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At the time of the 1936 Olympics, the dark night had not yet arrived for most non-Jewish Germans. Knowledge of the growing number of Nazi victims was not widespread. For the rest of Germany and, indeed, for the rest of the world who came to watch, the 1936 games evoked only sunshine, flagwaving, and celebration of the winners by enthusiastic throngs of spectators. While the Nazis managed to foreground the aesthetic aspects of the Olympic Games in 1936, by 1938 the power games behind Jobs and the Olympic Games / 41 sports became explicit, and Nazi ideology now openly promoted the ultimate goal behind Wehrertüchtigung.

They even contemplated asking the president of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), the Belgian Henri de Baillet-Latour, to go to the United States to intercede on their behalf. 14 A few Jewish Germans participated in the 1936 games. One athlete, Helene Mayer, an instructor at San Francisco City College in the late 1940s, was a tall, lanky, blond Jewish-German immigrant—a gold medalist in fencing in the 1928 Olympic 34 / Jobs and the Olympic Games Games in Amsterdam—who heeded the Nazis’ call to participate in the 1936 games on behalf of Germany.

The vast majority of Germans were caught in the tight vise of persuasion 16 / Introduction counterposed against coercion. Options and alternatives disappeared in very short order. To be sure, Germans had directed widespread resentment against real or imagined enemies in the past, but no hatred for any oppressors was pervasive or strong enough to have fueled a violent overthrow of the status quo. Yet in the early months of 1933, revolutionary change took place by virtue of the very speed with which the Nazis removed opposition groups from positions of power—Communists and Socialists, above all—and installed trusted Nazis in key positions throughout German society.