Carl Diem (24 June 1882 – 17 December 1962) was a German sports administrator, and as a Secretary General of the Organizing Committee of the Berlin Olympic Games, he was also the chief organizer of the 1936 Olympic Summer Games.
He created the tradition of the Olympic torch relay when he organised the 1936 build-up event, and was an influential historian of sport, particularly the Olympic games.
Biography Born into an upper-middle-class family, Diem was a middle- and long-distance runner as a teenager – unusual in a country where gymnastic-style athletics was fashionable, rather than what were known as "Anglo-Saxon" athletics. He showed an early gift for organizing, founding his first athletic club, called Marcomannia, in 1899.Mandell, Richard, The Nazi Olympics, 1987 reprint edition, University of Illinois Press, Champaign, IL, 1987, p. 84 As a young man, Diem originally pursued a career in sales, but also began to write articles for sporting newspapers. At the age of twenty, he was hired by the German Sports Authority for Athletics (the Deutsche Sportbehörde für Athletik, or DSBfA), and a year later was elected to its board of directors.Findling, John E. and Pelle, Kimberly E., Historical Dictionary of the Modern Olympic Movement, Greenwood Publishing Group, Westport, CT, 1996, p. 87 Diem was an ardent believer in the heroic Olympian ideal, and in the contributions that international sport could foster harmony between nations. In this regard (and others) he was a fervent disciple of Pierre de Coubertin, the founder of the International Olympic Committee and father of the modern international Olympiad.Taylor, Paul, Jews and the Olympic Games, Sussex Academy Press
In 1906, Diem began his Olympic career, leading the German contingent of athletes to the Athens games (for reasons that are not entirely clear, the German delegation entered the stadium first in the parade of athletes). In 1909, the games for the summer of 1912 were awarded to Stockholm, but the IOC made it clear that Diem and his fellow organizers could expect to hold the 1916 games in Berlin.Findling and Pelle, Historical Dictionary, pp. 28 and 43 In 1912 he initiated the award of the German Sports Badge, following the example of a Swedish award encountered during the Stockholm Olympics.
Diem threw himself into preparations for the 1916 games. His principal partner in this and most of his Olympic endeavors was Theodor Lewald, who was for many years chairman of the German Olympic Committee. In the summer of 1914, Diem and Lewald were planning their spectacular 1916 Olympiad when World War I erupted, and the Berlin games were subsequently cancelled. Diem enlisted in the German army and served in Belgium and France. He was wounded at Saint-Quentin, recovered, and fought at both Champagne and the Argonne.Daniels, George G., The Olympic Century (Vol. 6): V and VI Olympiads, Stockholm-The Inter-Allied Games, World Sport Research and Publications, Inc., Los Angeles, 2000, p. 99
After the war, Olympic officials penalized Germany by excluding them from the 1920 and 1924 games. Diem and Lewald, who had returned to their sports-organizing duties, lobbied successfully to win permission for a German team to compete in the 1928 games in Amsterdam.Bryant, John, "The Stadium Hitler Hated", The Times, 10 December 1998 With support from the state, Diem also founded the Deutsche Hochschule für Leibesübungen, a school dedicated to the study of the science of sport. He was a great admirer of American athletic programs, and in 1929 toured the US for five weeks with Lewald. During this trip he formed a friendship with Avery Brundage, an American Olympic official who would play a major role in the controversy over the 1936 Olympics (and in Olympic history for decades to come).Guttmann, Alan, The Games Must Go On, Columbia University Press, New York, 1984, p. 64 In 1938, Diem was elected as a Corresponding Fellow in the prestigious American Academy of Physical Education (now known as the National Academy of Kinesiology). In 1955, his wife, Liselott Diem, was also elected into the Academy as a Corresponding Fellow.
Olympics in Berlin
Carl Diem became the secretary of the all-German sports organization (DRL), the forerunner of the Nationalsozialistischer Reichsbund für Leibesübungen (NSRL), the Sports Organ of the Third Reich.
In April 1931,Jordi Mercader. “The Games after Sixty Six Years Wait.” Olympic Review, no. 233 (March 1987). again largely due to the reputation and lobbying efforts of Diem and Lewald, Berlin was selected to host the 1936 summer games, and Diem was named Secretary General of the Organizing Committee. He attended the 1932 games in Los Angeles, carefully observing the host city's preparations and facilities, committed to meeting or outdoing the American accomplishment in Berlin four years later.Bryant, "The Stadium Hitler Hated"
Dr. Theodor Lewald, Diem's boss as President of the Olympic Committee and IOC Member, set up an Organizing Committee for the Olympic games, five days before the elections that resulted in Hitler being elected the new chancellor. The rise of Adolf Hitler to power in 1933 once again threatened Diem's dream of a Berlin Olympiad: Nazism did not embrace international sport, and Hitler himself had dismissed the Olympics as a project of "Jews and Freemasons.""Prof. Carl Diem", obituary, The Times, Tuesday, 18 December 1962
Five days after the swearing-in of the new Ministers, Theodor Lewald had an appointment with Joseph Goebbels, the new Minister of Propaganda. Lewald, a former Under-secretary of state was well connected inside the whole administration and able to get an appointment. He convinced Goebbels that this was a once in a lifetime propaganda opportunity. Goebbels convinced Hitler, who informed Diem and Lewald that he would support the Games. Six months later, after touring the construction sites for the sporting arenas, he told Diem that the German state would pay the bills.
Instead of a balanced budget, which Diem had proposed in late 1932, new sporting facilities were built, the underground train extended to the stadium site. The amount of money provided by the government was about twenty times higher than the original budget. Diem used the opportunity to quadruple his own salary.Arnd Krüger, "Germany: The Propaganda Machine", in: Arnd Krüger and William Murray (eds.), The Nazi Olympics: Sport, Politics and Appeasement in the 1930s, Univ. of Illinois Press, Champaign, IL, 2003, pp. 17-43.
The Nazis embraced the Olympic Games not only because they promised to be a unique opportunity to extol the virtues of their "reborn" state; as a celebration of physical prowess, the games also dovetailed neatly with the Nazi idealization of youth, fitness and athleticism. Further, according to Nazi racial theories, their own Aryan "superiorities" were descended from the great achievements of ancient Greece.
Despite the official Nazi support for the games, Diem's position as organizer was at risk, mostly because his Hochschule employed Jewish teachers and because Diem's wife, Liselott, came from a Jewish family. He himself was classified, for these reasons, as a "white Jew",Guttmann, The Games Must Go On, p. 64 but even so, Diem managed to hold on to his job and solidify his position with his Nazi patrons. His boss Theodor Lewald, who had given up his post as President of the German Sports Body in 1933 before the Nazis could remove him, clung to the newly created position of President of the Organizing Committee. (Lewald's father was a prominent lawyer who was Jewish. Lewald had to arrange himself with Hans von Tschammer und Osten, the new President of the National Olympic Committee, but even more so with Interior Minister Wilhelm Frick (whose Ministry had been in charge of elite sport since 1914.)
American IOC Member Gen. Charles Sherrill had a one-hour interview with Hitler in which Sherrill not only asked Hitler for an autograph, but demanded the participation of at least one token Jew on the German teams for the Winter and Summer Games – or the Games would be cancelled. Hitler strongly rejected this "friendly" advice, shouting that if the worst came to the worst, the Olympic games would be staged for Germans only.Arnd Krüger, "Germany: The Propaganda Machine" The Nazi establishment went out of their way to assure the world that "non-Aryan" participants were being allowed to compete – and kept Jewish Olympic hopefuls in national training camps.Taylor, Paul, Jews and the Olympic Games
The American Olympic Association remained sceptical about the Nazis' openness to non-Aryan competitors, and a movement to boycott the Berlin games began to gather steam among U.S. Olympic officials. Diem's old friend Avery Brundage, president of the American Olympic Committee, was dispatched to appraise the facts; in Berlin, Diem convinced Brundage that Jews were not being excluded, though he likely knew otherwise. Brundage returned to the U.S. and, defeating the boycott's supporters, helped to ensure that a full American athletic delegation would attend the games in Berlin.Guttmann, The Games Must Go On, pp. 65-71 With the first edition of the Nuremberg Laws (September 1935), excluding Jews from public life, "Half-Jews" (no more than two of the four grandparents racially of Jewish descent) were still permitted in public life but not in the civil service. This gave Lewald the opportunity to preside over the Opening Ceremony next to Hitler, allowed Rudi Ball to play hockey in the Winter games, and permitted Helene Mayer to fence (and win a silver medal) in the Summer Games. Jewish Germans were, however, excluded.
Diem held high posts in the Third Reich's sports organization even after the Olympics, becoming the leader of the Foreign Department of the National Socialist Sports Office (the aforementioned NSRL) in 1939. As such he was responsible for the management of German athletes in foreign countries, as well as for the international affairs of the NSRL. With his good relations with the IOC, Diem succeeded in having the 1940 Winter Olympics scheduled for Garmisch-Partenkirchen, despite the fact that the previous Winter Olympics had been held there, and that Germany had already invaded Czechoslovakia at the time the decision was made.Arnd Krüger, "The Nazi Olympics of 1936", in: Kevin Young & Kevin B. Wamsley (eds.), Global Olympics: Historical and Sociological Studies of the Modern Games, Elsevier, Oxford, 2005, pp. 43-58, . The 1940 Winter Olympics were cancelled following Germany's invasion of Poland.
Torch relay There is a controversy as to who invented the Olympic torch relay. According to the "Official Report", a Mr Haeggert, administrator of the Propaganda Minister on the Propaganda Committee of the Summer Games, invented the propaganda stunt to raise public awareness in the last weeks prior to the games, and Diem was merely told to work out the details. On the other hand, Diem himself claimed that it was his idea all along. On a visit to Greece for an Olympic conference in 1934, Diem and Lewald imagined a new symbolic pageant that would cloak the German games with the ancient Greek mantle: the transit of a lit Olympic flame from Greece to Berlin by a relay of torch-bearing runners. While the relay is sometimes believed to be an ancient tradition, it was in fact the wholly modern creation of Lewald and Diem; the ancient games included a ritual flame commemorating the theft of fire from the gods by Prometheus, but not a torch relay. Diem had been organizing long-distance road relays ever since 1910.