Breaking News: FUHRER SHAKES HANDS WITH JESSE OWENS

What do you mean he upsets people not classified as Aryans? Accepting Black people as equals seems like he's giving other ethnicities a second chance. His anti-semitist policy already caught on with a lot of people, I don't see many leaving just because Hitler accepts one group of people that were only populated in the deep south.
He would never accept Black people as equals. He didn't accept anyone as equal to Aryans. It was kinda his thing.
 
Even if Hitler personally accepted black people, there would be way too much popular racism for him to be civil to Owens. The Rhine Bastards were a huge campaigning point for the Nazis and there was a lot of awareness of black American culture as a symbol of decadence.
 
You’re positing a much bigger change than just a handshake. The Nazis had greatly hyped up Aryan racial superiority before the Olympics and Owens’ dominance was a huge stick in their eye. Max Schmeling was forced to join the Army for shaking hands with the black man who beat him, why would Hitler ever do the same?

QUALIFIER: I do not, in any way, agree with this argument. I'm just seeing how the Nazis could rationalize Owens's victory while still retaining their racist ideology.

Everyone can recognize that there are a lot of wild animals that are stronger or faster than humans. A gorilla is far stronger than any human, but no one would use that one quality to say the gorilla is a superior life-form. So Owens's victory is due to his African 'animalistic' nature giving him a speed advantage over 'pure human' Aryans.

So with that 'argument', Hitler could shake Owens's hand on the grounds of 'Germany's still weak enough that we need to play nice and look good in international diplomacy' whilst still considering him an inferior being.
 
QUALIFIER: I do not, in any way, agree with this argument. I'm just seeing how the Nazis could rationalize Owens's victory while still retaining their racist ideology.

Everyone can recognize that there are a lot of wild animals that are stronger or faster than humans. A gorilla is far stronger than any human, but no one would use that one quality to say the gorilla is a superior life-form. So Owens's victory is due to his African 'animalistic' nature giving him a speed advantage over 'pure human' Aryans.

So with that 'argument', Hitler could shake Owens's hand on the grounds of 'Germany's still weak enough that we need to play nice and look good in international diplomacy' whilst still considering him an inferior being.

That is what the Nazis believed and how they justified their athletic losses. Displaying civility to untermenschen out of weakness is the exact opposite of what the Nazis were trying to do with the Olympics in 1936.
 
That is what the Nazis believed and how they justified their athletic losses. Displaying civility to untermenschen out of weakness is the exact opposite of what the Nazis were trying to do with the Olympics in 1936.
Yeah, Nazism, and Fascism in general, is an ideology which, by definition, revolves around loyalty to a "strong" central leader. As a result, that leader, Hitler in this case, can never allow himself to appear weak, or he is, by the tenets of his own philosophy, unfit to lead, or, indeed, by Hitler's Social Darwinist views, live.
 
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That is what the Nazis believed and how they justified their athletic losses. Displaying civility to untermenschen out of weakness is the exact opposite of what the Nazis were trying to do with the Olympics in 1936.

That was my impression. Some years ago I heard that Hitler's view of the US allowing blacks (Owens and others) to compete in the Olympics was more or less no different than if the US had had Cheetahs running in the sprint events. Obviously they won, they are wild animals who should not have been permitted to compete with proper humans.
 

Ryan

Donor
On the first day of the Olympics Hitler only congratulated German winners and was told that he should congratulate all winners or none of them. He chose the latter. If he chose the former, he would have congratulated Jesse along with every other winner.
 
Supposedly Hitler was civil and respectful to Owens in OTL.
In an article dated August 4, 1936, the African-American newspaper editor Robert L. Vann describes witnessing Hitler "salute" Owens for having won gold in the 100m sprint (August 3):

And then...wonder of wonders...I saw Herr Adolph Hitler, salute this lad. I looked on with a heart which beat proudly as the lad who was crowned king of the 100 meters event, get an ovation the like of which I have never heard before. I saw Jesse Owens greeted by the Grand Chancellor of this country as a brilliant sun peeped out through the clouds. I saw a vast crowd of some 85,000 or 90,000 people stand up and cheer him to the echo.

Owens even claimed to have a photo showing the two shaking hands.
In a 2009 interview, German journalist Siegfried Mischner claimed that Owens carried around a photograph in his wallet of the Führer shaking his hand before the latter left the stadium. Owens, who felt the newspapers of the day reported 'unfairly' on Hitler's attitude towards him, tried to get Mischner and his journalist colleagues to change the accepted version of history in the 1960s. Mischner claimed Owens showed him the photograph and told him: "That was one of my most beautiful moments." Mischner added "(the picture) was taken behind the honour stand and so not captured by the world's press. But I saw it, I saw him shaking Hitler's hand!" According to Mischner, "the predominating opinion in post-war Germany was that Hitler had ignored Owens, so we therefore decided not to report on the photo. The consensus was that Hitler had to continue to be painted in a bad light in relation to Owens."

In 2014, Eric Brown, British fighter pilot and test pilot, the Fleet Air Arm's most decorated living pilot, independently stated in a BBC documentary "I actually witnessed Hitler shaking hands with Jesse Owens and congratulating him on what he had achieved." Additionally, an article in The Baltimore Sun in August 1936 reported that Hitler sent Owens a commemorative inscribed cabinet photograph of himself.

Now does this change anything. Not really according to Owens.
In Germany, Owens had been allowed to travel with and stay in the same hotels as whites, at a time when African Americans in many parts of the United States had to stay in segregated hotels that accommodated only blacks. When Owens returned to the United States, he was greeted in New York City by Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia. During a Manhattan ticker-tape parade. After the parade, Owens was not permitted to enter through the main doors of the Waldorf Astoria New York and instead forced to travel up to the event in a freight elevator to reach the reception honoring him. President Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR) never invited Jesse Owens to the White House following his triumphs at the Olympics games. While the Democrats had bid for the support of Owens, Owens rejected those overtures: as a staunch Republican, he endorsed Alf Landon, Roosevelt's Republican opponent in the 1936 presidential race.

It was a different time and of all people, Hitler wasn't going to change race relations for the better, especially not in America.
 
Let's just say he does so to say like "Yeah, Aryans are better than all other races, but blacks, not bad, I could live with them" Kinda message.

It would be an 'Americans are bigots but Germans are polite' message. His solid base wouldn't want any kind of 'blacks are okay' message, and the rest of Germany wouldn't care either way.
 

Deleted member 94680

Let's just say he does so to say like "Yeah, Aryans are better than all other races, but blacks, not bad, I could live with them" Kinda message.

What do you mean he upsets people not classified as Aryans? Accepting Black people as equals seems like he's giving other ethnicities a second chance.

You have... interesting views on Hitler's race relations policies.
 
How do we know he detested Africans? Are there any quotes about black people in any speeches, or his books?

"Jews were responsible for bringing Negroes into the Rhineland, with the ultimate idea of bastardizing the white race which they hate and thus lowering its cultural and political level so that the Jew might dominate."

He then went about sterilizing all the mixed race children and their parents. Yes, he hated Africans.
 
What do you mean he upsets people not classified as Aryans? Accepting Black people as equals seems like he's giving other ethnicities a second chance. His anti-semitist policy already caught on with a lot of people, I don't see many leaving just because Hitler accepts one group of people that were only populated in the deep south.
The wording given in the post I quoted would give the impression that he thought Africans to be better than them and, more importantly, that he reaaaally didn't like people not classified as Aryans.
 
There wasn't a official German view of how biracials with African ancestry should be treated. Their treatment depended on individual civil servants interpreted the racial purity laws. The Nazi didn't really care about Africans, it was a pretty irrelevant groups for them. They didn't live in lands the German Regime cared about, the African population in Germany itself was extremely small. The official view on Africa itself was to my understanding, that the Nazi wanted to make it into one big nature reserve outside the north and south, and they saw Africans as part of the wildlife.
 
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