My personal boycott of the Olympics

[frazzled]

87. Just a question for you (I don't know the answer)

Do you think if the world had boycotted the 1936 Olympics that Hitler would not have invaded Poland and beyond? Or would not have built the concentration camps or instituted the Final Solution? Would the situation for Jews, gays, Gypsies, and others who defended these groups have been better?

Do you think the Olympics made him popular enough to retain support and do all that? Or do you think it wouldn't have mattered? Or does the answer lie somewhere between?

In other words, my question is: what effect did holding the Berlin Olympics have on the ensuing geopolitical events? Was the course of history changed by holding them?

I honestly don't know the answer, though my suspicion is that it may not have mattered much (except for internal support from the German people, which he perhaps didn't even need; dictators, once in power, tend to make do with or without the support of the people.)

One thing I think we all need to remember is that Hitler's anti-Semitism was pretty standard fare throughout Europe at the time, and not considered the biggest problem at all with Hitler. It really didn't bother most people and governments at the time. I remember watching a program on PBS a number of years ago that presented the immediate postwar footage made by the British at the war's end: a sort of propaganda film for "why we fought." Alfred Hitchcock was hired to direct it all. It was explained that the footage of the liberated camps had to be generalized not to mention Jews at all, because anti-Semitism in Britain, even at that time, was as bad as it had been in Germany. The government felt that people would not have felt the country's sacrifice in fighting the war would have been worth it to save a bunch of Jews. I was shocked, but in retrospect, it makes sense. Even in the US, after the war, my father was denied a job with a pharmaceutical manufacturer because they didn't hire Jews; and redlining was a common practice in preventing Jews from buying houses in certain neighborhoods.

That's why I wonder if the Olympics really made any difference. It wasn't until Poland was invaded and a geopolitical issue was at stake that the rest of the world decided maybe they should stop this guy.