Reich Sports Week

Reich Sports Week

An illustration of a cohort of German athletes participating in the Reich Sports Week.

The Nazi regime placed great emphasis on the physical fitness of its people, and sports was promoted as a means to harden the spirits of its citizens as well as making them feel that they were part of a wider national purpose. The steeling of one’s own body was connected to a healthy spirit and promoted the idea of a strong, unified Germany. For example, training within the Hitler Youth prioritized physical and military training over academics. More than just a way to keep the German nation healthy, sports became a means of inculcating in its youth a martial spirit and training them for combat.

Sports and athletics took on a national-political character in Nazi Germany, as the cultivation of one’s physical prowess was also an indispensable facet in creating the utopian vision of a ‘New Man’ who would harness the ultimate potential of the human race. The will for self-improvement inherent to any sport is a central trait in Nietzsche’s concept of a ‘master-morality’, which serves as the basis on which National Socialism, and indeed all fascist thought, base their moral philosophies. Nazism, in all its Darwinistic tendencies including eugenics, the subjugation of inferior peoples, the substitution for Christianity with Germanic paganism, amongst others, sought to fashion a new national culture rooted in this so-called ‘master-morality’ to supplant the prevailing Judeo-Christian ‘slave-morality’. This celebration of the heroic and triumphant is the moral antithesis to the coddling liberal notion of enabling mediocrity. Sports, in its unrelenting pursuit for excellence and focus on man’s primal spirit, came to embody a new conception of life as envisioned by National Socialism.

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An illustration of a cohort of German athletes participating in the Reich Sports Week.

The Nazi regime placed great emphasis on the physical fitness of its people, and sports was promoted as a means to harden the spirits of its citizens as well as making them feel that they were part of a wider national purpose. The steeling of one’s own body was connected to a healthy spirit and promoted the idea of a strong, unified Germany. For example, training within the Hitler Youth prioritized physical and military training over academics. More than just a way to keep the German nation healthy, sports became a means of inculcating in its youth a martial spirit and training them for combat.

Sports and athletics took on a national-political character in Nazi Germany, as the cultivation of one’s physical prowess was also an indispensable facet in creating the utopian vision of a ‘New Man’ who would harness the ultimate potential of the human race. The will for self-improvement inherent to any sport is a central trait in Nietzsche’s concept of a ‘master-morality’, which serves as the basis on which National Socialism, and indeed all fascist thought, base their moral philosophies. Nazism, in all its Darwinistic tendencies including eugenics, the subjugation of inferior peoples, the substitution for Christianity with Germanic paganism, amongst others, sought to fashion a new national culture rooted in this so-called ‘master-morality’ to supplant the prevailing Judeo-Christian ‘slave-morality’. This celebration of the heroic and triumphant is the moral antithesis to the coddling liberal notion of enabling mediocrity. Sports, in its unrelenting pursuit for excellence and focus on man’s primal spirit, came to embody a new conception of life as envisioned by National Socialism.