David Bennett

The Olympics 1936 to 1948: Grandeur to Austerity

Travellers in the Third Reich by Julia Boyd is a book about tourists, business people, students, and diplomats who were in Germany in the 1930s. What did they think, what did they notice? Mostly they didn’t notice much. They did little mental gymnastics to avoid characterising the rise of the Nazi state for what it was.

We all know how the black American Jesse Owens was cold-shouldered when he got Gold in the Berlin Olympics.

But a snippet about the Olympics that caught my attention was after the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games the head of the British Foreign Office, Sir Robert Vansittart, commented on the grandeur of the design, and that the stupendous cost made him thankful that Britain had relinquished its claim to the next Olympiad in favour of Japan.

In the event, the 1940 Olympic Games never happened. The Japanese pulled out in 1938 because they were otherwise engaged with the Second Sino-Japanese War that broke out in 1937.

The Games were then to go to Finland, the runners-up to the original bid. The Helsinki Games were cancelled, though, because of the Winter War between Finland and the Soviet Union. 

The 1944 Olympic Games were due to be held in London, but were cancelled due to World War II.

The 1948 Olympic Games were held in London, and were known as the Austerity Games because Britain was nearly bankrupted by the war.

Food was still rationed in Britain, and would be until 1952. Things were so bad that the Government had to issue regulations to allow the athletes at the Olympics to be fed more than twice the UK national rationing allowance. 

Some countries didn’t attend the 1948 Games.

Germany and Japan were not permitted to send any athletes to the 1948 Olympics, and the Soviet Union didn’t send any athletes because of the deterioration in East-West relations. 

End Of Life

As of July 2018 there were up to 24,000 patients in the NHS In England in either a permanent vegetative or minimally conscious state, according to an estimate by Professor Derick Wade, a consultant in neurological rehabilitation in Oxford.

This was reported because of the decision by The Supreme Court. The decision was that families and doctors of patients in a persistent vegetative state no longer need permission from a court to withdraw end-of-life care if both the relatives and the doctors agree.

First, the number is staggering. If you asked one hundred people to guess or estimate the number of such patients, who would say 24,000? Second, does this represent a dangerous slide towards something we might not be happy with? After all, once a law is enacted it can serve any kind of society.

The Rhine Runs Dry

Last year, the German company Thyssenkrupp declared force majeure as the reason for lawfully getting out of its obligations to complete various of its contracts or to complete them within a certain time.

Specifically, it cited the Rhine’s low water levels for disrupting the delivery of raw materials to its Duisburg plant. 

The water in the river was so shallow that the ships, laden with raw materials for the factory, could not float free of the bottom of the river. They would simply run aground if they tried to navigate the Rhine.

Photographs showed people walking on a broad stony beach that would normally be under water.

Around 40 percent of Switzerland’s diesel is brought into the country along the Rhine, with the rest by cargo trains, pipelines, trucks and the country’s own refineries.

Switzerland stores diesel against the possibility of interruption to its supply. This Monday, the Swiss Federal Office for National Economic Supply decided to allow the release of 30,000 cubic metres of diesel.

That is about two-and-a-half percent of the amount Switzerland has in storage.

It has done so because they cannot bring any diesel into the country by ship up the Rhine because the Rhine is dry.

Emptying Countries

Did those who promoted the free movement of people within the European Union predict this?

Under the heading ‘Population decline’ the 18 January 2020 issue of The Week reported that the prime minister of Croatia says his country is suffering a “population loss equivalent to losing a small city every year”.

He is calling for EU-wide strategies to tackle the ‘existential’ threat in southern and eastern Europe caused by falling birth rates and mass emigration.

Last year, a study found that 230,000 Croatians left (mostly for Germany, Austria and Ireland) between 2013 and 2016.

That’s in a country with a population is just 4.2 million. The populations of ten of the EU’s 28 member states fell in 2018, with the biggest relative drops recorded in Bulgaria, Latvia, Lithuania, Croatia and Romania.

One can imagine it as the rich countries sucking the creativity and vigour out of the poor satellite countries. Was it foreseen?

We can think back to the decades before the free movement of people was written into the laws of European Union. People emigrated to the United States, for example, because of lack of opportunity or persecution in their home countries.

Not everyone left their homes to find a new life. Some held back. It was those willing to take a chance who went. That is true whether they were running from oppression or running to something.

The result was that the United States thrived (along with other reasons of geography and natural wealth) because it was populated by people who took a chance. I don’t think it is a stretch to picture it that way.

And in that case, the depleted populations of Croatia and the other countries are also the populations that didn’t make the jump, that didn’t risk all. The risk takers have gone. What damage can that do to a country filled with those who stayed behind?