Carl Diem

Dr. Carl Diem (born June 24, 1882, Würzburg – December 17, 1962, Cologne) was a German sports administrator, and the chief organizer of the 1936 Olympic Summer Games in Berlin (sometimes referred to as the "Nazi Olympics"). He created the tradition of the Olympic torch relay, and was an influential historian of sport, particularly the Olympic games.

Career

Born into an upper-middle-class family, Diem was a middle- and long-distance runner as a teenager - unusual in a country where gymnastic-style athletics was fashionable, rather than what were known as "anglo-saxon" athletics. He showed an early gift for organizing, founding his first athletic club, called "Macromannia", in 1899. [Mandell, Richard, "The Nazi Olympics", 1987 reprint edition, University of Illinois Press, Champaign, IL, 1987, p. 84] As a young man, Diem originally pursued a career in sales, but also began to write articles for sporting newspapers. At the age of twenty, he was hired by the German Sports Authority for Athletics (the "Deutsche Sportbehörde für Athletik", or DSBfA), and a year later was elected to its board of directors. [Findling, John E. and Pelle, Kimberly E., "Historical Dictionary of the Modern Olympic Movement", Greenwood Publishing Group, Westport, CT, 1996, p. 87] Diem was an ardent believer in the heroic Olympian ideal, and in the contributions that international sport could make to harmony between nations. In this regard, and many others, he was a fervent disciple of Pierre de Coubertin, the founder of the International Olympic Committee and father of the modern international Olympiad. [Taylor, Paul, "Jews and the Olympic Games", Sussex Academy Press] In 1906 Diem began his long Olympic career, leading the German contingent of athletes to the Athens games (for reasons that are not entirely clear, the German delegation actually entered the stadium first in the parade of athletes). In 1909, the games for the summer of 1912 were awarded to Stockholm, but the IOC made it clear that Diem and his fellow organizers could expect to hold the 1916 games in Berlin. [Findling and Pelle, "Historical Dictionary", p. 28 and 43]

Diem threw himself into preparations for the 1916 games; his principal partner in this and most of his Olympic endeavors was Theodore Lewald, who would for many years be chairman of the German Olympic Committee. In the summer of 1914, Diem and Lewald were planning their spectacular 1916 Olympiad when World War I erupted; the Berlin games were subsequently cancelled. Diem enlisted in the German army and served in Belgium and France. He was wounded at St. Quentin, recovered, and fought at both Champagne and the Argonne. [Daniels, George G., "The Olympic Century (Vol. 6): V and VI Olympiads, Stockholm-The Inter-Allied Games" (Los Angeles: World Sport Research and Publications, Inc., 2000), p. 99]

After the war, Olympic officials penalized Germany by excluding the country from the 1920 and 1924 games; Diem and Lewald, who had returned to their sports-organizing duties, lobbied successfully to win permission for a German team to compete in the 1928 games in Amsterdam. [Bryant, John, "The Stadium Hitler Hated," "The Times", December 10, 1998] With support from the state, Diem also founded the "Deutsche Hochschule für Liebesübungen", a school dedicated to the study of the science of sport. He was a great admirer of American athletic programs, and in 1929 toured the U.S. for five weeks with Lewald; during this trip he formed a strong friendship with Avery Brundage, an American Olympic official who would play a major role in the controversy over the 1936 Olympics (and in Olympic history for decades to come). [Guttmann, Alan, "The Games Must Go On," Columbia University Press, New York, 1984, p. 64]

Olympics in Berlin

In May 1932, again largely due to the reputation and lobbying efforts of Diem and Lewald, Berlin was selected to host the 1936 summer games; Diem was named Secretary General of the Organizing Committee. He attended the 1932 games in Los Angeles, carefully observing the host city's preparations and facilities, committed to meeting or outdoing the American accomplishment in Berlin four years later. [Bryant, "The Stadium Hitler Hated"]

The rise of Adolf Hitler to power in 1933 once again threatened Diem's dream of a Berlin Olympiad: Nazi nationalism did not embrace international sport, and Hitler himself had dismissed the Olympics as a project of "Jews and Freemasons." ["The Times", Obituaries "Prof. Carl Diem", Tuesday, December 18, 1962] After Hitler took power, Diem expected him to cancel the Olympics. But Hitler's propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, convinced him that the games would be an excellent showcase for German organization and pride. At a March 1933 meeting, six weeks after taking power, Hitler informed Diem and Levald that he would support the games. Six months later, after touring the construction sites for the sporting arenas, he told Diem that the German state would pay the bills. [Taylor, Paul, "Jews and the Olympic Games", Sussex Academy Press]

The Nazis embraced the Olympic Games not only because they promised to be a unique opportunity to extol the virtues of their "reborn" state; as a celebration of physical prowess, the games also dovetailed neatly with the Nazi indealization of youth, fitness and athleticism. Further, according to Nazi racial theories, their own Aryan "superiorities" were descended from the great achievements of ancient Greece.

Despite the official Nazi support for the games, Diem's position as organizer was at risk, mostly because his "Hochschule" employed Jewish teachers and Diem's wife, Liselott, came from a Jewish family. He himself was classified, for these reasons, as a "white Jew." [Guttmann, "The Games Must Go On", p. 64] Diem managed to hold onto his job and solidify his position with his Nazi patrons - but his partner Theodore Lewald was not so lucky. The Nazis removed Lewald from his post because his paternal grandmother was Jewish. This move provoked close scrutiny from Olympic officials, who threatened to pull the games from Berlin if Jews were excluded.

The protests from the IOC forced the Nazi leadership to reinstate Lewald - although only to the minor post of "adviser" to the games. And the Nazi establishment went out of their way to assure the world that "non-Aryan" participants were being allowed to compete. These assurances were less than truthful. [Taylor, Paul, "Jews and the Olympic Games"] In particular, the American Olympic Association remained skeptical about the Nazis' openness to non-Aryan competitors, and a movement to boycott the Berlin games began to gather steam among U.S. Olympic officials. Diem's old friend Avery Brundage, president of the American Olympic Committee, was dispatched to appraise the facts; in Berlin, Diem convinced Brundage that Jews were not being excluded, though he likely knew otherwise. Brundage returned to the U.S. and, defeating the boycott-supporters, helped ensure that a full American athletic delegation would attend the games in Berlin. [Guttmann, "The Games Must Go On", pp. 65-71]

Torch Relay

On a visit to Greece for an Olympic conference in 1934, Diem and Lewald imagined a new symbolic pageant that would cloak the German games with the ancient Greek mantle: the transit of a lit Olympic flame from Greece to Berlin by a relay of torch-bearing runners. While the relay is sometimes believed to be an ancient tradition, it was in fact the wholly modern creation of Lewald and Diem: the ancient games included a ritual flame commemorating the theft of fire from the gods by Prometheus, but no torch relay.

On June 30, 1936, [Taylor, Paul, "Jews and the Olympic Games", Sussex Academy Press] the first torch-flame was kindled in Olympia, Greece, in the ruins of the Temple of Hera, by 15 robed "virgins," using a concave mirror focusing the sun's rays, all under the supervision of a "high priestess." It was carried to the Acropolis in Athens for a special invocation, and then relayed along the 3,422-kilometer distance to the Olympic stadium in Berlin by an equal number of young Aryan-looking runners, each of whom took the flame a single kilometer. On its way, the flame passed through Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Hungary, Austria and Czechslovakia; those countries, and Greece itself, would all be under Nazi domination within ten years. [Andy McSmith, "Aryan ideals, not ancient Greece, were the inspiration behind flame tradition," "The Independent", April 8, 2008] The event was filmed by Hitler's favorite director, Leni Riefenstahl, and branded with the giants of German industry: the lighting-mirrors were made by the Zeiss corporation, and the torches themselves, fueled with magnesium to prevent them from going out in bad weather, were constructed by Krupp, the huge steel and munitions conglomerate that armed Germany for both world wars. ["The Olympic torch's shadowy past," by Chris Bowlby, BBC News, April 5, 2008, available at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7330949.stm]

The final leg of the relay was completed on August 1 by Fritz Schilgen, a German electrical engineer and national champion runner, who ran into the stadium and lit the Olympic cauldron to open the games. Schilgen was not actually competing; he was selected by officials, including Riefenstahl, for the grace and aesthetic appeal of his running style. Diem was in Hitler's party as the Fuehrer presided over the ceremony; when Hitler strode across the stadium to his official box, a five-year-old girl presented him with a bouquet of flowers. The child was Diem's daughter, Gudrun.

The tradition of a torch relay from Greece to the host country of the Olympic games has been continued at every Olympiad since then. Even the ritual kindling of the flame with a mirror on the grounds of the Temple of Hera remains virtually intact as the official method of starting the relay.

Legacy

In March 1945, as the Allies were closing in on Berlin in the final weeks of the Second World War, Diem staged another famous event in the city's Olympic stadium. Addressing a rally of thousands of teenage Hitler Youth, Diem exhorted them to defend the capital to the death, in the spirit of the ancient Spartans. Some two thousand of the young men assembled there did exactly that, sacrificing themselves before Berlin finally fell in May. ["From Berlin to Beijing," by Guy Walters, in "Standpoint Online", July 2008, available at http://www.standpointmag.co.uk/from-Berlin-to-Beijing-july]

. He returned to his career as a historian of German sport and the Olympic games. In 1960, a he published an authoritative general history of sport. At his death in 1962 in Cologne, he was once again a respected national figure. The Carl Diem Institute at the German Sports University was created in his honor, and run by his wife, Liselott, until 1989. After her death in 1992, the institute was renamed the Carl and Liselott Diem Archive. [details from the website of the CuLDA, the Carl and Liselott Diem Archive, available at http://www.culda.de/] Diem remains the most influential historian of sports in Germany.

The full nature of Diem's relations with the Nazi apparatus is complex. His career in national sport preceded the Nazi regime by decades, and he was appointed to organize the 1936 games years before Hitler decided to put his own indelible mark on the Berlin competition. [Andy McSmith, "Aryan ideals, not ancient Greece, were the inspiration behind flame tradition," "The Independent", April 8, 2008] But like many career professionals who chose to accept Nazi patronage, Diem's legacy was irreversibly tarnished by proximity to his masters. His earlier writings did occasionally embrace popular ideas about racial superiority; [Findling and Pelle, "Historical Dictionary", p. 43] he clung to his prominent national positions during the Nazi period, and he took part in war propaganda, including the Berlin rally near the war's end. [See the German Wikipedia entry "Carl Diem"] Richard Mandell, author of the 1971 book "The Nazi Olympics", was critical of Diem; in a reprint of the book, he defended his position, writing: "Recently, some careful German researchers have uncovered documents showing that Carl Diem's complicity with the Nazis went beyond his confessed use of them to promote sport. With his Nazi connections he settled brutally some old scores, and he stayed with the Nazis on ideological grounds long after their savagery was exposed and after their coming defeat was apparent to all." [Mandell, "The Nazi Olympics", p. xvi] And yet even Mandell did not dispute that Diem was "the greatest sports historian and most profound theorist of sport education" of the 20th century. [Mandell, "The Nazi Olympics", p. 85]

During Diem's final years, there was open controversy about his Nazi connections. For example, in 1954 the French ministry of Education postponed a display of gymnastics before a delegation headed by Diem (then head of the Sportschule at Cologne), after students claimed that Diem had been a "Nazi general." Two days later, the students recanted, and admitted that there was no "formal proof" of the allegation. ["The Times", "French Students' Ban On German Visitor: A Display Postponed", March 24 and March 26, 1954] In the 1990s, a public debate erupted in Germany over his legacy, and whether streets named in his honor should be renamed because of the taint of the Nazi years. ["Historiker der Universität Münster arbeitet Biographie von Carl Diem auf", from the University of Munster website at http://cgi.uni-muenster.de/exec/Rektorat/upm.php?rubrik=Alle&neu=0&monat=200502&nummer=06214]

External links

* [http://www.kbs-koeln.de/gbg/diem/english/torch.htm The Origin of the Olympic Torch Relay]
* [http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/7330949.stm BBC News article describing Diem's links to the Nazis]

Notes