c. 1996 Religion News Service

WASHINGTON _ Olympic competitions have always been a platform to display the pride and ambitions of a nation. As the games continue this week in Atlanta, a photo exhibit at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum looks back to the Olympic games of 60 years ago in Berlin, when the international sports competition put the ambitions of Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich on display.

Long before Hitler rose to power in Germany, the International Olympic Committee designated Berlin as the site of the 1936 games. In”The Nazi Olympics: Berlin 1936,”the museum explores the drama that unfolded between 1933 and 1936, as the world slowly became aware of the Third Reich’s racist and anti-Semitic policies.

The photographs, videotaped testimonies and artifacts shed light on the way sport became a forum for Nazi propaganda. They capture the disappointment of Jewish athletes barred from competition as well as the triumph of Jesse Owens and 17 other African-American athletes, whose victories on the field were an eloquent answer to Hitler’s notions of Aryan superiority.

The exhibit will be on display in the Kimmel-Rowan Gallery on the museum’s lower level through July 1997.

END RNS