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 compared to the 16 obtained, precisely, by Barcelona, the other finalist candidate after Rome withdrew at the last moment. The political uncertainty that was opening up in Catalonia and Spain was a determining factor in depriving the Catalan capital of what would have been its first Games. At that time, the members of the IOC could not imagine that two years later, in 1933, Adolf Hitler would come to 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 advantage of the occasion to show the world the supposed virtues of Nazism. The history of those Games, the effervescence with which the Third Reich lived the preparations, its political dimension and how the relationship between Catalonia and Spain was viewed from Nazi Germany, is revealed in a sticker album that the Aurelia cigarette factory , based in Dresden, two hundred kilometers south of Berlin, put into circulation in the spring of 1936. A common propaganda product in 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 discovery, I saw a sticker from Catalonia and investigating where it came from I ended up there and bought it," he explained to La Vanguardia. Horizontal, about thirty pages long, it is entitled 'Staats: Wappen und Flaggen' (Coats and flags of the states) framed in a gold thread with the Olympic rings and the year 1936. On the presentation 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 in alphabetical order the states entered in the Games. 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 Bermuda and Malta had not been able to be included, or Bolivia still appeared as a non-participant. The Soviet Union was not there for ideological reasons and because since 1920, due to the consequences 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 show the flags and shields of European territories that did not participate. “The number of non-Olympic countries is very limited in Europe.
Only the small states of Gdansk, Lithuania, Albania, San Marino, Andorra and the small territory of the Pope, the state of Vatican City”, it is explained. And it is added that "the European images close 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 the Irish Free State, but to Great Britain. The inhabitants of these countries will participate in the Olympic Games as Spaniards and as Englishmen, 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 ethnonationalist movement, during the 1920s and 1930s there was a sensitivity to the ethno-linguistic diversity of Europe. "In 1929 there were maps where the ethnic nations without a state appeared, and there would also be in 1937 to talk about, for example, Catalonia and the possibility of independence as a geostrategic opportunity in the western Mediterranean," details the history professor at the University of Santiago de Compostela.
The album contains as a closure a fold-out world map in which Catalonia and the Irish Free State can be clearly seen in Europe. 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 Europe between the wars (2001) “the author should identify the autonomy of Catalonia and the self-government of the Free State of Ireland as a semi-independent status; and the Basques are not there because they did not have the Statute approved”. For his part, the historian Arnau Gonzàlez Vilalta explained to La Vanguardia that “the Catalan autonomous regime approved in 1932 was considered a semi-independence from all the foreign ministries. The idea was that what Catalonia was in Spain came to be like a domain of the British Empire: Canada, Australia, but above all 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 its evolution towards future independence or maintenance within Spain. It was not the center of his foreign policy, but the links with the Question of German Minorities spread across central and eastern Europe established a link that had intensified in the 1920s”. This is why, although 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, and ethnic groups that they considered 'genuine'. Although in this case a legal criterion has been sought to include their shields and flags: autonomy or self-government”. And it is that, as Gonzàlez Vilalta adds, "the Nazis understood the claims of Catalan nationalism, and during the Civil War they recommended 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 contest is won”.
At the moment of truth, the Popular Front government of the Second Republic boycotted the Games. It did not participate in the protest against the Nazi ideology that welcomed them and organized the Popular Olympics that the start of the Civil War, in July 1936, prevented from being held. Precisely, on April 26, 1931, the same day that the IOC delegates had chosen Berlin as the venue, the football teams of Spain and the Irish Free State had met on Montjuïc. And it happened 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 album by the cigarette manufacturer Aurelia presupposed. However, the finding by the collector Almenara shows how sometimes small objects explain very well the complexity of the external views of some states towards others and are a reflection of it.
