On April 26, 1931, less than two weeks after the proclamation of the Republic, the International Olympic Committee decided in Barcelona that the venue for the 1936 Olympic Games would be Berlin. The German city won by 43 votes to 16 against, precisely, Barcelona, ​​the other finalist candidate after Rome withdrew at the last moment. The political uncertainty that opened up in Catalonia and Spain was a determining factor in depriving the Catalan capital of what would have been its first Games. At the time, the members of the IOC could not imagine that two years later, in 1933, Adolf Hitler would gain power and that, having ruled out Barcelona, ​​the Games would be held in the snake’s nest.
In the first half of August 1936, the German chancellor wanted to take the opportunity to show the world the supposed virtues of Nazism. The history of those Games, the effervescence with which the Third Reich lived the preparations, the political dimension and how the relationship between Catalonia and Spain was seen from Nazi Germany is revealed with an album of trading cards that cigarette factory Aurelia, based in Dresden, two hundred kilometers south of Berlin, put into circulation in the spring of 1936. A common propaganda product of this and other commercial houses in those years.
The album was discovered by Isalguer Almenara, a collector of political books, on a German internet auction website. “It was a chance find, I saw a chrome from Catalonia and, researching where it came from, I went there and bought it”, he explains to La Vanguardia. Horizontal, about thirty pages long, is titled ‘Staats: Wappen und Flaggen’ (Coats and Flags of the States) framed in gold thread with the Olympic rings and 1936. On the introductory pages, it is explained that “53 nations will let the flower of their youth fight for the honor of their flag and their name”. The album presents the states entered in the Games in alphabetical order. With some alterations, because, for example, Costa Rica and Panama decided to participate when the design was closed, and the emblems of the British colonies of Bermuda and Malta could not be included or Bolivia still appeared as not participating The Soviet Union was not there for ideological reasons and because, since 1920, due to the derivations of the Russian civil war, it had not taken part in any Games. However, the most outstanding thing is that it dedicates a section to showing the flags and coats of arms of European territories that did not participate. “The number of non-Olympic countries is very limited in Europe.
There are only the small states of Gdansk, Lithuania, Albania, San Marino, Andorra and the small territory of the Pope, the state of Vatican City”, he explains. And it is added that “the European images are closed with the coat of arms and flags of Catalonia, which as an autonomous province of Spain occupies a state position, and the coat of arms of Northern Ireland, which does not belong to Irish Free State, but in Great Britain. The inhabitants of these countries will participate in the Olympic Games as Spaniards and as English, respectively”. “I find it very interesting,” Xosé M. Núñez Seixas tells this newspaper after observing it. “The key is in the introductory text when it talks about participating peoples, not just states.” In völkisch circles, the German ethno-nationalist movement, in the 1920s and 1930s there was a sensitivity to the ethno-linguistic diversity of Europe. “In 1929 there were maps showing stateless ethnic nations and there would also be one in 1937 to talk, for example, about Catalonia and the possibility of independence as a geostrategic opportunity in the Western Mediterranean”, explains the professor of ‘history of the University of Santiago de Compostela.
The album concludes with a drop-down world map in which, in Europe, it is clearly seen that Catalonia and the Irish Free State, despite being painted in the same color as the respective states, Spain and the United Kingdom, they have a dividing line with the rest of the territory. For the author of Between Geneva and Berlin. The question of national minorities and international politics in interwar Europe (2001) “the author should have identified the autonomy of Catalonia and the self-government of the Irish Free State as semi-independent status; and there are no Basques because they did not have the Statute approvedâ€. For his part, the historian Arnau Gonzà lez Vilalta explains to La Vanguardia that “the Catalan autonomous regime approved in 1932 was considered semi-independence by all the foreign ministries. The idea was that what Catalonia was in Spain was like a domain of the British Empire: Canada, Australia, but especially the Irish Free State. Almost independent de facto and with certain ties to the power of Madrid”.
The author of Catalonia in the European crisis (1931-1939) Spanish Ireland, French pawn or Mediterranean USSR? (2021) adds that “German diplomacy was really interested in the fate of Catalonia and the evolution towards future independence or maintenance within Spain. It was not the center of foreign policy, but the links with the Question of the German Minorities spread across central and eastern Europe established a link that had intensified in the twenties”. That is why, despite the fact that the album may seem like an isolated object, Núñez Seixas considers that “it is an interesting curiosity because it reveals that the Nazis had a sensitivity towards the nations, cultures, ethnicities that they considered ‘genuine’. Although in this case a legal criterion has been sought to include the shields and flags: autonomy or self-government”. And it is that, as Gonzà lez Vilalta says, “the Nazis understood the claims of Catalan nationalism and during the Civil War they recommended to Franco not to touch the Catalan autonomous regime and, above all, not to attack the Catalan language as the official language, of education and of the administration so as not to raise a serious problem once the dispute is won”.
At the hour of truth, the Popular Front government of the Second Republic boycotted the Games. He did not participate as a protest for the Nazi ideology that welcomed them and organized the People’s Olympics that the start of the Civil War, in July 1936, prevented from celebrating. Precisely, on April 26, 1931, the same day that the IOC delegates had chosen Berlin as their headquarters, the Spanish and Irish Free State football teams had faced each other in Montjuïc. And there was the coincidence that the Irish also boycotted the Games. They did not go because the jurisdiction of the Olympic Council of Ireland was limited to British rule only and Northern Ireland was left out. In the end, 49 countries participated in the Berlin Olympics, and not the 53 nations that the Aurelia cigarette manufacturer’s album presupposed. However, the find of the collector Almenara shows how sometimes small objects very well explain the complexity of the external views of some states towards others and are a reflection of it.
