When the final whistle blows in July at this year’s Euros, it will mark another chapter of history for a stadium that is no stranger to international tournaments. The origins of Olympiastadion, a nearly-90-year-old complex, lie in one of the world’s most infamous sporting event-turned-propaganda spectacles: the 1936 Olympics.
And despite undergoing significant renovations since its construction, that legacy remains on display today. This was a deliberate choice of the Berlin government, and an indication of how the city has chosen to reckon with the architectural legacies of its Nazi period.
Olympic origins
Berlin won the bid to host the 1936 Games in 1931. They were originally slated to be held in Charlottenburg’s Deutsches Stadion, which had been built for the cancelled 1916 Olympics and was set to be renovated. But when Hitler toured the stadium grounds in the autumn of 1933 and witnessed what little progress had been made, he ordered that the stadium be demolished and a new one constructed in its place.
Many factors informed Hitler’s decision to request a new stadium, such as the opportunity to address Germany’s unemployment crisis and take advantage of new, time-sensitive work creation programmes. But a key consideration was the chance to capitalise on the international spotlight and build the country a “monument of pride”, as Hitler characterised it. The stadium thus became an opportunity to celebrate the supremacy of the Nazi regime and the “Aryan race”.
The stadium thus became an opportunity to celebrate the supremacy of the Nazi regime
Architect Werner March was tasked with bringing Hitler’s vision to fruition. He produced a monumental neoclassical design: a series of 136 limestone-clad pillars characteristic of ancient Greek architecture held up the upper ring of the 100,000-person-capacity arena. The inside of the stadium featured Hitler’s balcony, an extended platform in the stadium from which he could oversee the games.
The stadium became the focal point of a larger sporting park, known as the Reichssportfeld (now Olympiapark). Numerous six-metre tall statues, mainly of athletes, dotted the grounds. Their muscular physique and militaristic postures sought to emulate the ideal Aryan body. The western end opened onto the Maifeld, a huge parade ground above which loomed a 76-metre bell tower. Meant to evoke Germany’s military might, the tower rose out of Langemarck Hall, a building that housed a World War I memorial that celebrated the sacrifice of German soldiers who had fought in the disastrous Battle of Langemarck.
By the time of its completion ahead of the Olympics, the Reichssportfeld was the largest sporting complex in the world. In total, 3.8 million spectators came to watch the 1936 Games, which historians refer to as the start of the modern Olympic era. German athletes won the most medals overall, but the Nazis’ hopes of proving their racial supremacy through athletic success faltered during the Games’ most popular event, track and field, where Black American track star Jesse Owens captivated the crowd and secured four gold medals.
Renovating history
Despite being a site of fierce fighting during the 1945 Battle of Berlin, Olympiastadion stood relatively undamaged when it came under British control after Germany’s surrender. In the years that followed, the stadium continued to function as a sporting arena. Little attention was paid to its past beyond a denazification process that involved the removal of swastikas from around the grounds and the shortening of Hitler’s balcony by one metre. In 1963, Hertha BSC’s arrival ahead of the Bundesliga’s inaugural season further shifted attention from the stadium’s origins.
“There was room to be able to ignore the past because one focused on the then-present: the present of the British forces there, the present of the soccer club there, the present of the sports games in general there. And people did not really reflect on the history before 1945,” explains Magnus Brechtken, a historian at the Leibniz Institute for Contemporary History, who published a report on the site’s history in 2021.
While ignoring the stadium’s past was no longer an option, the government did not want to be seen as erasing it either.
It was only after the reunification of Berlin and the prospect of international scrutiny that the stadium’s legacy entered the forefront of public consciousness. Such scrutiny began in the early 1990s, when Berlin launched a failed bid to host the 2000 Summer Olympics. The organisers’ plans to use Olympiastadion without confronting its legacy angered some Berliners and sparked public debate about how to reckon with the stadium’s past. This debate reemerged in the late 1990s when Germany applied to host the 2006 World Cup.
Like in 1936, the stadium – set to host the final – required major renovations. But a demolition was not on the cards this time. The stadium had been put under monument protection in 1966, and the Berlin government decided to uphold this status. While ignoring the stadium’s past was no longer an option, the government did not want to be seen as erasing it either. “You can’t overcome history by destroying it,” Volkwin Marg, an architect whose firm oversaw that project, told the New York Times ahead of the Cup. “We have to overcome our role in history by demonstrating it.”
The ensuing four-year renovation modernised the stadium, which now has a capacity of over 74,000. A sleek, horseshoe-shaped roof was the most significant addition. But the renovation also retained the stadium’s original architectural features, like Hitler’s balcony (now part of the VIP section), the statues and the ‘Marathon Gate’ – the opening at the west side of the stadium that preserved the sightline to the Maifeld and the bell tower.
Rather than changing the architectural style, the government commissioned the creation of a history trail, made up of 46 information boards throughout the park and an exhibition on German sports history in Langemarck Hall. Both were designed to educate visitors about the history of the site, but they also served as an opportunity for the government to market the stadium to a 21st-century audience.
Grounds for reckoning
While fans of the Euros may be encountering this complicated mix of past and present for the first time this summer, the juxtaposition will not be new to fans of Hertha. Throughout the years, many Hertha supporters have built a relationship with the stadium outside of its historical context. “When it comes to football, it’s the stadium of Hertha. It’s the living room, Heimat, et cetera. And the context of National Socialism, or the origin or historical past of the stadium, is not really brought into that relationship,” says Stefano Bazzano, the club’s fan outreach officer.
Longtime Hertha supporter Mark Hamilton believes it is meaningful that fans can forge this positive relationship with Olympiastadion. “That development is important for the community – that you are not stuck with only the sad feelings of the past, but you should never forget them,” he explains. “We should see it as a place where we overcame that time, and it’s home [to] happy moments now. And I think it’s the strongest improvement, that you can send also as a message to people who might still want to have this time back. No, it’s not your stadium anymore, and it’s not just your historical place. This is now a place of happiness on match days, for everyone.”
Even as the Euros come to a close on July 14, the stadium’s future will remain a topic of discussion.
Klaus Gierl, another longtime Hertha fan, is more critical of how the stadium’s history has become normalised through the games there. “My opinion is it would be good to have an initiative from football fans, from Hertha fans, and from other guys in the city who [say], ‘We have to talk about this historical site’,” he says. “There are some small signs [at] the stadium, but no one reads these small signs. What you have to do is to break the normal behaviour on this site, to shake this site as a normal site.” He cites the Schöneberg ‘Places of Remembrance’ memorial as inspiration.
Others question the necessity of preserving the entirety of the site’s history. “I’m not sure if we need all of this – the Maifeld, the grandstands at the Maifeld, the statues, the Olympiastadion, the columns, the sculptures – if we need all of this, to draw attention to it and remember it,” Bazzano says. “Some of the statues, or the bell with the swastika on it, to be honest, that shocks me more than it reminds me of something.”
Handling history
Behind the scenes, the Berlin government has also been reconsidering how to present history at the site. Veronika Springmann, the director of the Berlin Sports Museum, is curating a new exhibition and overseeing a revision of the history trail. Although she feels the site serves as an important monument, she believes that there must be a more deliberate effort to explain its history. “I find it necessary to show this ‘Nazi porn’ in a kind of way, but to make [it into] something different, or to show what it is exactly. And how they used it for their propaganda,” she says.
The Olympiastadion will continue to act as a sort of microcosm
Even as the Euros come to a close on July 14, the stadium’s future will remain a topic of discussion. Hertha fans have been campaigning for the construction of a new, football-specific stadium within Olympiapark, but the site’s monument protection status has complicated their efforts. Meanwhile, the German Olympic Committee, supported by Berlin politicians, is lining up a bid for the 2036 Olympics, exactly 100 years after the 1936 Games.
Whatever comes next, there’s no doubt that the Olympiastadion will continue to act as a sort of microcosm for the conflicts inherent in German memory culture when it comes to the Nazi period. “It’s weird how you handle history,” says Stephan Zwickirsch, lifelong Hertha fan who now works as a cameraman for their Stadium TV. “Should we keep it, to remind people what happened here? Should we remove everything? It’s a very thin line to walk.”
