In Adolf Hitler’s mind, the 1936 Olympic Games were a golden opportunity for Germany, and not simply on account of the prestige of hosting an international event. Germany won the bid to host the Olympics two years before Hitler came to power (per Britannica), but having won control of the government by the time the games arrived, he wanted them to serve as the ultimate piece of Nazi propaganda. It was a platform to show fascism’s success at unifying the nation, engineering its economic resurrection, and confirming what they believed was the inherent superiority of the Aryan race.

The ugliness and brutality of Nazism had become apparent to many on the world stage by 1936, and per the Holocaust Encyclopedia, there was a concerted effort to boycott the German-hosted Olympics. To have a chance to demonstrate their ideology, the Nazis had to tone down their rhetoric (per Time). That didn’t stop them from denying Jewish athletes almost any participation in German teams, and it didn’t stop other nations from pulling Jewish athletes to avoid offending the host nation. But it did help buy Germany some good press and may have even worked against antifascist sentiments from the early 1930s.

Besides going mum on their most hateful talking points, the Nazis did everything they could to sanitize Berlin before the Olympics began. According to PBS’s “The Boys of ’36,” the University of Washington rowers arrived in a clean, organized city with swastikas everywhere. And the leader of their host nation expected the German teams to sweep the events.