that will manifest when Hitler comes to power,

and that's the fact that his maternal grandmother was Jewish.

His father had become a practicing Christian at 110 years earlier.

Obviously he dated from the Weimar regime, but he was in a particularly invidious

position because, of course, he was under enormous pressure from the Nazis.

Laval had secured the Olympics for Weimar Germany,

but the rise of the National Socialist Party was suddenly,

although many Germans supported them, the Nazi regime

capitalized on a nation who seemed weary of politics.

In early 1930s Germany.

I think the key issue was not so much that everyone was a Nazi.

They never got a majority of votes, but that

everyone had ceased to believe in democracy.

So the society was, split between right and left

with no kind of center anymore.

Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany

in January of 1933.

He was not elected to office, but

he quickly worked to assume greater powers.

The Enabling Act is a key piece of legislation.

It cements Hitler's power

into this absolutely dominant position.

Hitler had the country and with it, the Olympics.

However, he did not view the games in an altogether favorable light,

and he would require some persuasion in order for the games

to go ahead.

The modern Olympic Games,

founded on the idea that they would foster international goodwill,

and this was about as diametrically opposed

to the ultranationalist Nazis as you could get.

Goebbels saw clearly straight from the start.

He was in no doubt at all.

You merely pointed out the propaganda potential.

Goebbels and Hitler was visiting the Olympic Stadium.

Goebbels was able to show him this is going to be a fantastic arena

to celebrate.

That is going to just do so much for our prestige hits.

Then suddenly you saw in the natural clarity

what actually could be achieved for Germany,

for its international reputation, for its projection and for its diplomacy.

If it did indeed host the Olympics.

It was the Nazis Germany in 1936

who really saw it for the first time.

The Berlin Olympics had been hijacked with Hitler's backing.

The Olympics, like every other aspect of German life, would be Nazi fied.

And as the world looked on at the injustices of this regime,

the Olympic values of friendship and respect would be used

as a false facade for a terrifying, sinister and deadly cause.

After World War One, Germany

had been ostracized from the rest of Europe, but in 1931,

the International Olympic Committee would reach out to a name Berlin,

as the host nation for the 1936 Summer games.

The Germany to which the games were bestowed would,

however, be very different to the Germany that would end up hosting them

once the Nazi Party had assumed power in March 1933.

Their anti-Semitic rhetoric was put into action.

All books of Jewish authors are ordered burned and the public squares.

Other scientists artists are driven from Germany.

Soon after Hitler took power, Jews began

to be excluded from many different areas of German life.

And this included sports with the Nuremberg Laws,

which were 1935 Jews, became non citizens of Germany.

It's as simple as that.

But specifically they banned Jewish leaders

from all sports clubs and forced them into the Jewish sports organization.

They could no longer do sports training with non-Jews.

If you're not Aryan, you're to be excluded

from sports grotesque anti-Semitism, which totally flies

in the idea of the Olympic movement, which suggests

that all sportsmen and women should have an equal chance to compete.

Clearly the Jews of Germany did not.

Many German sportsmen and women at the time were Jews,

and all found that their professional and personal lives were being affected

by the persecution of the Nazis.

One of these athletes was Margaret Lambert.

She was born Gretel Bergmann in 1914,

in Lough Pine, southern Germany.

She was a promising young athlete

and would go on to become Germany's leading high jumper.

It was for the

everybody knew everybody else and everybody was agreeing

with everybody else.

We had friends all over the place.

There was really no difference

between Jews and non-Jews.

For friends.

I just loved sports.

I did everything.

My parents were a little bit

upset about my sports career.

I was one of the few Jewish kids

who hated life in sports.

At 18 years

old, Margaret would witness the Nazi Party

assuming power in Germany.

Where the Nazis came in.

It wasn't any fun. Hang in there.

You win a medal.

Friends know how, though.

They testify.

They came the house party

to visit us

because they were not supposed to see us.

We. They do that immediately.

I had friends to the

Irish. Friends that were Jewish.

I have friends all over the place.

And all of a sudden, they were not allowed to talk to us anymore.

We were upstairs in our house

and dances to dancing to a machine

and seeing a kid in his shoes.

So that was 25 dresses.

As Margaret found her life changed beyond recognition.

The Olympics loomed on the horizon.

Athletic groups and political parties in many different countries

started questioning whether it would be morally right to compete

in the Olympics in a Germany under Nazi rule.

The United States of America

was pivotal in whether the games would go ahead or not.

If the country with the strongest, fastest, most successful athletes

were not going to show, then the games would not be worth putting on.

The fate of the games would rest on the arguments of two men in the United States.

You have a figure called Avery Brundage of the American Olympic Committee.

He sees a lot in the Nazi creed

that he sees well as marrying into his own personal philosophies.

As a self-made millionaire in Chicago, a kid with nothing who turned himself

into an Olympic athlete and a millionaire construction magnate.

Brundage is not a member of the American Olympic Committee.

He's also a member of the A.U., the American athletics union.

He then decides to resign.

The party's over leadership to a man called Judge Jeremiah Mahoney,

who is passionately anti-Nazi.

Jeremiah Mahoney was a New York Athletic Club guy,

and he was particularly concerned not only about the Jews,

but about the anti-Christian policies.

He saw the issue with astonishing moral clarity, saying

that this would be to really legitimize the most appalling, tyranny.

In a bid to convince the U.S.

to participate.

Avery Brundage was invited to Berlin in 1934 on a fact finding mission

to investigate the treatment of Jewish athletes.

It was a very tightly controlled inspection.

His purpose was to see if there was discrimination

against Jewish athletes, or how Olympic

fair play was in place.

The Germans wheeled out a couple of very pliable Jewish athletes

to say that everything was going well for them.

This was complete nonsense, and Third Reich was marvelous

at laying on the compared to Reich Marshal Goering was amazing.

New charming.

Hitler could, from time to time, listen politely.

Brundage had no desire to come back to the United States

and create any difficulties for the Germans.

The decision was made in December of 1935.

You had these Brundage rights who said, Germany's not so bad,

and you also had most of the athletes, including the African-American

athletes, who said,

how can you ask us not to go

to Germany because of the way they're treating Jews?

When we're treated, the way we're treated here in the U.S.?

And they had a point.

Brundage was successful,

and with the inclusion of America, the rest of the world followed.

The games would go ahead.

And as the U.S.

team would prepare to make the voyage from New York to Berlin,

Hitler and Goebbels made preparations for welcoming the globe

to a liberal Nazi Germany.

Berlin's parks and playgrounds are filled

with groups of plain, cheerful people who show no signs of dissatisfaction

with the fascist dictatorship which controls their life.

What happens largely under

Goebbels is stewardship is what's called an Olympic pause.

Anti-Jewish signs were removed for many streets or anywhere

close to Olympic venues.

Shops have to be let out at a very cheap rate in order to show

that there is a thriving economy.

Everybody on certain streets in Berlin is forced to hang up either

a swastika flag or an Olympic flag.

Everywhere is whitewashed along the train lines, from lines going through Germany

to Berlin.

All the houses are back on to the train.

Lines have to be repainted

to show that everything's spick and span and all very rich and tidy.

So there was this big, tidy up of buildings and people

during the big clean up in Germany.

The world's greatest athletes

would be journeying to Berlin, and following them would be a hungry

press, hopeful politicians and excited spectators.

On July the 15th, the US team set sail from New York Harbor on the S.S.

Manhattan.

They left a fanfare and cheers and would be met in Berlin with the same.

It was very much the Olympic grandees were, you know, in first class

and the athletes were in steerage, but apparently everybody had a good time.

It took nearly ten days to reach Berlin.

So you have these super fit, young and very beautiful people together

from ten days and say there was a certain amount of scandal.

We do know that Eleanor Home was one of these athletes who, maddeningly,

could just smoke and drink all night, and then we can go medals the next day.

If she had been in a flirting ostentatiously

and ingratiating with the first class passengers, getting frightfully drunk

and ignoring everyone and ignoring every Olympian ideal,

Avery Brundage, of course, hate that and and booted her off the team.

What's also remarkable is that the American Olympic athletes

weren't segregated.

And so actually, for the first time, you have a lot of white athletes,

especially from the South,

who've never actually shared a meal with a black person before, even, you

know, you know, gone to the same lavatory or shared the same sort of dorm.

And actually, what's very interesting

is that there was no problem that

on their way to the Olympic Games in Berlin,

on the USS Manhattan, are the best of American athletes on deck.

Glenn Cunningham and Jesse Owens

anticipate stiff competition in this greatest of all sport to land.

The U.S.

team were a collection of world class athletes.

Many would be favorites for podium finishes.

One athlete who the entire world would be eager to watch was Jesse Owens.

Many thought he would go on to win three gold medals,

but very few thought he would surpass that.

Jesse Owens was born

in rural Alabama in 1913.

His father was a sharecropper.

His grandparents had been slaves.

He came from the most humble beginnings imaginable.

Certainly, people were aware of Jesse Owens.

Wherever people were running and jumping because he was breaking world records.

So particularly among his fellow African-Americans,

he was a great hope.

Blacks could not play in the baseball major leagues.

Blacks could not play in the National Football League.

There not been a black heavyweight champion since 1915.

So he was someone that, in particular, the African American community,

pinned a lot of its hopes on.

As athletes began to arrive from all over the globe,

so did many spectators.

Eric Brown was a 17 year old boy at the time when his father,

a former Air Force pilot, received an invitation from Germany

for previous combatants to attend the games.

Eric and his father made the decision to see this once in a lifetime spectacle.

We were welcomed.

I must say, enthusiast,

the way over your gravesite because the young man

I love derives from my childhood, as was not a quiet event

very means.

Berlin's stage was set,

and the next two weeks would be a festival of athletic and sporting prowess.

Under Hitler's supervision, spectators would witness men and women

performing faster, higher and stronger than ever before.

The advanced technology that Germany had been developing

made sure that this high drama would be played out to the globe.

The 11th Olympiad was almost underway.

Boycott movements had come to nothing.

A planned People's Olympics, due to be held in Barcelona

as a protest to the Berlin Games, had to be canceled

due to the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War.

For two weeks, all eyes would be on Germany

as the world's greatest athletes and scores of excited spectators

traveled to the Olympic Stadium to attend the opening ceremony.

The Olympic flame was making the final leg of its journey

from Olympia in Greece to Berlin,

the Berlin Games.

I think in many ways represent the beginning

of the Olympic Games as we now see them.

The torch relay was invented for these games.

It's invented by the Nazis,

but they give the impression that it's actually an ancient Greek thing

that always happened.

It shows the element of complete imagining and the fantasy

representation of Greece as the seed of Germanic civilization.

It works very well.

Frankly, that's why people do it still today.

But the irony, of course, about the Olympic torch, it's made out of steel.

That same steel is going to go south

in about four years time, as German steel tanks made by Krupp

invade the Balkans and Greece.

So it's in many ways the kind of the reverse prophecy of

what's going to happen.

Crowds lined the streets of Berlin to witness

the arrival of Hitler and his dramatic entry into the stadium.

The lighting of the Olympic flame would signal the beginning of the games,

but this act of pageantry was just one of many highly choreographed

set pieces which made up the opening ceremony of

the opening ceremony.

It's the first Olympic opening ceremony of modern time.

To me, it was very exciting.

We stood beside Germans

and everyone has to say their role impressed

in various ways.

On August 1st, the last of the relay teams spread out into Berlin

and into the 325 acre Reich Sports, being an overflow crowd of 105,000

people, stood at attention for the historic moment.

It really invented Olympic ritual for all time to come.

It is full of artillery fire.

It is full of Nazi flags and Olympic flags put together swastikas everywhere

for their share, carrying swastikas around the arena.

I made a very different version.

You have the marches of the teams.

You have the great entry of Hitler.

And then finally you have the arrival of the Olympic torch on the Nazis,

of course, understood the power of silence as well as the power of noise.

The lithe athlete charges through the stadium months and steps,

and then suddenly he pauses before he lights the flame.

That pulls is quite extraordinary.

They release 20,000 pigeons into the air.

All well and good until bang is his great big

artillery barrage goes out at the same time.

Net result. Pigeons get frightened.

Frightened pigeons do what frightened pigeon do.

And the heads and hair of the American team

largely are splattered in guano.

This is highly comic moment, and it shows that underneath all the sophisticated

pageantry, things aren't entirely brilliant.

It is a absolutely huge, deafening event.

And it's all about one man, Adolf Hitler.

He is at the epicenter of these games at the ceremony,

and he will be for the next two weeks.

The astonishing thing was,

you realize right away

that Hitler had this lot in his hand.

After the euphoria of the opening ceremony,

the competition would finally commence.

Yet it would be a competition that would be missed by many Jewish

athletes.

Margaret Lambert had managed to escape the persecution and relocate

to England in April 1933, but was ordered by the Nazi Party

to move back to Germany in a bid to highlight their liberal attitude.

Refusal would jeopardize her family's safety.

Reluctantly, she moved back.

And in a Pre-Olympic competition, she equaled the German record of jumping

one meter 60cm just two weeks before the start of the games.

Margaret was stripped

of all her achievements and was told she would not be participate.

There were only two people instead of three.

This was supposed to be the third one.

And they came that I was injured and I couldn't compete.

They wouldn't let me.

I was crushing my head off.

I mean, I never got to Berlin.

I was in the prime and I was to take shot.

But they did tell me

they set out at the official level so I didn't make it.

But you, who now have a standing

room, take it.

And you get a set.

Margaret's

replacement in the German team was an athlete named Dora Rochon,

who only managed to jump one meter 58cm, finishing fourth in 1939.

After complaints from other athletes, Dora was found to be

working as a waiter under the name of Hermann.

An investigation was launched and it was found that Strachan was actually male.

Olympic games have begun.

The best athletes in the world have come to Berlin.

Although highlighted by their absence, the persecution of Jewish

athletes was eclipsed by the presence of Jesse Owens.

When he stepped into the arena, the anticipation was palpable.

I saw him

when all four of his events the title of World's

Fastest Man, goes to the 100 meter Olympic champion.

If he won the 100 meter dash, it almost wouldn't matter

what happened in the others.

He wanted to hear something big and thinking.

He powered through the competition and

won the gold medal without having to work for too hard.

He ain't got no.

The 200 meter dash was an even easier competition for Jesse.

The silver medalist, Mac Robinson from the US wasn't close.

Nobody could touch him at 200m,

Owens really made a huge impact.

And major realized that this Aaron

Chevrolet Origin maybe wasn't

quite where it seemed to be.

With two gold medals, one.

The third gold seemed a mere formality.

Jesse, however, would run into difficulty during the heats of the long jump.

The conclusion of which would be the start of an unlikely friendship

that would go down in Olympic history.

Jesse was close to falling out of the competition.

You get three attempts in the preliminary round,

and he had misunderstood the European rules.

He'd overshot the mark he had fouled on his second attempt.

Now Jesse Owens, who is the world record holder in the broad jump,

is this close to being out of the competition?

And his most formidable

opponent takes it upon himself to offer some advice.

According to the story,

Lutz Long goes over to him and says, take a towel.

Put it half a foot back.

Jump from where your towel is.

And then you know you're still going to qualify,

even if you jump two meters behind the board.

And Jesse does this qualifies

and then goes on to beat Lutz Long in the final.

Hey, I was very disappointed

when there was nobody left that stadium

and didn't think I under all those.

That's a guy.

The long jump secured Owens his third gold medal.

He'd won all his events with ease.

A twist of fate would offer Jesse the chance to compete for a fourth

gold medal.

There was a sudden anxiety around the American team

as to who they should pick for their four by 100 meter relay.

Jesse Owens and Ralph Metcalf replaced sandstone and Marty Glickman.

Speculation ensued as to whether the move was anti-Semitic.

As both Stoller and Glickman were Jewish.

But the fact remained that Owens and Metcalf, with a stronger athletes,

the relay team went on to win and set a new world record.

Jesse Owens had four gold medals.

The single handedly crushed Hitler's myth of Aryan supremacy.

One of the great stories

everybody knows from my school days is how Hitler snubbed Jesse Owens.

And now Jesse Owens stopped two fingers up at the Nazis and their racial theories.

This is an enormous myth.

Hits, began the Olympics taking quite a lot of hits.

But was it advised that what he should do is is restricted?

Probably just to German athletes.

It had to be either everybody or nobody.

In fact, Owens was claimed that Hitler waved at him.

We shall never know the truth.

But it's certainly not true that he stormed out.

Hitler had a right to run.

He couldn't be there the whole time.

He had to go and do his go and do his pure airing for the rest of the day.

The Olympic Games could not have been going better

for Hitler, despite the success of Jesse Owens.

Germany were leading the medal table.

But it was not just Germans sporting endeavor that was being showcased.

They also gave the opportunity for the regime

to show off their expertise in technology and militaristic venture.

Spectators were enraptured by the games

ritualistic ceremony, coupled with the greatest athletic

pursuit, was so intoxicating that all the debates of Nazi

oppression were momentarily forgotten.

The Nazi regime capitalized on this feeling by a constant stream

of receptions and galas that orbited the main attraction, making

sure it was not just Germany's sporting prowess on display,

but the entire breadth of German enterprise.

Although attended by many figures from around the world

representing the wider political spectrum, these events attracted many fascists

eager to ingratiate themselves with the Third Reich.

It was seen by politicians

and diplomats and statesmen the world around to have a get together.

And the Nazis knew this all too well.

All of the penitents of the Reich held

magnificent lavish dinners and ceremonies, writes Marshall Goering,

topping them all with the production of a complete funfair.

Later on in the evening.

There are also a lot of

links being made between fascists, such as Oswald Mosley,

in the form of his about to be wife going to see Goebbels

asking for the British Union of Fascists to have lots of money.

And this is going on during the burning of the games.

So when Jesse Owens is winning medals.

You know, you've got British fascist trying to forge links with the Germans.

At the same time, all sorts of, you know, things going on in the background

as the global far right mixed in the melting pot of German fascism.

Hitler and Goebbels made sure the world's press were reporting what was planned.

Global media outlets were treated like VIPs and were given free access

to the pioneering communication technology, which Germany had developed.

The games were also the subject of the first live television broadcast,

although quality was low.

This would dictate how future Olympics would be consumed.

The reporting in Germany was totally controlled.

The reporting out of Germany was controlled in a different way.

Hitler basically bribed the international journalistic control

by treating them terribly well, by using what Berliners

called butter propaganda, because butter was in short supply.

But they got all they needed.

The games gave some very good press to the Nazis globally.

They built six huge international

transmitters, giving journalists incredible amount of access.

They didn't see the concentration camps.

They didn't hear from people whose parents had been,

you know, locked up for their race.

They were blinded by the magnificence of the ceremony, the ritual,

the outside splendor of the Olympic Stadium itself.

What Germany was really doing was advertising itself as a technologist,

the global leader in technology, in organization.

The Herald of a new form of efficient

human civilization, a kind of prototype.

And people were taken in.

Technological advancement meant the news coverage

coming out of Germany traveled fast, and the actions of the German Jewish

fencer Helena Mayer would quickly spread and enrage the global Jewish population.

So controversial was her action that its motive and meaning

is still debated to this day.

She was a star fencer, but because her father was Jewish,

she was drummed out of her local fencing club

and not allowed to compete.

In Hitler's eyes, she looks the absolute,

you know, athletic, Nordic Aryan business

man who's training now in another country.

She was California, but she was summoned back to Germany

by the implicit threat to her family.

Mayer was beaten by the Hungarian fencer

Ilona Elek, and she would have to settle for silver.

It would be her actions on the podium which would cement her place

in Olympic history.

She was

on the podium with the other medalists and she did

give the Nazi salute, though perhaps and slightly hesitating manner.

She was never forgiven by the Jewish community.

I think the real explanation is that she was terrified about her family

still in Germany, and made this ostentatious gesture

of regime ingratiating, sacrificing her moral scruples.

To that end, because of the terror,

the closing ceremonies found the Olympic flame for untold centuries,

the symbol of international peace being extinguished.

Germany led the medal table as the games came to a close.

The Olympics were the success of the Nazi regime,

but it would not take long for the tyranny to return.

Captain Wolfgang Forster,

the commandant of the Olympic Village, was the first to fall victim.

A brilliant young army captain and very good administrator.

However, during the arrangements it was discovered that he was partly Jewish.

It was quite clear that he couldn't continue his meteoric rise

in the German army. He was one of these people

who can envisage no other life than outside the army.

First in the shot himself, on August the 19th, 1936,

just three days after the end of the Olympics.

The Nazis, of course, said this was a car accident and very good at that.

The false fliers and so forth were false turns.

It's what you did as a Nazi.

You had a false face.

For Margaret Lambert, like all the Jews of Germany.

Life would become increasingly unbearable.

I had a friend that lives next door to me,

and she had warned me of, you know, carrying on our.

And she went out in the animal.

So be afraid.

I was outside my house, and she started to talk to me, and I said, you know what?

Why you go to hell

and tell.

That was to me.

Salvation.

In 1937, Margaret managed to emigrate to New York

and married a German Jewish doctor, Bruno Lambert.

Recognition.

For her achievements would come in 1999, when the stadium in La Pine,

from where she'd been banned, was renamed after her.

I left Germany and I didn't want to know anything.

The that I was I searching

go to have.

It was a tough life.

Later.

But I'm a tough lady.

Not all Jewish athletes, however, were lucky

enough to be able to find refuge in other countries.

Lili Hannah was a Jewish shot putter and discus thrower.

She remained in Germany throughout the 1930s, and in 1942

was taken with her mother to German occupied Latvia and interned in a ghetto.

They were one of many Jewish athletes who were victims of the Holocaust,

and they were taken on it together at a certain moment and they were,

killed in a mass shooting operation

that was organized by the SS.

If you happen to be Jewish, you were to be killed

as part of the Final Solution to the Jewish question.

The games of the

11th Olympiad would bring diametrically opposed fates for both Jesse Owens

and Avery Brundage, in an aim to exploit promised sponsorship deals.

Owens was stripped of his amateur athletic status by Brundage

even before stepping back on U.S. soil.

The superstar of the games returned to the US and enjoyed a hero's welcome,

but none of the sponsorship deals amounted to anything.

As America's own discriminate at the time seemed

blind to Owens remarkable achievement.

He was forced to earn a living

by taking any employment opportunity that came to him.

Brundage, on the other hand, returned home with the Commission

for the construction of the German Embassy in Washington and would also go on

to become the chairman of the International Olympic Committee

for Adolf Hitler.

There was no uncertainty about the fate of the Olympics.

It may have taken Goebbels to convince him of their potential.

But once the games were over, he was in no doubt about their importance.

His plans for subsequent games were monumental.

Hitler was dissatisfied

with the scope and the scale of the Berlin stadium.

It wasn't big enough. It wasn't grand enough.

It wasn't what he wanted entirely.

His plan was to build a stadium

that would seat 400,000 people.

So he had a discussion with his favorite architect, Albert Speer, about this.

And Speer pointed out that the kind of stadium that Hitler had in

mind was not going to be allowed by Olympic rules.

Track dimensions are correct.

They're not the right Olympic measurements.

And Hitler says, well, no matter about that,

because when we rule the world, we'll be able to rule the Olympics

and just determine what the new measurements are going to be.

The Olympics were going to be German forevermore

because it was going to be a thousand year Reich.

It was going to have the hegemony of all the world

and the Olympics would be forever after German,

despite their Greek and indeed English and even French paternity.

World War Two

stopped any chance of a thousand years of Nazi run Olympics.

But the overt and aggressive tactics of mixing sport and politics

seems to have been adopted by all subsequent games.

Governing sporting bodies such as the

IOC and FIFA go to great lengths to insist

sport is, and should always be, separate to politics.

But looking at the spectacle and ceremony of Hitler's Olympics,

it's clear to see that today's sporting events

are their direct descendants.

In many ways the Nazi Olympics

or the father of the Olympics that we have today.

They were the first truly modern games

the packaging, the organizing, the efficiency with the underlying

aim of the projection of nationhood on the myths of nationhood.

Well, that has become the paradigm ever since.

So, unsurprisingly, those

innovations were incorporated and sustained.

If you were in Beijing in the Bird's Nest in 2008, if you're in London in 2012,

and you'd been in Berlin in 1936, you'd all seem very recognizable.

It is a vehicle for the projection of national glory.

It has become what Hitler intended it to be.

It is his Olympics.