India has officially bid to host the 2036 Olympic Games in Ahmedabad. Its main competitor at this stage appears to be Doha, Qatar, with Santiago, Chile; Istanbul, Turkey; and South Africa (without announcing a city) also making bids. Lurking in the background is Germany, which is mulling a bid with Berlin, Cologne, Hamburg, and Munich as the four possible host cities, with the final decision to be made in September. However, both Berlin and Munich evoke negative memories, and if the 2036 bid falls through, Germany will try for 2040 or 2044.

Germany’s historical baggage

Germany has hosted the Olympics twice—once in Berlin in 1936, as a united nation as it is today, and then in Munich in West Germany in 1972. The bid for 1936 was decided in 1931, and just a year later Adolf Hitler came to power. He eventually turned the Games into a propaganda exercise to push his racist theory of the superiority of the Aryan so-called master race. It has forever gone down in infamy as the “Nazi Olympics.”

The trauma of Munich, thirty-six years later, was the storming of the Israeli quarters in the Olympic Village and the kidnapping and subsequent murder of 11 Israeli sportsmen at the hands of the PLO.

Germans are acutely sensitive to their Nazi past, and President Frank-Walter Steinmeier has expressed concern that Berlin being chosen as the host in 2036 would reopen old wounds, since it would mark the centenary of the notorious “Nazi Olympics.” The........

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