Germany won more medals in the 1936 Summer Olympics than any other country and Nazi leadership considered the Games a domestic and international success. According to Hitler’s favourite architect, Albert Speer, “Hitler exulted over the harmonious atmosphere that prevailed during the Olympic Games. International animosity toward National Socialist Germany was plainly a thing of the past, he thought.”

Canadian journalist Matthew Halton saw the Games differently. Writing in the Toronto Daily Star on August 11, 1936, he cautioned: “You may not appreciate your democracy now, but some day you will. If you had been with me last week and seen fine men who had been completely broken on the Fascist wheel you would know whereof I speak.”

Halton’s fears proved prescient. On November 9, 1938, the Nazis unleashed a state-directed pogrom against Jews, burning over 1,000 synagogues and vandalizing over 7,000 Jewish businesses in the “Night of Broken Glass,” or Kristallnacht. On September 1, 1939, Germany invaded Poland, precipitating the Second World War and the Holocaust.

Between 1939 and 1945, the Nazis and their collaborators murdered some six million Jews across Nazi-occupied Europe. Hundreds of thousands of Roma and Sinti, as well as mentally and physically disabled people, also victims of Nazi terror, were killed. Countless others, including Poles, Soviet prisoners of war, political dissidents, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and homosexuals, were executed or died from maltreatment during imprisonment in Nazi prisons and concentration camps.