Adolf Hitler Quotes

The year before {625800} he had castigated the Germans for discriminating against Jewish and other athletes because of their warped political/ideological views. However, there were so many people in the Olympic movement, that by 1934 there was much advocacy of the boycott of the coming 1936 Berlin Olympics. Brundage who himself was somewhat anti-Semitic had made the earlier statement to try and head off calls for boycott. So in 1934, he changed his approach and argued to keep all “politics” out of the Olympics. However racism transcended politics and much athletics in the American South was segregated so there was some support to keep issues of racism out of the Olympics although it had been introduced in Nazi Germany and the American South in the tryouts and the membership on the Olympic Committees. In 1935 Ernest Lee Jahncke, the American delegate was expelled from the International Olympic Committee (IOC) in July 1936 after taking a strong public stand against the Berlin Games {625798}. Based on this statement The IOC pointedly elected Avery Brundage to fill Jahncke's seat. Jahncke is the only member in the 100-year history of the IOC to be ejected. Brundage beat back the boycott movement and the Olympics went on with American Blacks winning many medals to the distress of the Nazis. However, behind the scenes, Brundage worked to have two Jewish runners removed from the American 400 meter relay team where they were overwhelming favorities so that when America won, Hitler would be spared the embarrassment.

The Germans were planning to use the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin as a propaganda platform for their Nazi approach. Their perverse notion that the German Arayans were the most superior people and Blacks, Jews, Gypsies at the lower end of the spectrum was called into question by the fact that two of their own champions were Jewish. Goebbels gave orders that no newspaper could mention that fact. Mayer refused to participate. However the Nazi plan backfired when Jews and Blacks won many of the medals. Jessie Owens of America alone won 7 Olympic medals. Adolf Hitler, in order to avoid the “embarrassment” of shaking hands and congratulating Black and Jewish winners, refused to meet any of the athletes.

Ernest Lee Jahncke, a former assistant secretary of the Navy, of German Protestant descent, was expelled from the International Olympic Committee (IOC) in July 1936 after taking a strong public stand against the Berlin Games. The IOC pointedly elected Avery Brundage to fill Jahncke's seat. Jahncke is the only member in the 100-year history of the IOC to be ejected.