Though it has been a tragic day here in the United States, as all of us are mourning the shooting victims at midnight premiere screening of "Batman: The Dark Knight Rises" at a theatre in Aurora, Colorado, but we are going to go ahead with our plans to conclude this series.
We finish this series up with a look at the distance between Berlin, Germany, which hosted the very controversial 1936 Olympics, in which Adolf Hitler promoted Aryan supremacy, and Stockholm, Sweden, which hosted the more sanguine 1912 Olympics.
American track and field athlete Jesse Owens (1913-1980), a black man who is the subject of a folk song by Greensboro, NC, singer/songwriter Bruce Piephoff (a personal friend) entitled "Jesse" (2008), was able to prove the absurdity of Hitler's concepts as he won four gold medals in Berlin.
On a more tragic note, I learned from an exhibit about the 1936 Berlin Olympics at the National Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC, that Endre Kabos (1906-1944), a Hungarian athlete of Jewish heritage who won gold in Berlin in addition to his gold medal at the 1932 Los Angeles Olympics was among the millions of Jewish people killed during World War II.
Kabos was sent to a concentration camp, but his death reportedly came on the battlefield after he escaped. His Hungarian teammate Attila Petschauer* (1904-1943) who won gold medals in fencing at the 1928 Amsterdam Olympics and the 1932 Los Angeles Olympics was killed in a concentration camp.
Just this week, Hungarian officials detained Laszlo Csatary, 97, for alleged role in deporting Hungarian Jews to concentration camps.
On a lighter note, today's Berlin features stop lights, featuring little green men and little red men, which are one of few surviving relics from East Germany. In 2004, several German cities, including Dresden introduced female counterparts for pedestrian stop lights.
As for the 1912 Stockholm Olympics, among the gold medalists were Finnish wrestler Kaarlo Koskelo, Italian gymnast Alberto Broglia and Australian women's swimmer Fanny Durack. The above pictured dish is a popular one in Sweden during the holidays.
And, even though he has nothing to do with either Olympics, we will mention Bruce Jenner, the American 1976 Montreal Olympics track champion, since the mere mention of his name assures significantly more hits for our blogs.
So just how far apart are these two cities?
A) 454 miles
B) 479 miles
C) 504 miles
D) 529 miles
http://www.ushmm.org
http://www.jewishsports.net
http://www.washington.org
*-I happen to share a first name with the Hungarian Jewish athlete. My first name is Attila. My late Turkish father Mehmet Gokbudak chose to give me the Hungarian spelling as opposed to the Turkish spelling which is Atilla, which has assured that people in Turkey, including passport officials, do not spell my name correctly.
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