The International Olympic Committee (IOC) has defended its decision to sell a limited edition T-shirt commemorating the 1936 Berlin Olympics.
The shirt, which was on sale for $42, has already sold out on the official online store.
If featured an image of the Olympic logo set above the silhouettes of a muscle-bound victorious athlete and Berlin’s famous Brandenberg Gate.
The image is based on a poster designed by Franz Würbeld and used at the time by the Nazi propaganda ministry to promote the idea of Aryan supremacy.
But the garment was condemned by several Jewish organisations given the historical context of the games.
The 1936 event was attended by Adolf Hitler, featured German athletes competing under the swastika flag and performing Nazi salutes, and occurred after the passage of the Nuremberg Laws, which excluded Jews from German citizenship and prohibited marriages between citizens and Jews.
Yoav Potash, director of the award-winning Holocaust documentary Among Neighbours, called the shirt a “sickening affront to human decency”.
"To say that the IOC's sale of these shirts is in poor taste would be a gross understatement,” he told Fox News Digital.
"The IOC has the benefit of 90 years of hindsight here. We know that Nazi Germany used its role as the Olympic host for propaganda purposes, aiming to showcase supposed Aryan superiority.”
And Christine Schmidt, co-director of the Wiener Holocaust Library, said: “The Nazis used the 1936 Olympics to showcase their oppressive regime to the world, aiming to smooth over international relations while at the same time preventing almost all German-Jewish athletes from competing, rounding up the 800 Roma who lived in Berlin, and concealing signs of virulent antisemitic violence and propaganda from the world’s visitors.
"The Nazis’ fascist and antisemitic propaganda infiltrated their promotion of the games, and many international Jewish athletes chose not to compete.
"The IOC would be minded to consider whether any aesthetic appreciation of these games can be comfortably separated from the horror that followed.”
As well as the design based on the Würbeld poster, the Olympic site is also selling a shirt commemorating the same year’s Garmisch-Partenkirchen Winter Games, featuring Ludwig Hohlwein, a top artist in the Nazi propaganda ministry, and another marking the 1972 Munich Olympics, during which nine members of the Israeli delegation were murdered by Palestinian terrorists.
However, the IOC sought to defend the decision, even invoking the legacy of legendary African American sprinter Jesse Owens, who shattered the myth of Aryan supremacy at the 1936 Games by convincingly winning 100m gold.
"While we of course acknowledge the historical issues of ‘Nazi propaganda’ related to the Berlin 1936 Olympic Games, we must also remember that the Games in Berlin saw 4,483 athletes from 49 countries compete in 149 medal events,” an IOC spokesperson said.
"Many of them stunned the world with their athletic achievements, including Jesse Owens.”
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