Hitler praised the virtues of sport, especially its effect on young people. “What wonderful bodies can be seen today!” He commented on one occasion, after looking at a photo of a swimmer. But when it comes to physical exercise, it cannot be said that he led by example. “He refused to play any sport,” Albert Speer, the Führer’s favorite architect, confidant and Minister of Armaments of the Reich, writes in his Memoirs: “Nor did he mention ever having done so in his youth.”
To the Nazis, however, what interested them in sport was its capacity as a weapon of mass manipulation. Major sporting events, such as football matches, scenes of passionate passions, were the ideal occasion to inoculate fascist ideology among the crowds. The Sport exhibition gives a good example of this. Masse. Macht. Fußball im Nationalsozialismus (Sport. Masses. Power. Football during National Socialism), which is exhibited in the Berlin Sports Museum, in a building built by the Nazis within the Olympic complex whose stadium will host the Euro final at one point in which the rise of the extreme right —AfD was the second most voted force in the European elections on the 9th— is worrying on the continent.
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