The People’s Olympiad of 1936: When Barcelona protested ‘Hitler’s games’ in Berlin

Eighty years ago, from the 19^th to 26^th of July 1936, Barcelona was supposed to host the People’s Olympiad which was designed by anti-fascists to counterbalance the powerful tool of propaganda and legitimation that holding the 11^th modern Olympic Games in Berlin meant to the Nazi regime. The capital of Germany had been designated the Olympic host city on the 26^th of May 1931 at a meeting of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) held precisely in Barcelona. Yet this nomination was not changed after Adolf Hitler rose to power in 1933, or with the activation of his anti-Semitic policies 1935, or even with Germany’s occupation of the demilitarised zones in Rhineland just a few months before the Olympics started.

Numerous countries and international organisations decided to mobilise and engage in a boycott and pressure campaign against ‘Hitler’s games’, with Barcelona at the core of one of the most prominent initiatives. The city announced the People’s Olympiad shortly after the victory of the Leftist Front of Catalonia in the February 1936 elections and the restoration of the Republican Generalitat. The games had to be organised quickly by the Catalan Committee in Favour of Popular Sport (CCEP), a grouping of sports and cultural organisations from Barcelona (led by the sports sections of CADCI and the Encyclopaedic Athenaeum, the Barcelona Gymnastic Centre and the Women’s Sports Club), which had been founded in March in order to spread the practice of sports and popular sports to society as a whole.

It hosted its first event one month after being founded by organising a sporting even in solidarity with Ernst Thälmann, an athlete and German communist leader who had been imprisoned by the Nazis since 1933. With the Thälmann Cup, the young organisation sought to test its ability to organise a parallel Olympics which would revive the true spirit of the Olympics under the banner of peace and the solidarity of nations. ‘The Olympics, which were started thousands of years ago and reborn during our age, and which had always remained a symbol of the fraternity of peoples and races, has now lost this character forever,’ the CCEP manifesto read. ‘The Olympic Games being planned in Berlin are indisputably a shameful falsification, a mockery of Olympic thinking. In a country where millions of athletes are deprived of continuing their social mission, where thousands of the top athletes are imprisoned, where the majority of working people are living under the threat of persecution because of their convictions or religion, where an entire race has been outlawed, this country is not the right place to host true Olympic Games!’

In Catalonia, the majority of leftist forces supported the People’s Olympiad, which the organisers claimed ‘does not run counter to the idea of the Olympics itself but to the fascist Olympics in Berlin’. The only major exception was the Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification (POUM), which remained on the sidelines because it believed that the concept of sports for the people was a prostitution of working-class sports and because it mistrusted the alliance between socialists and communists. On the right, which was led by the Lliga, the position was one of fully-fledged opposition. The regionalists tried to remove any Olympic legitimacy from the Barcelona event by claiming that the IOC would never again accept Barcelona’s candidacy to host the Olympics if the People’s Olympiad ‘of Jews and communists’ were held with many amateur participants. The Spanish ultra-nationalists were on their same side and were steadfastly opposed to the initiative after they found out that the representatives of the Spanish state would be divided into four teams: Catalonia, Spain, Euskadi (Basque Country) and Galicia.

The COOP determined that, counter to Coubertin’s ‘state games’, the delegations that could participate in the People’s Olympiad could do so at three levels: ‘national, regional and local’. The national representatives included Alsace and Lorraine, Catalonia, Euskadi (Basque Country) and Galicia, in addition to a Palestinian delegation made up of Jewish athletes, and another made up of European Jewish emigrants who had fled Hitler. Athletes from Algeria and the French and Spanish protectorates of Morocco were also slated to participate, in addition to representatives from the United States and Canada. So was the professional high jumper Eva Dawes, for example, who refused to go to the Berlin Olympics and ‘compete with the shadow of a swastika’. It should also be noted that the presence of female athletes was yet another unique features of the People’s Olympiad: there were 200 in the Catalan delegation alone.

Facist coup d’état
In July 1936, in a city that had already begun to welcome the thousands of athletes and visitors to the People’s Olympiad, few people could have predicted that the words of peace written by Sagarra would become dead letters just a few hours before the opening ceremony. On the 19^th of July, the same day that Montjuïc stadium was supposed to open its doors to people’s sports, the army left its barracks to consummate the coup d’état against the Republic, and the Generalitat was permanently thwarted in its attempt to put on this unusual sporting and cultural event. Even though the vast majority of foreign athletes returned home, a few decided to take up weapons and fight against fascism, initially alongside the armed workers who stopped the soldiers on the streets of Barcelona, and later by heading to the front as members of the Anti-Fascist Militias. They unwittingly became the first foreign volunteers to defend the Republic, the embryo of the future International Brigades.

An article from the time perfectly describes the situation created on that distant 19^th of July: ‘It is impossible for us to calculate our sports prowess before the world because the javelin has had to be exchanged for a rifle, the discus for a hand grade, hurdles for parapets and trenches, foot races for military marches; likewise, our joy has slipped towards suffering, and outside attraction was derailed by horror, tourism by invasion, and light, love and light by gloom, hatred and death.’ As the text continued, the CCEP certainly was unable to ‘carry out that dream which had been shaped with such enthusiasm’, but the following year it was able to participate in its first and only experience of international proletarian games in the third and last working-class Olympiads before the outbreak of World War II held in the Flemish city of Antwerp.

Commemoration of the 80^th anniversary
To ensure that this event is not lost to oblivion, precisely the 80^th anniversary of the date when the People’s Olympiad was supposed to be held is coming with all sorts of commemoration and homage activities. The majority are being organised by the Committee for the Commemoration of the 80^th Anniversary of the People’s Olympiad of 1936, in conjunction with the Alternative Foundation, Unit against Fascism and Racism, the Democratic Memorial of the Generalitat and the Memory Commission of the Barcelona Town Hall.