1936: What Was the Big News?
Francisca O'Kon
2025-04-26 03:20:26
Count answers: 3
The Berlin Olympics had been awarded to Germany before the Nazis came to power, but in August 1936 they provided a perfect opportunity for the Nazis to showcase Hitler's Third Reich to the 49 nations of the world competing for Olympic gold. The 1936 Olympics will mostly be remembered for the exploitation of the Games by the Third Reich in pursuit of Nazi ideology. The Olympics were a political coup for Reich Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels, who ordered the removal of anti-Semitic slogans from Jewish shops, moved "undesirables" out of Berlin, toned down the racist Nazi newspaper "Der Stürmer" and organised groundbreaking TV and radio broadcasting of the Games. The Berlin Games were only a partial success for the Nazis. Germany finished top of the medal table ahead of their main rivals, the United States, but the Americans dominated the Athletics events with African American Jesse Owens winning four gold medals ahead of his blond, Aryan rivals. Hitler refused to put the gold medal around Owens' neck. The German filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl was famously commissioned by the German Olympic Committee to make a film documenting the Berlin Games for $7 million.
Regan Grimes
2025-04-26 01:57:24
Count answers: 5
Regarded as the “hinge of the decade,” 1936 was when Britain found itself ruled by three kings in quick succession; when idealistic young men and women went off to fight in the Spanish Civil War; when political agitation at home led to riots; when poverty and unemployment grew; when India was in revolt and when Hitler poisonedthe Olympic Games by snubbing black medallist Jesse Ownes and the world edged closer to war.
It wasn’t just that bad things were happening and that menace hung in the air but that those bad things no longer could be concealed from the public, not least because the development of radio continued and 1936 saw the BBC launch the world’s first scheduled television service.
In fact Britain had recovered relatively well from the traumas of the Wall Street Crash of 1929.
But in 1936 when Mussolini used poison gas against the tribes of Abyssinia and Hitler marched his troops into the Rhineland, preparation for war overshadowed all.
Death stalked the year.
On December 10, 1936, Edward VIII renounced the throne for the woman he loved.
A year that had started with some optimism was now ending in a morass of gloom.
Rusty Cruickshank
2025-04-26 00:36:20
Count answers: 5
On the evening of 30 November 1936, a fire was discovered within the Crystal Palace, an enormous plate glass and cast-iron building located in the Sydenham area of south London. Multiple fire brigades attended, but the fire grew until it could be seen for miles around. The morning after the fire, the Guardian published the following report under the title ‘London flocks to the Palace pyre’. There was no mistaking the earnestness of London’s farewell to the Crystal Palace tonight. The news was given out in one of the earlier news bulletins on the wireless, but long before that the flickering orange glow into the sky, which could be seen from Islington, Willesden, and even farther north and as far south as Hayward’s Heath, had begun to draw the crowds in hundreds of thousands, by bus and car and train.
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