The Beijing Summer Olympics represented the first time the United States and its Western allies unanimously participated in an Olympics hosted by a totalitarian regime since 1936, when the games were held in Berlin, the capital of Nazi Germany.
What was remarkable about this choice to participate is that the host country, China, has a history of persecuting its own people as well as those who have fallen under its influence – a history that includes Mao’s mass murder of millions; the violent suppression of a peaceful student protest in Tiananmen Square during which several hundred were killed by Chinese soldiers; the persecution of the Falun Gong; longstanding misreatment of the Taiwanese and Tibetans; and willingness to support the Sudanese economically and militarily while the Darfur massacres continue unabated.
As one might imagine, civil rights advocates the world over were appalled by Western participation in Beijing, which, to their minds, lent credence to China’s persecutory policies.
The sad historical irony in all this is that the one time a boycott could have made a real difference in the lives of millions – Berlin, 1936 – the world was silent.
The International Olympic Committee had already awarded the 1936 Summer Olympics to Berlin in 1931, signaling Germany’s return to the world community after its defeat in World War I.
But two years later, in 1933, Adolf Hitler became Germany’s chancellor of Germany and quickly turned the nation’s frail democracy into a single-party dictatorship that persecuted Jews and a host of others.
The Nazis worked swiftly to establish control over all aspects of German life, including sports. In April 1933, an “Aryans only” policy was instituted in all German athletic organizations. Many Jewish athletes were banned from German sports facilities and associations, including some of the world’s top ranked competitors in boxing, tennis and track and field.
Soon thereafter, in 1935, the Nazis introduced the Nuremburg Laws, which set out to categorically ostracize German Jews from the rest of the nation, legally, politically and socially.
But for two weeks in August 1936, Hitler’s dictatorship camouflaged its racist and militaristic character. Most anti-Jewish signs were temporarily removed and newspapers toned down their harsh rhetoric. Foreign spectators and journalists were bedazzled with the image of a peaceful, tolerant Germany.
To be sure, there had been a significant call for the United States and other democracies to boycott the games. Such efforts were led by the likes of Judge Jeremiah Mahoney, president of the Amateur Athletic Union, who pointed out that Germany had broken Olympics rules forbidding discrimination based on race and religion. In his view, participation would indicate an endorsement of Hitler’s Reich.
New York City mayor Fiorello La Guardia, New York governor Al Smith, and Massachusetts governor James Curley also opposed sending a team to Berlin, as did William E. Dodd, U.S. ambassador to Germany, and George Messersmith, head of the U.S. Legation in Vienna.
Still, President Roosevelt chose not to become involved in the boycott issue. Instead, he continued a decades-long tradition in which the U.S. Olympic Committee operated independently of outside political influence.
The benign façade employed by Hitler during the Munich Olympics was lifted shortly after the Games concluded. Hitler pressed on with grandiose plans for German expansion, intimidating the European powers into permitting the annexation of Austria and the Czech Sutendenland in 1938.
The next year, Germany invaded Poland. So just three years after the Berlin Olympics, the Games’ impressive sponsor had unleashed World War II. Persecution of German Jews also accelerated, leading to Kristallnacht and, ultimately, the systemic effort to annihilate Jewry.
It is clear that by participating in the 1936 Olympics, the Western democracies missed an incredible opportunity to take a stand, one that might have given Hitler pause and bolstered international resistance to Nazi tyranny.
In light of the shameful consequences of Western inaction seventy years ago, there a debate took place within the Jewish community in the months leading up to the Beijing Games as to whether we should rise up in opposition to Chinese persecution and demand a boycott.
In late April, a group of more than 150 rabbis and community leaders signed a statement arguing against participation in the Beijing Games because of China’s “complicity in severe human rights abuses abroad and at home” – abuses they compared to Nazi brutality against Jews and others.