On Holocaust Memorial Day, it is vital we remember all the people targeted by the Nazis
Many people, even those with no more than a passing interest in sport, have heard of Jesse Owens, the American athlete who ruined Adolf Hitler’s moment in the sun. For there can be no question that Hitler saw the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin as the ideal platform from which to amplify Nazi propaganda and demonstrate his white supremacist ideology. But Owens, the grandchild of a slave, shattered that illusion.
Owens became the first US track and field athlete to win four gold medals at a single Olympiad. For most of the watching world, his dominance in the 100m, 200m, long jump, and 4x100m relay was a powerful repudiation of Hitler’s myth of a superior race of humans, the Aryans. So stung were the Nazis by Owens’ exploits in their own backyard that their chief propagandist, Joseph Goebbels, would later write in his diary that “white humanity should be ashamed of itself”. By this he meant that it had been a mistake to allow black athletes to compete at the world’s grandest sporting event.
Olivia Marks-Woldman is the chief executive and Farayi Mungazi is the senior communications officer at the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust
