Hurrah for history

Forget the football, a bizarrely exotic touch of history reverberates around the World Cup final in Berlin’s Olympiastadion tomorrow evening. Listen to this: ‘Berlin was crowded with foreigners and the streets beflagged. Went for a walk down the Unter den Linden, an avenue of banners blowing in the breeze, and everywhere the radio booming achtung and giving the latest result….’ That was British Tory MP ‘Chips’ Channon’s diary entry for 5 August 1936, the fourth day of competition at the notorious Berlin Olympics 70 summers ago. Plushly refurbished certainly, but precise in outline and feature, the Olympiastadion is the very amphitheatre where Adolf Hitler — and Jesse Owens — strutted their different stuff those three score and ten years past. Wide, handsome boulevard, Unter den Linden is still there, of course (though now a Jesse Owens Allee runs off it); the gigantic 10-ton, cast-steel Olympic Bell, shot down in 1945 by a British anti-tank shell, has been restored to its 1936 tower; and the very same five sombre, black iron Olympic rings remain suspended high between the vast twin pillars of the stadium entrance, just as they were that humid, showery, afternoon when Richard Wagner’s Huldigungsmarsch sounded imperiously as the Führer raised his right arm to acknowledge the venerating sea of 100,000 similar salutes of homage as he took his place in the Chancellor’s tribune. To Hitler’s right was then Reich Minister Frich, deputy Führer Hess, and Field Marshal von Blomberg; to his left, Italian Crown Prince Umberto, and (like their VIP compatriots resplendent in military uniform) Messrs Goebbels and Göring. Alongside those two, Leni Riefenstahl directed the movements of a bulky film camera.