On July 11, 1936, New York opens the Triborough Bridge. The same day, Hitler and Austria’s Kurt von Schuschnigg put their rivalry and distrust aside for a while, signing a “Gentleman’s Agreement,” saying that Austria is a “German State,” but has full sovereignty. The Austrians agree to admit pro-Nazis into their government and release Nazi political prisoners. This deal temporarily takes some of the steam out of Hitler’s desire to take over Austria.
Germany continues to mobilize its youth, both body and soul. On June 20, 1936, it does so in body by creating the Reich Arbeit Dienst, to put youth to work and end unemployment with state-sponsored labor camps. The RAD’s task is to train youth to be physically fit and mentally loyal through reclaiming land for harvesting, helping with harvests, building roads, and relief projects. In practicality, working conditions are harsh, pay is low, and hours are long. But the RAD succeeds in making German youth tough – when the Germans invade France, American reporter Bill Shirer will be most impressed with how strong and fit the German kids are, with good teeth and firm bodies, compared to the sallow, Depression- and poverty-stricken British PoWs, who have short stature and bad teeth from poor health care and unsafe working conditions – when they had work.
A few days later, Heinrich Himmler, endlessly trying to make himself tougher than he is, lays a wreath on the empty tomb of Saxon King Heinrich the Fowler, considered the first German king, on the 1,000th anniversary of his death. Considering himself the embodiment of Henry the Fowler, Himmler tells his assembled SS staff of the importance of strengthening the German blood. To do so, he is building the SS’s own private army, which goes from 9,000 to 18,000 men between 1936 and 1939. The SS as a whole, numbers 210,000 – secret police, military, and concentration camp guards – by 1937.
Joining the SS is no easy feat. Applicants have to show the political reputation of their parents, brothers, and sisters, and the record of their ancestry back to 1750. The same year, Himmler founds the “Lebensborn,” SS maternal homes, to ensure that children sired by SS men are born and raised, regardless of legitimacy, in an appropriately Nazi environment. This particular practice is also designed to encourage SS families to produce more kids for the Nazi elite. It doesn’t work too well, but when the war begins, the SS begin confiscating children of suitable stock from occupied nations and farming them out to SS foster homes. The “Lebensborn” also provide future pornographers with a rich source of highly-inflated tales.
But two big shows, one in Spain, one in Germany, explode that summer. The German show is the best-organized, the Games of the 11th Olympiad, which gives the Nazi government an opportunity to impress the world with its organization, hospitality, racial superiority, and, for two weeks in August, lack of anti-Semitism. All across Berlin and the Reich, anti-Semitic signs and propaganda disappear for the duration of the Games.
At the Opening Ceremony, 40,000 Stormtroopers sing the German and Nazi anthems before Hitler, at a packed Olympic Stadium.
The games offer sights familiar to modern Olympics and sports fans: American domination of track and field, the home team putting forward strong efforts in many other events, and endless panoply and ceremony. It also offers some new things: huge tents around Berlin show the games on television, for example. Another new initiative done specially for the games is the Olympic relay, with a Berlin policeman named Schilgen running the torch to the brazier in the Stadium as the climax of this odyssey.
The games are best remembered for something that never happened: Hitler supposedly snubbing Jesse Owens for his four gold medals. In actuality, Der Fuhrer congratulates a German Gold Medal winner, Hans Woellke, on the first day of track and field. Olympic officials tell Adolf that he has to congratulate all winners or none, not just Germans. Hitler then snubs the next winner, African-American Cornelius Johnson, and ignores Jesse Owens completely. He tells his hangers-on after the Games that it isn’t fair to require Aryans to compete against blacks, because the blacks are part-ape and therefore genetically faster than Aryans. Anyway, it won’t matter – after Germany is victorious in the various wars Hitler plans, the Olympics will only be held in Germany, amid better architecture, and the Nazis will set the rules.
Besides, Hitler’s main interest in the Olympics is architectural – rebuilding Grunewald Stadium so that it impresses everyone who visits it.
There are other highlights in the Olympics – Jack Lovelock wins a classic 1,500-meter run for New Zealand…Korea’s Kitei Son wins the Marathon for his occupying power, Japan…Jack Medica wins the 100-meter freestyle swimming Gold for the United States. But the Germans win the most medals and score the most points, but critics note that this Olympics gives out gold medals for music, architecture, and even urban planning.
A casualty of the Olympic Games is the man who built the Olympic Village, Hauptmann Wolfgang Fuerstner, one of the Wehrmacht’s remaining part-Jewish officers. Having built a superb Olympic village, he knows his time is running out, so he shoots himself two days later. Aside from this, and bickering over whether or not Leni Riefenstahl’s film “Olympia” is propaganda or art, the Games are considered a great success for Germany and sport, with both shining through – the Nazis impress everyone with their perfect, if overly mechanical hospitality. One such example is a party where Rudolf Hess meets Britain’s Duke of Hamilton. The latter admires Hess and the whole German set-up, and a friendship with a bizarre outcome is forged.
The other explosion takes place in Spain, where tension between the left-wing Republic and the right-wing officer corps explodes into rebellion in July, and Civil War.
For the next four years, Spain becomes the ugly dress rehearsal for the war to come, with many of its better-known figures earning their combat spurs there.
Hitler and Mussolini support the Nationalists under Generalissimo and Captain-General Francisco Franco. Mussolini sends an entire corps of infantry and air units to fight for Franco, and Hitler delivers armored vehicles under a young officer named Ritter von Thoma and an air unit that gains fame under the name “Condor Legion.” Josef Stalin, seeking to expand his influence or at least stop Hitler from expanding his, does the same, sending in troops, advisers, tanks, and aircraft and airmen. In return, the Republic pays Stalin hard gold.
