Feb. 17--The first-level story about the 1936 Olympics in Berlin has Jesse Owens, the African-American track star, showing up Adolf Hitler, the racist German dictator, by winning four gold medals over competitors from Hitler's supposed "master race."
It's a compelling tale of comeuppance. The fuller truth, of course, is darker and more complex, as a new exhibition at the Illinois Holocaust Museum demonstrates. Maybe the villain got embarrassed a little on the world stage, but he also got to temporarily calm international anxiety about his supremacist policies and military ambitions with the smokescreen of a five-ringed propaganda spectacle.
Among the revelations in "The Nazi Olympics: Berlin 1936": Hitler's Games gave us the now-stirring traditions of the grand opening ceremony -- big rallies were a Nazi specialty -- and the relay run carrying the lighted torch from the site of the original Olympic Games, in Greece.
"A lot of what we think about when we think about the Olympics, the Nazis were the first to do them," said Arielle Weininger, Illinois Holocaust Museum chief curator. "It very much diverted everyone's eyes from the reality of what was happening."
The exhibition, opening Sunday, comes at a propitious time for the continuingly resonant Skokie museum. It's the 80th anniversary of the Berlin Games. The movie "Race," which tells some of the story of Owens and those Olympics, opens Friday. And 2016 is an Olympic year, with the Summer Games being held in August in Brazil.
Sunday's exhibit opening will feature, from 2 p.m. to 3:30 p.m, a discussion involving Marlene Owens Rankin, one of Owens' daughters; Ralph H. Metcalfe Jr., son of Ralph Metcalfe, a 1932 and 1936 U.S. Olympian and, in the 1970s, a U.S. representative from Chicago; and exhibition curator Susan Bachrach, from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
The following weekend, at 1:30 p.m. Feb. 28, the museum offers an early look at the new documentary "Olympic Pride, American Prejudice," which tells of the 18 African-American athletes representing the U.S. in Berlin out of a contingent of more than 300. (Tickets are $10-$15 at www.ilholocaustmuseum.org. That film is presented with the DuSable Museum of African American History, which hosts its own screening at 7 p.m. Feb. 26; $10-$15 at www.dusablemuseum.org).
The traveling exhibition, created by the U.S. Holocaust Museum in 1996, coincident with the Nazi Olympics' 60th anniversary and with the Atlanta Olympics that year in the United States, superbly explains the buildup to the '36 Olympics, both in Germany and in the U.S.
In Germany, we learn, Hitler did not at first like the "internationalism" of the Games, which had been awarded to Germany in 1931, two years before the Nazis took power. But his propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels convinced the dictator of their propaganda value.
