Paul Scraton explores Berlin’s abandoned 1936 Olympic Village and the legacy of Jesse Owens… 

What do you do with a building when it symbolises some of the darkest days of your country’s history?

It’s a common question in Berlin and elsewhere in Germany, and one which was certainly asked of the various venues built for the 1936 Olympics.

Of course, Germany was awarded the Olympics before Hitler and his National Socialist cronies took power, and indeed many of the designs were already in place, but the Olympic Stadium and its surroundings still symbolise a games where Hitler was determined to show to the world the power and the glory of his three-year-old Thousand Year Reich.

When one thinks of what was to follow over the next decade, it is not much consolation that the games were less the “Hitler Olympics” than the “Jesse Owens Show”.

But the African-American athlete Owens’ exploits on the track were more triumphant and glorious than even the best of Leni Riefenstahl’s cinematic efforts; and perhaps it is this history that has allowed the Olympic venues to shake off the taint of their history, most gloriously during the 2006 World Cup where – seventy years after the Olympics – the world came to Germany and was greeted not with swastikas and triumphalism, but a wonderful celebration that even FIFA’s rampant commercialism and Zinedine Zidane’s flying headbutt could not sour.

But if the Olympic Stadium, renovated and restored for 2006, has been granted the opportunity to write a new history on its football pitch and track – and who can forget Usain Bolt’s victories during the 2009 World Championships – what of the other venues built for the 1936 games?

Fourteen kilometres to the west of the stadium and the main Olympic park, beyond the city limits and in the village of Elstal in the Brandenburg countryside, lies the Olympic Village.

This was the home of the athletes for the duration of the games, and a place where, despite Nazi conceptions of race and segregation, 4,000 sportsmen (the women were housed elsewhere) from over 50 nations slept, trained and ate together in the massive House of the Nations canteen.

Much of it is ruins now, though slowly but surely the complex is being patched-up to keep it standing, and certain parts such as the facade of the swimming pool are being restored to their original condition.

We visited on an early summer’s day and paid a bored looking security guard the nominal entry fee to allow us to walk around the grounds pretty much alone. Apart from the larger buildings, such as the House of the Nations, the old swimming pool and the gymnasium, the site is dotted with smaller barracks-like buildings in which athletes were housed.

Some are crumbling, some no longer standing, whilst on others the paint is only slightly peeling. Only one of the athlete residences, which houses the Jesse Owens exhibition, has been properly fixed up, and you can even take a look inside.

It remains a somewhat spooky place. During the long years of socialism, when Elstal and the surrounding countryside was very much a part of the German Democratic Republic, the village was used by the Soviet Army until their withdrawal from German soil in 1992.

They built a series of Plattenbauen – those classically communist pre-fabricated housing blocks – for their soldiers, which now loom amongst the trees in ghos…