Carl Diem

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Carl Diem (portrayed by Emil Stumpp , 1930)
Carl Diem

Carl Diem (born June 24, 1882 in Würzburg , † December 17, 1962 in Cologne ) was a German sports official , scientist and journalist . On the occasion of the 1936 Summer Olympics , he was the main initiator of torch relays before the start of the Olympic Games and, together with others, initiated the establishment of the world's first sports university in Berlin .

Childhood and youth

Diem's ​​family moved from Würzburg to Berlin in 1887, where Diem's ​​father, who had failed with a men's clothing business, wanted to make a fresh start. The family lived there cramped and poor. After his father emigrated to America after another economic setback without his family, Diem, who was not a particularly good student anyway, left high school prematurely to take care of the family.

After various commercial training and activities that did not satisfy him, he enlisted in the military as a one-year volunteer in 1904 , but to his disappointment was not taken on as a professional soldier afterwards. Now Diem devoted himself entirely to sport. However, his military service remained formative for his further life; In both world wars he volunteered at the first opportunity, and in World War II even in 1944 at the age of over 60 for the Volkssturm . He also often drew parallels between sporting and military combat and referred to the benefits of sport for the training of future soldiers.

Career as a sports official

Empire

Diem (right) 1913, on the grounds of Princeton University

In 1899 Diem founded the sports club SC Marcomannia Berlin . He drove to the Olympic Intermediate Games in Athens in 1906 as a team companion for the German team, financed by several newspapers for which he reported. He then continued his sports journalistic activity. In 1908 he became chairman of the "German Sports Authority for Athletics". From 1911 he was part of the federal management of the Young Germany Federation , the umbrella organization for all youth organizations. In 1913 he founded the award of the " German Sports Badge ", which is still awarded today and for which he was one of the first to take the exam.

For the 1912 Olympic Games , he traveled to Stockholm as captain of the German team and led the team to the stadium. During the Games, the hosting of the next Olympic Games in 1916 was assigned to Berlin. At the suggestion of chairman Victor von Podbielski , Diem was elected Secretary General for the Olympic Games in November 1912 by the German Reich Committee for the Olympic Games (DRAfOS). The full-time sports functionary volunteered to be on the front lines at the beginning of the First World War , despite his responsible position . Because of the war, the games did not take place. The DRAfOS was renamed the German Reich Committee for Physical Exercise (DRAfL) in 1917 and Diem was appointed its general secretary.

Weimar Republic

Diem (right) with Theodor Lewald at the 1928 Olympic Winter Games

In 1920 the " Reich Youth Competitions ", which he initiated, took place for the first time , the forerunners of today's Federal Youth Games . In 1920 he played a key role in founding the German University for Physical Education in Berlin and became the prorector of this first sports university in the world. As a sports official he was head of mission of the German Olympic teams at the Olympic Games in 1928 and 1932 . In 1930 he made it possible for Sepp Herberger to study at the sports university without a high school diploma with a special permit . Diem as an employee would not have been able to develop any effectiveness in sport if his boss Theodor Lewald had not repeatedly supported him. Diem repeatedly emphasized the fighting character in sport. Increased in 1919 - after the prohibition of compulsory military service by the Peace Treaty of Versailles - he propagated “sport as a substitute for military service”, which should serve the military and political recovery of Germany. He linked his views closely with his own World War II experiences and favored the Langemarck myth about an alleged heroic sacrifice in which 2000 young and poorly trained German soldiers died. In 1932 he predicted that the “bones” of the “Fighter von Langemarck” would “create a new German future”.

Nazi state

Information board about Diem, bell tower and memorial at the Olympic Stadium. (2011)

In the era of National Socialism Diem in 1934 by the Nazis classified as "politically unreliable" (probably because of the Jewish origins of his wife). In 1933 his position as DRAfL general secretary ended. In the same year he lost his post as Vice-Rector of the Sports University because he refused to join the NSDAP .

Thereafter, Diem held important and prominent functions and participated in propaganda campaigns. As General Secretary of the Organizing Committee, he was instrumental in planning and holding the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin from January 1933 . Based on an idea by Alfred Schiff , he and Theodor Lewald initiated the first Olympic torch relay from Greece to the respective venue - this custom has been preserved to this day. He also suggested the inclusion of a Langemarck consecration site in the planning of the Berlin Olympic site. During the construction, he staged an earth ritual with a Nazi cult of the dead, in which "blood-soaked" earth procured by himself from the Langemarck battlefield was sunk in a shrine in the Langemarck Hall. From 1936 to 1945 he headed the International Olympic Institute (IOI) in Berlin. About a third of his publications from 1938 to 1945 appeared in National Socialist publications. In 1939 he was entrusted by the Reich Sports Leader with the management of the foreign department of the NSRL . Diem was often represented with sports reports in the weekly newspaper Das Reich (1940–1945) controlled by Joseph Goebbels . In an article in the Reichssportblatt of June 25, 1940, he praised "with breathless tension and increasing admiration this storm run, this victory run" through France, stood "in amazement at the deeds of the army" and wrote that "the sporting spirit in which Germany's young team grew up ”, first the“ assault through Poland, Norway, Holland, Belgium and France ”, the“ victory run into a better Europe ”made possible. Sentences like "Sport is voluntary soldiery" also come from Diem. On March 18, 1945, he called on members of the Hitler Youth in a fiery speech in the domed hall of the Berlin Olympic site for a “final sacrifice for the Führer”: Diem quoted the poet Tyrtaios in his speech : Death is beautiful when the noble warrior for the fatherland fights, for the fatherland dies . In the days that followed, hundreds of young people were killed in the vicinity of the Reichssportfeld and at the Pichelsdorf bridges on both sides of Heerstraße trying to stop Soviet tank units with handguns and bazookas .

Diem served the Nazi state in many offices and had known about the Holocaust since the summer of 1943 . He held on to his offices, which served sport-political and general political tasks.

After the Second World War

Memorial plaque from 1964 on the marathon gate in the Olympiastadion Berlin.

After the end of the war in 1945, Diems's book Olympische Flamme (Deutscher Archiv-Verlag, Berlin 1942), comprising several volumes, was placed on the list of literature to be segregated in the Soviet occupation zone .

On April 12, 1947 Diem was appointed rector of the German Sport University he founded in Cologne . He held this office until his death in 1962. From 1950 to 1953 he was also a sports officer in the Federal Ministry of the Interior . In 1947, Diem offered Sepp Herberger the post of football teacher, which he held at the sports university until 1957. In 1951, Diem, as editor-in-chief, accompanied the founding of the magazine Olympisches Feuer , a magazine of the German Olympic Sports Confederation (DOSB) and the German Olympic Society (DOG).

Carl Diem left behind 60,000 letters and 12,000 pages of diaries, which are accessible in the Carl and Liselott Diem archive at the Sport University Cologne. Until his death, Diem did not comment publicly on the positions formulated before the Hitler Youth.

Private life

In 1930 Diem married the sports teacher Liselott Bail ; the marriage resulted in four children (born in 1931, 1932, 1935 and 1941).

Honors

souvenir

In the first few years after Diem's ​​death, appreciation of Diem's ​​merits in German sport outweighed it. Numerous sports facilities (for example in Bad Bentheim , Iserlohn and Wadersloh ) and streets (for example in Furtwangen and Stadtlohn ) are still named after him today. It was only towards the end of the last century that Diem's ​​role in National Socialism was viewed increasingly critically in the light of contemporary historical research. "Nothing is known of public repentance [note: Carl Diems on his role in National Socialism], nor of serious doubts from renowned historians about Diem's ​​role in National Socialism."

After discussions that were sometimes passionate and very controversial, streets named after Diem (for example 1996 in Mülheim an der Ruhr , 2003 in Ingolstadt, 2004 in Kempten (Allgäu) , 2007 in Aachen and Paderborn , 2009 in Pulheim , 2010 in Münster , 2013 / 14 in Alsdorf ) and schools (elementary school Ritterhude ; 4th comprehensive high school Berlin-Spandau , today Heinrich-Böll-Oberschule), halls (for example 2001 in Berlin-Steglitz or 2004 in his hometown Würzburg). The German Sport University, located on the former Carl-Diem-Weg in Cologne, was defeated in the legal dispute against the renaming of the street in 2008 to “Am Sportpark Müngersdorf”. The Carl Diem shield, which the German Athletics Association has been awarding to deserving officials since 1962, was renamed the DLV honor shield on February 23, 2001. A medal named after him from the city of Würzburg is no longer awarded. The Carl Diem plaque , which was donated in 1952 by the German Sports Association for outstanding German-language sports science work and has been awarded every two years since 1953 , continued to be awarded. Since 2006, the DOSB has replaced its nameplate, which was used to commemorate Diem, with the DOSB Science Prize . In Ludwigsburg , the city administration's submission to rename Carl-Diem-Strasse failed on July 29, 2015 due to the rejection of the CDU parliamentary group, the Free Voters parliamentary group and the REP city ​​council . A city council of the FDP also rejected the proposal.

Fonts

  • Olympic flame. 3 volumes, Berlin 1936 (considered an important contemporary document of National Socialist sports propaganda)
  • Asian equestrian games. A contribution to the cultural history of the peoples. German Archive Publishing House, Berlin 1941
  • Physical education with Goethe. A source work on the history of sport. Kramer, Frankfurt am Main 1948.
  • Lord Byron as a sportsman. Cologne 1950.
  • A life dedicated to sport. Ratingen n.d. [1974].

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. M. Breuer, 2008, p. 17
  2. M. Breuer, 2008, p. 18
  3. a b M. Breuer, 2008, p. 19
  4. Military history reports . Karlsruhe 1917, p. 120
  5. M. Breuer, 2008, p. 20
  6. a b c Ernst Klee : The dictionary of persons on the Third Reich. Who was what before and after 1945 . Second updated edition. Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2005, pp. 108-109.
  7. ^ Arnd Krüger : Theodor Lewald. Sports guide to the Third Reich. Bartels & Wernitz, Berlin 1975, ISBN 3-87039-954-6
  8. a b Information board in the bell tower memorial at the Olympic Stadium, November 3, 2011.
  9. Historian Thamer suggests renaming ( memento from October 19, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) In: Münstersche Zeitung , August 11, 2010.
  10. Court confirms “victim speech” in front of the Hitler Youth - will Halle be renamed? In: Main-Post , January 22, 2002
  11. ^ Quotation from Ernst Klee: Das Personenlexikon zum Third Reich. Fischer Paperback, 2005, p. 109.
  12. Wolfgang Bausch: To the last breath. Diem and his role in the Nazi era - why German sport finds it so difficult to critically assess its superfather . In: sportunterricht.de
  13. a b 50 years ago. Children should save the leader . In: Focus , April 15, 1995:
  14. Frank Becker in an interview from October 18, 2012 ( "Diem can be compared with Hindenburg" ) at LISA
  15. ^ German administration for popular education in the Soviet zone of occupation, list of the literature to be sorted out, letter D, pp. 72-90. Retrieved December 15, 2011.
  16. Franz Lotz: A woman for all weathers - for Liselott Diem's ​​70th birthday . In: DTS magazine , 1976/18, p. 18
  17. a b Monument fall. Sports university loses in the name dispute over Carl Diem. In: Spiegel-Online . August 22, 2008, accessed February 11, 2014 .
  18. From the Eagle's Nest to Between the Gardens . Street names in Mülheim-Ruhr
  19. Carl-Diem-Straße is renamed. In: Donaukurier. May 8, 2003, accessed July 23, 2016 .
  20. Diem-Weg: Karl instead of Carl should end a dispute. In: Allgäuer Zeitung . February 17, 2004, accessed February 11, 2014 .
  21. ^ Andreas Rüttenauer: War of Expertise. In: taz . December 6, 2010, accessed February 11, 2014 .
  22. ^ In Alsdorf should ... In: Aachener Nachrichten. March 24, 2014, accessed February 15, 2016 .
  23. DVS-Information 2/1996, p. 42 ( Memento of the original dated November 7, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (PDF; 46 kB)  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / cosmic3.rrz.uni-hamburg.de
  24. ^ By decision of the DLV Association Council on February 23, 2001 in Dortmund, the name was changed to the DLV Honor Shield, see Honors by the German Athletics Association in the BLV archive, accessed on December 15, 2011.
  25. Competition for the Science Prize of the German Sports Association (Carl Diem Badge) 2005/2006. ( Memento of the original from October 20, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Retrieved December 15, 2011 (PDF).  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.uni-leipzig.de
  26. Documentation of the festival academy of the DOSB Science Prize , accessed on December 15, 2011.
  27. Melanie Braun: Hindenburg remains Ludwigsburg . In: Stuttgarter Zeitung . July 31, 2015, accessed August 2, 2015