Inside Hitler's rotting Olympic dream: Athlete's village built to show German supremacy at 1936 Games is now a decaying relic of 1,000 year Reich (after the KGB used it as Soviet torture chamber)
- These exclusive pictures show the ruins of the complex in Berlin
- Boarded up and rotting it was once the price of Nazi Germany
- It was later used to house Soviet Red Army troops and torture chamber
- Shunned by many Germans it is now a decaying relic
- All attempts to renovate it have so far failed
The ghosts of heroes and monsters lurk in these decaying buildings.... vying for haunting rights in ruins once inhabited by the very best specimens of mankind - and the very worst.
MailOnline gained exclusive access to the long-shuttered buildings of Hitler's Olympic Village of 1936 - the so-called 'Nazi Games' intended to showcase German supremacy against the rest of the world.
Here behind closed doors can be seen the rotting remains of the '1000 year Reich' which vanished in flames after just 12.
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Twisted Olympic ideals: Hitler used the 1936 Games as a showcase of German supremacy against the world
Ghosts: The vaulting horse which became known as 'Alfred's Throne,' after Nazi athlete Alfred Schwarzmann from Bavaria, who won three gold medals and two bronzes for gymnastics
Boarded up: Many Germans shun the village because it reminds them of them of an inglorious period of their history, according to Sven Voege, head of the Arctic preservation society
No expense was spared on the design which saw the quarters installed with all mod cons at the time. However, Poland, which Hitler loathed, were afforded the worst facilities of any team
As Britain continues to ponder what the legacy of the ultra-expensive London 2012 Olympics will be, we were granted unique access to the venue of the most infamous version in history - a place which lies decaying 600 miles from the UK capital and 78 years on from its moment in the world's spotlight.
Adolf Hitler promised his Ayran Volk world supremacy - and that supremacy was intended to be in the 19 disciplines on offer for the 4,066 competing men and women athletes at the now infamous 1936 Berlin Olympics.
Despite an overall German sporting victory, Hitler's empire was already ticking down to its doom. Just nine years after they were staged, his showcase global athletic village, along with much else besides, came under different ownership.
For almost five decades after 1945 it was occupied by the Soviet Red Army. Among the new tenants were the torturers of SMERSH and the KGB, interrogators who turned the subterranean rooms housing the heating system of the superb swimming pool into an amphitheatre of pain and death.The cremated remains of their victims lie strewn all over the site.
Since the Soviet pullout in the early 1990's the village of 1936 has lain undisturbed. It is a monument in bricks and mortar to the two most murderous ideologies of the 20th century mingled in with the remembrance of athletes whose grace, poise, sportsmanship and excellence rose above squalid and murderous politics - if only for a brief while.
Adolf Hitler (center) admires a model of the village which was purpose built for the games. He promised German supremacy and intended them to prove his bizarre theories on race
Across 19 disciplines, 4,066 competing men and women athletes competed at the games but the star of the show was the black US athlete Jesse Owens, who won four golds at the Games
In three short weeks here the participants consumed 100 cows, 110 calves, 91 pigs, 664 lambs, 8,000 lbs of coffee, 150,000lbs of vegetables, 160,000 lbs of flour, 160,000 pints of milk and something over a million eggs
Remains: The dining hall as it is now in the shell of the Olympic Village
Tour: Tourists can wander around the outside of the buildings for just 80p - but MailOnline was given access to the eerie rooms within
Folly: The village lies forlorn and largely forgotten, even though its ruins tell a fascinating story of achievement in the era of totalitarian madness
The site lies just a few miles west of the Olympic Stadium where Hitler watched with delight as his German 'supermen' lived up to expectations to win the games with a medal count of 89. Britain came tenth with 14.
Tourists can wander around the outside of the buildings for just 80p.
But it is far from the city center and the shops of the glitzy Ku'damm and Friedrichstrasse.
Therefore, it lies forlorn and largely forgotten,even though its ruins tell a fascinating story of achievement in the era of totalitarian madness.
'It is a shame,' said Sven Voege, head of the Arctic preservation society Polarworld in Berlin and currently in negotiation to rent out some of the empty village sites for exhibition rooms.
'But because it is inextricably bound up with Nazism, most Germans avoid it. It is a place that lives and breathes sportsmanship and history, side by side.
'But German history is something which we shun because of our past.
'I have been researching the village for two decades. It was the centre of the world once when the world was a much more dangerous place.
'Three years after what happened here we were plunged into the worst war in history. This was the last great peaceful coming together before that war which changed everything....'
The war changed everything, but one man above all changed the 1936 Olympics for the Nazis.
He was called Jesse Owens, he was black and he was the undisputed star of the games, a man Hitler had condemned as 'inferior' who blew a hole through his quack racial theories as big as the state of Alabama from which he hailed.
The tiny room, number five, in block 39 is the only one that has been renovated on the site.
A grim reminder about Nazi aims for the games. At the time Nazi propaganda minister Josef Goebbels, said the game had only one task which was to strengthen the character of the German people
At the time it was built, this heated pool was the most modern in the world but it has suffered years of neglect
After the Nazi's were defeated, the torturers of Communist Russia's SMERSH and the KGB, turned the subterranean rooms housing the heating system of the pool into an amphitheatre of pain and death
Horror legacy: The cremated remains of many torture victims are still scattered around the village which home to the two most murderous ideologies of the 20th century
Rotting: The buildings were only abandoned by the Red Army in the 1990s as Soviet Russia collapsed
Bad memory: Because the site is so bound up in Nazi history, most Germans avoid it
It is a modest abode that reflects well the modesty of the shy man who stayed within it: a man who, ironically, enjoyed more freedom in Nazi Germany steering its berserk racial course than he could in his segregated homeland.
There is the bed that the four-times Olympic gold medal winner slept on, the pine wardrobe he hung his clothes in and the small bedside table where he wrote letters home to his parents of his observations of a state that took him to its heart, even while its leader could not. It is a simple tribute but a fitting one.
At the end of the corridor from Jesse's room is a tiny kitchen with a stove that has as much in common with modern-day appliances as Stephenson's Rocket has to the Space Shuttle.
Yet at the time, in a Europe still gripped by Great Depression poverty, it was the last word in mod cons.
The casual visitor can imagine Jesse and his friends at night making cocoa here, talking about the events of the next day as the Nazi menace increased by the hour on the outside for the citizens of Germany and the wider world.
A short walk from Jesse's quarters lies the shuttered 'Restaurant of the Nations,' the eating hall for the athletes.
A graceful, sweeping structure, the record books tell how in three short weeks here the participants consumed 100 cows, 110 calves, 91 pigs, 664 lambs, 8,000 lbs of coffee, 150,000lbs of vegetables, 160,000 lbs of flour, 160,000 pints of milk and something over a million eggs, among other things.
Hopes to refurbish the building, which served in WWII as a hospital for wounded German troops, have so far come to nought
Paint peeling and brickwork exposed, little has been done to the site since it was first built
Sven said; 'The Fuehrer was tee-total and the order for the athletes was no drinking. But the French and the Italians railed against the idea of no wine while the Belgians and Dutch thought the prospect of no beer was too much to contemplate. All four nations were the exception and were served alcohol at every meal.'
Only the salon where the Italians dined alongside the Soviets is preserved; where the British ate on the first floor is simply a shell filled with fallen masonry.
Grand hopes to refurbish the building, which served in WW2 as a hospital for wounded German troops, have so far come to nought.
In 1936 a huge steel-and-wood sign of the five Olympic rings stood on top of the Restaurant of the Nations; that too survived the war and now resides, propped forgotten on a back wall, in the off-limits gymnasium whose hardwood floors and wall bars remain in surprisingly good condition.
Also in the gym can be seen the vaulting horse which became known as 'Alfred's Throne,' after Nazi athlete Alfred Schwarzmann from Bavaria, who won three gold medals and two bronzes for gymnastics there before going on in the war to be decorated with the Knight's Cross for his services as a distinguished paratrooper.
Sick pride: The site lies just a few miles west of the Olympic Stadium where Hitler watched with delight as his German 'supermen' lived up to expectations to win the games with a medal count of 89
With a proud Aryan man in the background, the post for the 1936 games
With the Olympic logo on the right and stamps featuring star athletes of the day, a letter found at the site
A grim reminder of Nazi theories on race. Jewish or part-Jewish and Gypsy athletes — were systematically excluded from German sports facilities and association
Outside the hall where the British team failed to win a thing, is the 400 metres loop which is exactly as it was when Godfrey Brown, Godfrey Rampling, Freddie Wolff and Bill Roberts pounded it in practice to salvage national price by going on to the Olympic Stadium to bring home the gold for the UK with the 4x400m relay race.
'The authorities allowed children on to the site, which was managed by the military,' said Sven. 'The English runners were a firm favourite among them because of their impeccable manners. They always stopped to say hello to the children and sign autographs. They were the superstars of their day.'
The track runs alongside what was once the most magnificent training pool in Europe, a 25 meter long facility that was still in use for Soviet athletes before the 1980 games in Moscow.
Now the water has long since drained away, the taps, fixtures and fittings of the shower and bathrooms stolen along with everything else that was removable when the Red Army finally decamped for the last time in 1993.
For years rainwater poured in through a smashed roof and shattered windows, gradually destroying the exquisite tiling and paintwork.
But the bank which manages the foundation which owns the buildings - all of them listed save for the grim barrack blocks built for Soviet soldiers after 1945 - stumped up the cash for a new wall of glass and a replacement roof that now keeps the worst of the elements at bay.
Eroded: Rainwater has stripped away most of the buildings' paintwork and detailing
Modern: The heated baths were the height of luxury for the competing athletes but they were later used to hide the screams of torture victims
High-kicking: Athletes in high spirits outside the Village before the 1936 Games
Looking at the structures and their pure, clean lines, it is easy to see them as the architectural manifestation of the pronouncement of Nazi propaganda minister Josef Goebbels, who voiced the regime's take on sport shortly after Germany learned it would host the event.
'German sport has only one task: to strengthen the character of the German people, imbuing it with the fighting spirit and steadfast camaraderie necessary in the struggle for its existence,' he ranted.
Sven said all Germany then knew that sport was an extension of politics. He went on: 'The government harnessed sport as part of its drive to strengthen the 'Aryan race,' to exercise political control over its citizens, and to prepare German youth for war.
'Non-Aryans' —Jewish or part-Jewish and Gypsy athletes — were systematically excluded from German sports facilities and associations. They were allowed marginal training facilities, and their opportunities to compete were limited.
'It was not accidental that Poland, which Hitler loathed, sent one of the biggest contingents to the games, but were afforded the worst facilities of any team.
'The games were the ultimate propaganda vehicle for Hitler. In August 1936 Olympic flags and swastikas bedecked the monuments and houses of a festive, crowded Berlin.
'Most tourists were unaware that the Nazis had temporarily removed anti-Jewish signs. Neither would tourists have known of the 'clean up' ordered by the German Ministry of Interior in which the Berlin Police arrested all Gypsies prior to the Games.
'On July 16, 1936, some 800 Gypsies were arrested and interned under police guard in a special Gypsy camp in the Berlin suburb of Marzahn.
The only room to have been renovated is the simple quarters which the black US athlete Jesse Owens lived in. With his four golds, Owens blew Nazi theories about Aryan supremacy out of the water
A picture of Owens sits on the bedside table next to where he slept. Ironically Owens had more freedom in Nazi Germany than he did in his home country
Ourdated: A simple stove which was used by athletes to cook on. By modern standards it is a relic
'Also in preparation for the arrival of Olympic spectators, Nazi officials ordered that foreign visitors should not be subjected to the criminal strictures of the Nazi anti-homosexual laws.
'But the athletes, surrounded day in day out by officials in Nazi uniforms, could not have failed to have seen the hand of the regime in everything.'
In fact the militaristic ambitions of Hitler met them every day.
Hidden from the casual visitor, locked away inside on the first floor of the Hindenburg House - named after the WW1 field marshall who blindly gave authority to Hitler to seize the reins of power in 1933 - is a bas relief of marching German soldiers that still stands near to the theatre where athletes went to watch variety shows and stage pieces after a hard day's training or competing.
Row upon row of concrete soldiers march on to their Wagnerian appointment with destiny beneath the words in old Germanic script; 'May the the armed forces may go on a strong an honourable path, vouchsafing for a strong German future.'
Instead they marched into atrocities in Russia and western Europe, into the cauldrons of Stalingrad, Normandy and Berlin, leaving five million of their comrades behind in graves in the process; that was their destiny. Many of them were members of infantry regiments who trained at the site between 1936 and 1945 before moving up to the front lines.
Mocking their memory on walls just yards away are the murals of the
post-1945 occupants. Lenin exhorts his followers to greatness in an enormous painting rendered inside the theatre itself while in another room, reserved for officers, is a painting of heroic Soviet soldiers doing battle with the Nazis in the 'Great Patriotic War' which took the lives of 27 million Russian citizens.
Haunting: The peeling paint and dank atmosphere just serves to remind visitors more of Hitler's failed dream
Hope: Mr Voege paid tribute to the athletes who competed at the Games, saying: 'The memory of the participants lives on and no dictator of whatever hue can take away what they achieved
Sven, who also wants to utilise the theatre now for stage plays about the Arctic region, said; 'I can understand if there is anxiety in the UK now about what the legacy of this year's Olympic Games might be given what happened here. The place became a playground for monsters and the memory of the athletes faded along with the paintwork and the bricks.
'Still, the memory of the participants lives on and no dictator of whatever hue can take away what they achieved. That is something that those who compete in uncertain times in London can take heart from.'
2 comments:
All this evil stuff that these people did is NOT going to be "allowed" to happen again! This will be stopped! These pictures of this stuff just look gross and these places should all be demolished IMO.
I agree. None of these places should be able to stay erected as a living shrine. I would love to demolish all of them.
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