THANKS to the historical diligence of our World Cup football commentators, there are few who are unaware that this week marks the 70th anniversary of the 1936 Berlin Olympics.

    Every time a match was played in the Berlin Olympic stadium, we were constantly reminded that this was the scene of Jesse Owens's famous victories, in which the humble African American from Ohio supposedly made a mockery of Hitler's racial theories.

    We were also told by some that a Nazi-built stadium was no place to hold the World Cup, but those voices were ignored, and rightly so – the Berlin stadium is not a symbol of the evil of Nazism like the watchtower at Auschwitz.

    Besides, the World Cup gave the stadium new associations, new memories, all of which diminish the role it played in the 1930s.

    However, that still does not mean that lessons should not be learned from 1936. The grandly titled "Games of the Eleventh Olympiad of the Modern Era" were, without doubt, the most controversial sporting event held in the past 100 years, and perhaps the most controversial of all time.

    Far from being a celebration of our common humanity, they were a celebration of everything that was going wrong during that turbulent decade. For many of the athletes, the event was still a sporting one, but wiser and older heads knew that behind the Olympics lay something far more sinister.

    One of those heads was the Foreign Office mandarin, Sir Robert Vansittart, who had visited the Games as part of an informal diplomatic mission. Upon his return, he told his masters that the Germans were "in strict training now, not for the Olympic Games, but for breaking some other and emphatically unsporting world records, and perhaps the world as well".

    As such, the Berlin Games can be seen as nothing less than a warm-up for war. The youth who competed on the cinders in Berlin would soon be fighting each other in the ashes of Europe and the Pacific.

    What the warm-up also revealed was that the totalitarian states were on the rise. Germany won the most medals at the Games, and the Italians and the Japanese both did well. Hitler and his cronies were able to point at the medal table and show the world that Fascism was the way to organise a society, not democracy, which they saw as weak and ineffective.

    The Games were most certainly a propaganda triumph for the Nazis.

    Jesse Owens's successes may have got under Hitler's skin, but they did not detract from the fact that thousands of athletes and spectators returned home to say that there was nothing wrong with Germany, and that all this nonsense about the treatment of the Jews was just a load of claptrap put out by a Left-leaning press. As Frederick Birchall wrote in the New York Times, many visitors thought that the "Germans are a much maligned, hospitable, wholly peaceful people who deserve the best the world can give them".

    This impression, of course, was entirely false. By 1936, the Nazi regime was three years old, and plenty of the seeds of the Holocaust had already been sown. Gypsies were interned in special "work camps". Jews were victims not only of increasingly harsh strictures and laws, but also of random slayings carried out by SA thugs. Communists and trade unionists were incarcerated in concentration camps. Germany, therefore, was emphatically not a nice place in which one could play sport with a clean conscience. "Going to a party in such a house may not be a pleasant or profitable experience," wrote the noted sportswriter John Kieran.

    But we did go to the party. The only nation that boycotted the Games was Spain, but then she was at the beginning of a civil war that would be seen as another warm-up.

    Despite the protestations, appeasement was in the air, not just in the world of politics, but also in that of sports. The sporting world also felt that sport was above politics, a charmingly naïve notion that Hitler was able to capitalise on.

    In two years' time, we have another party to go to – the Beijing Olympics. The similarities between Beijing 2008 and Berlin 1936 could not be more striking. Like Nazi Germany, China is ruled by a despotic regime that incarcerates and executes political prisoners.

    As the Nazis did with Germany, the Chinese will be presenting their country as a utopia, its population smiling and happy.

    Visitors will not see the evil underside of a country that executes its prisoners to harvest their organs. Once again, the Olympics will provide an excellent propaganda vehicle from which a vile regime can present an entirely false image.

    But we will still go. Some will defend their attendance by saying that sport is above politics, and others will maintain that the glare of the Olympic spotlight may force the Chinese to improve their human rights record.

    One only has to look at Berlin to know that such thinking is absurdly optimistic. No doubt there will be an "Olympic Pause", as there was in 1936 when the measures taken against Jews were temporarily halted, but as soon as their visitors turn their backs, the Chinese regime will continue to conduct itself with the utmost brutality.

    There is no difference between playing sport with Nazi Germany and today's China than there is with playing sports with mass murderers. Very few of us would play a game of tennis with the Yorkshire Ripper Peter Sutcliffe, so why do we insist on doing so with equally murderous regimes?

    Playing games with murderers does not stop them killing, it merely helps to make them look normal. That's why the Nazis loved having the Olympics, and that's why the Chinese will love them as well.

The Yorkshire Post