August 1, 1936 was an unseasonably drizzly and overcast day in Berlin, but nothing could dampen the ardour of the 110,000 people crammed into the city’s newly built, dauntingly brutalist Olympiastadion — with Hitler’s favoured architect, Albert Speer, ensuring that the shock and awe factor was jacked up to 11 — for the opening ceremony of what had been billed, not least by the Nazis, as the Nazi Olympics. Trumpet fanfares hailed Hitler’s arrival; the massive Hindenburg blimp loomed over the onlookers, trailing the Olympic flag; a white-clad Richard Strauss conducted a choir of 3,000 in the singing of Deutschland über Alles; and Leni Riefenstahl’s cameras were dotted around the stadium, ready to immortalise Aryan heroics. It promised to be a huge propaganda coup for nazism — the firing of the starting gun, if you will, on the nascent Thousand-Year Reich.
“I wanted no part in politics. I wasn’t running against Hitler. I was running against the world.”
And then Jesse Owens definitively rained on
