GHOSTS OF THE PAST GHOSTS OF THE PAST
Berlin's Olympic Stadium, one of the most visible reminders of the Nazi
era, returns to center stage with the World Cup finals
Matthew Schofield McClatchy Foreign Correspondent
BERLIN - Adolf Hitler couldn't stand even 90 minutes of soccer. After a
Norwegian -- by legend, a Jew -- scored his second goal in the 84th
minute, sending the favored, and "racially pure," German team crashing
out of the 1936 Olympics, a red-faced Hitler stormed out of his beloved
Olympic Stadium.
Trailing him was a panicky Nazi propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels,
who later noted in his diary: "The Fuhrer is incensed. I can hardly bear
it. A bag of nerves."
On Sunday, the world's attention once again will be focused on that same
field for the championship game of the World Cup soccer tournament.
Soccer fans who have never been inside will have a creepy sense of
having been here before, in scenes from grainy newsreels shown a hundred
times in documentaries and history programs.
"It's impossible to walk into that place without evoking the ghosts of
our past," said Erik Eggers, a German soccer journalist whom the German
soccer association once banned from its facilities because of stories
he'd written about the stadium's Nazi past.
The stadium hasn't changed much since Hitler, from his seat on the right
side of the VIP terrace, raised his arm in a stiff Nazi salute and tried
to use sport to advance his belief in racial superiority before he set
about conquering Europe and killing 11 million civilians, including 6
million Jews.
cont'd....
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