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regular-article-logo Sunday, 22 December 2024

Spain vs England, Euro 2024 Final: Hitler history haunts venue

Built for the 1936 Olympic Games, Berlin’s Olympic stadium still bears the scars of World War II and contains relics from its Nazi past

AP/PTI Berlin Published 14.07.24, 10:33 AM
The Olympiastadion in Berlin, venue of Euro 2024 final.

The Olympiastadion in Berlin, venue of Euro 2024 final. Reuters

Spain and England will play the European Championship final on Sunday in an imposing stadium with a dark history.

Built for the 1936 Olympic Games, Berlin’s Olympic stadium still bears the scars of World War II and contains relics from its Nazi past.

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But the Olympiastadion, as it’s known in German, is also associated with the rebirth of a democratic Germany after the war. It hosted matches during the 1974 World Cup in what was then West Germany and again at the 2006 World Cup, 16 years after German reunification.

Adolf Hitler was personally involved in the design and construction of the 100,000-seat track-and-field stadium after the Nazis assumed power in 1933, two years after Germany had been awarded the 1936 Games.

Drawing inspiration from the Colosseum in Rome, the stadium was designed to impress. The Nazi regime’s racist ideology deeply influenced the project as construction companies were told to only hire “complying, non-union workers of German citizenship and Aryan race.”

Hitler watched from his stadium-balcony as Jesse Owens, a Black American athlete, won four gold medals to become the star of the Games, dealing a blow to Hitler’s notions of racial superiority.

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