1936 Summer Olympics - Host City Selection

Host City Selection

The bidding for these Olympic Games was the first to be contested by IOC members casting their votes for their favorite host city. The vote occurred in 1931 during the reign of the Weimar Republic, before Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany rose to power in 1933. There were many other cities around the world that wanted to host this Summer Olympics, but they did not receive any IOC votes. The other cities competing to hold the games were: Alexandria, Barcelona, Buenos Aires, Cologne, Dublin, Frankfurt, Helsinki, Lausanne, Nuremberg, Rio de Janeiro, and Rome.

Academics cannot agree whether the IOC during this period was a willing collaborator or an organisation that favoured the aesthetics of fascist governments. Although the IOC was insulated from the reality of Nazism, elements of Hitler's regime were in parallel alignment with the sporting ideologies of the IOC.

After the Nazis took control and began instituting anti-Semitic policies, the IOC held private discussions among its delegates regarding changing the decision for Berlin. However Hitler's regime gave assurances Jewish athletes would be allowed to compete in a German Olympic team. In September 1934 the US Olympic committee publicly accepted the invitation to go to the Berlin games halting any further IOC attempts to quietly revise the decision.

The next scheduled games in 1940 were awarded to Tokyo even though Japan was becoming an aggressive militaristic, nationalist state. Ironically in 1938 the Japanese rejected hosting the games because they saw the Olympics and its pacifist values as 'an effete form of European culture'.