PROTESTORS WANT STATUES GONE
Thursday, June 01, 2006 - FreeMarketNews.com
Jewish activists are demanding that several bronze statues of broad-shouldered athletes, at the Olympic Stadium in Berlin, be either draped or removed entirely before the upcoming World Cup games begins, according to a London Times article.
The claim is that these figures, initially sculpted by Arno Breker under the orders of Adolf Hitler to extol the virtues of the Aryan master race, still represent "Nazi propaganda" and should not be visible to the soccer players and fans attending Cup matches. The protest is being led by Lea Rosch, who led the campaign to build a Holocaust memorial in the city center; she reportedly considers the "cover-up" her "new cause." Breker had been a renowned sculptor even before Hitler's reign, and was commissioned during the building of the Stadium for the 1936 Olympic Games, to sculpt "The Female Victor" and "The Decathlete."
Rosch wants both covered, along with statues of discus throwers and relay runners by Karl Albiker, "The Resting Athlete" (by Georg Kolbe) and others scattered around the complex. Meanwhile, Ralph Giordano, a leading German Jewish novelist, wants the statues pulverized or melted down. Calling them "ugly and deceitful," he reportedly said, "I demand that these statues be taken out of the stadium, quickly dismantled and scrapped." - ST
