German Ski Resort with Nazi Ties to Make Olympic Bid
Posted on January 22nd, 2010 by Mike under olympics
Photo via Times Online
I wonder if the people behind the Garmisch Ski Resort’s bid to be part of the 2018 Olympic site have heard of Allianz, the German insurance firm who made a bid for the naming rights of the new Giants/Jets stadium who were nixed after it was discovered that they had ties to the Nazis? The Garmisch must not have, if they actually believe that their Olympic bid is going to work.
Times Online (UK) reports that the Bavarian ski resort, which lies in a town that in the 1930s was “rabidly anti-semitic,” and had to undergo “a comprehensive clean-up to present the sunny face of Nazi Germany” (????) before the 1936 Summer games in Germany, will be part of the proposal that the German delegation will bring forth next month in Vancouver as part of a bid for Munich to be the 2018 host of the Olympics.
On the surface, Garmisch resembles a typical picture postcard Alpine community, with wooden chalets, flower tubs and the ice-clad Zugspitze mountain looming over the valley, and it is still proud of the last time that it was the site of a Winter Olympics -1936.
In the 1930s, though, the town was rabidly anti-Semitic, so much so that worried sports managers ordered a cover-up lest bad publicity jeopardise the success of the Summer Olympics in Berlin which Hitler wanted to be a showpiece of Aryan superiority.
The organiser of the summer Olympics, Carl Diem, visited Garmisch in 1935 and did not like what he saw. Nazi party rallies were stirring up hatred against Jews, he said, and the anti-Semitic newspaper “Der Stuermer” was on sale everywhere.
Definitely the best plan I’ve heard since I heard about the All-American Basketball Alliance yesterday.
And interestingly enough, the key player in this bid is Willy Bogner, who’s father delivered the Olympic oath in the presence of Adolf Hitler.
If this works out, it’s not going to make Oprah’s unsuccessful stumping for Chicago look that good.
January 24th, 2010 at 2:12 pm
Saw the link to this on reddit. Garmisch-Partenkirchen, to give it its full name, is my hometown and certainly anything but affiliated to any kind of third reich thinking anymore. Yes, we all learned about the 36 Olympics, simply because they happened there, but that was over 70 years ago and a different era and generation, waaaaay before my time (32 now). To put the Olympic bid of one of Germany’s best ski resorts (including Germany’s highest mountain, the 2964m Zugspitze) down because of this is, to put it politely, daft. The world hasn’t forgotten what has happened, but most people have also realised that we have moved on and bringing the old stories out will earn you nothing but head shaking from today’s generation.
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