German fighting games

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The German Fighting Games were a sporting event at the time of the Weimar Republic with a strongly politically colored meaning. Already in the 1890s planned and prepared as "German National Festivals ", in 1904 even included as a task and goal in the statutes of the German Reich Committee for the Olympic Games , the fighting games were not feasible until the First World War , mainly for financial reasons. Under the changed political signs of the post-war years, they then became a counter-draft of the German Reich Committee for Physical Exercise (DRA) to international competitive sport, especially the Olympic Games .

Emergence

At the beginning of the 1920s, the DRA brought the preparation of the German fighting games back to life and - among other things, with the help of its own combat game lottery and subsidized by the Reich government and the city of Berlin - now also ensured the financing. For the German athletes, these fighting games should now redefine the idea of ​​the Olympic Games , especially since they were excluded from the same at the international level in 1920 and 1924 as an indirect consequence of the First World War. Unlike before, the naming expresses a departure from Pierre de Coubertin's Olympic idea.

The sports journalist LC May 1922 wrote: "The falseness of the designation ´Olympic Games´ proved the event of the World War, it was only an international competition (...) The German fighting games are more a result of the cultural commonality". The Leipzig swimmer Herbert Heinrich , winner of the 100 m freestyle: "The games taught that the Olympic spirit has taken root deeper than ever in the German people."

Germans from abroad were also admitted; as early as 1922, several from Austria , Alsace and the Sudetenland , as well as other countries, took part. The pole vaulter Otto Fleiter, formerly German champion in 1912 and 1913, traveled from Barcelona and came third.

Sporting value

The actual German Fighting Games include the sports competition events, which were held as summer and winter games in 1922, 1926 and 1930, which were organized by the DRA and which included an opening ceremony with entry into the stadium - similar to the Olympics - as well as festivities, art performances and exhibitions. In terms of sport, the Games offered a similar program to the Olympic Games.

In athletics with eight Germans and one Austrian record as well as in swimming , in which Overhamm ( Breslau ) even achieved a world record with 6:13 minutes over 400 m back, there were consistently best performances in 1922. Noteworthy was the participation of the German Gymnastics Association alongside the various sports associations, despite the controversies that were already emerging, which led to the clean divorce a little later .

In football , the undecided, therefore later repeated final for the German championship of the DFB was integrated into the program in 1922 . However, due to excessive hardship, this offered 30,000 spectators a "strange, harrowing and unsatisfactory spectacle", according to eyewitness Walther Bensemann . Otherwise, in the context of the German fighting games in the Weimar period, the teams of the so-called state, actually regional associations of the DFB, later the Gau selections of the Reichsbund for physical exercises, competed against each other. The final took place in Cologne in 1926; the preliminary round had already been played decentrally three months earlier.

Continuation as Nazi fighting games

Nuremberg Rally Grounds. September 8, 1938, "Community Day" of the Nazi fighting games

The fighting games continued during the Nazi regime as Nazi fighting games . Since Germany was allowed to take part in the Olympic Games again since 1928, these games were no longer to be understood as a counter-movement to the Olympic idea, but rather as a propaganda platform for the regime. When in 1935 the international boycott movement against the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin increased significantly, the alternative implementation of German Combat Games in Berlin was the Reichssportführer's plan B. By order of Adolf Hitler on November 30, 1936, these games were held from 1937 to 1938 during the Nazi party rallies in Nuremberg, with regional qualifications for the main games also taking place. In the predominantly military sports competitions such as hand grenade targeting , 30-meter swimming in a drill suit with a knapsack or 15-kilometer luggage run in closed formations, the NSDAP and its branches also included the SA , SS , NSKK and HJ , as well as the Wehrmacht and the police . The SA was responsible for these paramilitary exhibition fights. The outbreak of war in 1939 ended the short episode of the Nazi fighting games .

Events

Summer games

Winter games

Nazi fighting games

  • 1937 in Nuremberg (as part of the Nazi party rally )
  • 1938 in Nuremberg (as part of the Nazi Party Congress)

literature

Contemporary reports
  • Carl Diem , Hans Borowik , Herbert Devantier: German fighting games 1922. Report of the German Reich Committee for physical exercises . Weidmannsche Buchhandlung, Berlin 1922.
  • Walther Bensemann , Fritz Frommel (Ed.): German Combat Games Berlin 1922 . Dr. Fritz Frommel Verlag, Stuttgart 1922.
  • Carl Diem: II. German Combat Games 1926 Cologne on the Rhine. Report of the German Reich Committee for Physical Exercise . Weidmannsche Buchhandlung, Berlin 1926.
further reading
  • Roland Naul: National Olympia and German fighting games . In: Manfred Lämmer (Hrsg.): Germany in the Olympic movement. An interim balance . NOK for Germany, Frankfurt am Main 1999, ISBN 3-87064-110-X , pp. 25-35.
  • Erich Beyer : Sport in the Weimar Republic . In: Horst Ueberhorst (Ed.): History of physical exercises. Vol. 3/2: Physical exercise and sport in Germany from the First World War to the present . Bartels et al. Wernitz, Berlin 1980, ISBN 3-87039-036-0 , pp. 657-700.
  • Arnd Krüger : The Olympic Games of 1936 as Fifth German Combat Games, in: Roland Naul (Hrsg.): Contemporary Studies in the National Olympic Games Movement (⇐ Sport Sciences International, Vol. 2). Frankfurt / M .: P. Lang 1997, 153-175. ISBN 3-631-32491-X .

Web links

See also

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Carl Diem, Hans Borowik, Herbert Devantier: Deutsche Kampfspiele 1922. Report of the German Reich Committee for Physical Exercise . Weidmannsche Buchhandlung, Berlin 1922, p. 6.
  2. ^ Carl Diem, Hans Borowik, Herbert Devantier: Deutsche Kampfspiele 1922. Report of the German Reich Committee for Physical Exercise . Weidmannsche Buchhandlung, Berlin 1922, p. 11.
  3. ↑ Kampfspiel-Liefe / The Idea of ​​German Combat Games , in: Walther Bensemann, Fritz Frommel (Ed.): Deutsche Kampfspiele Berlin 1922 . Dr. Fritz Frommel Verlag, Stuttgart 1922, p. 137.
  4. ↑ Walther Bensemann, Fritz Frommel (ed.): Deutsche Kampfspiele Berlin 1922 . Dr. Fritz Frommel Verlag, Stuttgart 1922, p. 85.
  5. ^ Carl Diem, Hans Borowik, Herbert Devantier: Deutsche Kampfspiele 1922. Report of the German Reich Committee for Physical Exercise . Weidmannsche Buchhandlung, Berlin 1922, p. 106; for a breakdown of the participants, see also p. 276 ff.
  6. ^ Carl Diem, Hans Borowik, Herbert Devantier: Deutsche Kampfspiele 1922. Report of the German Reich Committee for Physical Exercise . Weidmannsche Buchhandlung, Berlin 1922, p. 279.
  7. ↑ How Overhamm prepared for the world record , by Fritz Merk, in: Walther Bensemann, Fritz Frommel (ed.): Deutsche Kampfspiele Berlin 1922 . Dr. Fritz Frommel Verlag, Stuttgart 1922, p. 115.
  8. ↑ The introduction: German Football Championship , in: Walther Bensemann, Fritz Frommel (Ed.): Deutsche Kampfspiele Berlin 1922 . Dr. Fritz Frommel Verlag, Stuttgart 1922, p. 18.
  9. ↑ Details on football in the context of the German fighting games at the IFFHS : Libero special deutsch , No. D 9, 3rd quarter of 1994, as well as in the article Bundespokal .
  10. ^ From Eckart Dietzfelbinger: Nuremberg - Place of the Masses: The Nazi Party Rally Grounds. Prehistory and Difficult Legacy , p. 77.