FDR And The Nazi Olympics

by Rafael Medoff

The ongoing controversy over whether or not to boycott the Olympics in China has raised many important issues (“The China Olympics Are Not Kosher,” Opinion, April 25). One is the problem of Free World leaders allowing themselves to be misled by a totalitarian regime that exploits the games in order to hide its human rights abuses.
The international community faced a similar problem in 1936, when the Nazis used that year’s Berlin Olympics to improve their image and distract attention from their persecution of Germany Jewry. Hitler’s propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, called the games “a victory for the German cause.” In fact, it was a victory in ways that Goebbels himself did not realize. Shortly after the games concluded, American Jewish Congress leader Rabbi Stephen

S. Wise met with President Franklin D. Roosevelt to discuss a number of topics, including the Olympics. FDR had opposed boycotting the games. Evidently Roosevelt now felt vindicated, because he told Rabbi Wise that he had recently met two tourists who attended the Berlin Olympics, and they had reported to him “that the synagogues are crowded and apparently there is nothing very wrong in the situation [of Germany’s Jews] at present.”
Despite many reports from U.S. diplomats in Germany about the persecution of German Jews, and despite Rabbi Wise’s efforts to persuade the president that the tourists’ report was mistaken, “I could see” — Rabbi Wise wrote to Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis — “that the tourists (whoever they are, the Lord bless them not) had made an impression upon him.”
One can only hope that today’s world leaders will not fall prey to the kind of wishful thinking that Roosevelt exhibited.

Director
The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies
Washington, D.C.

Westchester Jewish Conference

Westchester’s Jewish Community Relations Organization