I've been thinking about the 1936 Berlin Olympics as we approach the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics. In '36, Hitler wanted to use the games to demonstrate the superiority of the what he called the "Aryan Race" Note: 20th century Germans were neither Aryan (from Persia) nor a race, but fascism hates facts. Hitler barred Jews from competing for Germany, although at least one athlete with a Jewish father, Helene Mayer, did participate. Leading up to the games, Joseph Goebbels hid some elements of antisemitism from public display, for example ordering anti-Jewish signs removed in Berlin. There were significant disputes within nations about whether to field Jewish athletes, and the US famously benched two 4 x 100 Jewish athletes, [Marty Glickman and Sam Stoller.] (https://www.ushmm.org/exhibition/olympics/?content=jewish_athletes_more)
Following the Olympics, Hitler began World War II and carried out what we now call The Holocaust.
In February of this year, President Trump claimed to exclude transgender athletes from the Olympics. He repeated a lie that two women boxers in the Paris Olympics were transgender (they are not) and Trump demanded the International Olympic Committee conform to his wishes.
Trans-athletes, like Jewish athletes of the 1930s, and most all athletes, are not Olympic caliber athletes. Targeting these groups is about an assertion of power, not about fairness. In the 1930s, many people, not just Nazis, supported excluding Jews, as witnessed later when the US turned boats of Jewish refugees away from US ports. (3) Just as today, many in the US, like California Governor Gavin Newsome, are willing to agree with Trump in his targeting of Americans athletes who are trans.
The 1936 Olympics gave Hitler a huge stage for his Nazi ideology. I wonder what the 2028 Olympic Games will highlight, especially given the desire of billionaires (who sponsor the games through their corporations) to seek favor from the President? Given the swelling patriotism of people in Canada, Panama, and Greenland (have your heard the boos at sporting events with US teams?), I'm not sure what to expect. Russia held the 2014 Winter Olympics, and few athletes or nations declined to go based on politics. Qatar used slave labor to construct it's stadiums, and that didn't keep people from attending or watching. It may be that the appetite for sport is just much greater than the appetite for human rights.
I rarely do cross-chronology comparisons in my classes as I want my students to understand historical events in situ, without imposing modern parallels. That said, the comparison between 1936 and 2028 keep popping up for me.
