Carl Diem - Legacy

Legacy

In March 1945, as the Red Army was closing in on Berlin in the final weeks of the Second World War, Diem staged another famous event in the city's Olympic stadium. Addressing a rally of thousands of teenage Hitler Youth, Diem exhorted them to defend the capital to the death, in the spirit of the ancient Spartans. Some two thousand of the young men assembled there did exactly that, sacrificing themselves before Berlin finally fell in May.

After the conclusion of the war, Diem was quickly rehabilitated into the mainstream of the newly democratic Federal Republic of Germany. He returned to his career as a historian of German sport and the Olympic games. In 1960, he published an authoritative general history of sport. At his death in 1962 in Cologne, he was once again a respected national figure. The Carl Diem Institute at the German Sports University was created in his honor, and run by his wife, Liselott, until 1989. After her death in 1992, the institute was renamed the Carl and Liselott Diem Archive. Diem remains the most influential historian of sports in Germany.

The full nature of Diem's relations with the Nazi apparatus is complex. His career in national sport preceded the Nazi regime by decades, and he was appointed to organize the 1936 games years before Hitler decided to put his own indelible mark on the Berlin competition. But like many career professionals who chose to accept Nazi patronage, Diem's legacy was irreversibly tarnished by proximity to his masters. His earlier writings did occasionally embrace popular ideas about racial superiority; he clung to his prominent national positions during the Nazi period, and he took part in war propaganda, including the Berlin rally near the war's end. Richard Mandell, author of the 1971 book The Nazi Olympics, was critical of Diem; in a reprint of the book, he defended his position, writing: "Recently, some careful German researchers have uncovered documents showing that Carl Diem's complicity with the Nazis went beyond his confessed use of them to promote sport. With his Nazi connections he settled brutally some old scores, and he stayed with the Nazis on ideological grounds long after their savagery was exposed and after their coming defeat was apparent to all." And yet even Mandell did not dispute that Diem was "the greatest sports historian and most profound theorist of sport education" of the 20th century.

During Diem's final years, there was open controversy about his Nazi connections. For example, in 1954 the French ministry of Education postponed a display of gymnastics before a delegation headed by Diem (then head of the Sportschule at Cologne), after students claimed that Diem had been a "Nazi general." Two days later, the students recanted, and admitted that there was no "formal proof" of the allegation. In the 1990s, a public debate erupted in Germany over his legacy, and whether streets named in his honor should be renamed because of the taint of the Nazi years.