1936 Summer Olympics
The Berlin Olympic Stadium in 1936.
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Reich Chancellor Adolf Hitler saw the Games as an opportunity to promote his government and ideals of racial supremacy, and the official Nazi party paper, the "Völkischer Beobachter", wrote in the strongest terms that Jews and Black people should not be allowed to participate in the Games. However, when threatened with a boycott of the Games by other nations, he compromised and allowed all races to participate.
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Jesse Owens specialized in the sprints and the long jump and was recognized in his lifetime as "perhaps the greatest and most famous athlete in track and field history". His achievement of setting three world records and tying another in less than an hour at the 1935 Big Ten track meet has been called "the greatest 45 minutes ever in sport" and has never been equaled. At the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin, Germany, Owens arrived to compete for the United States at the Summer Olympics. Adolf Hitler was using the games to show the world a revising Nazi Germany. He and other government officials had high hopes that German athletes would dominate the games with victories. Meanwhile, Nazi propaganda promoted concepts of "Aryan racial superiority" and depicted ethnic Africans as inferior. Owens countered this by winning international fame with four gold medals: 100 meters, 200 meters, long jump, and 4x100 meter relay. He was the most successful athlete at the games and as such has been credited with "single-handedly crushed Hitler's myth of Aryan supremacy."