Stuff You Should Know - Short Stuff: POW Olympics

Episode Date: July 3, 2024

While it sounds like something out of a movie, some POWs in WWII really held an Olympics. And it happened more than once. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey and welcome to The Short Stuff, I'm Charles. Wait, I'm Josh, there's Charles. Wow. This is off to a good start already. This is Short Stuff, Jerry's here too. Yada yada. Let's go.

All right. This is about the POW Olympics. We're gonna hop in the old way back machine and go back to 1944. Cool. Ooh. In Woltenberg in Western Poland where Polish military officers were being held captive as POWs by

the Nazis. But the Nazis were like, hey, be glad you're here because it's not so bad. We treat you guys pretty well. We adhere to the Geneva Convention for the most part. And if you'll notice, there are no death chambers and things like that here. You've got an orchestra, you're taking classes, treat us well after the war, because I think I see where this whole thing's headed. 06 Yeah, did you, did you say that the POWs were all officers? 06 I did. 06 Okay, so that that was why this POW camp was called Auflaug 2C.

Auflaug is derived from a German word. I think it might be slang for an officer's prison camp. Yeah, it's kind of like the Great Escape. Okay, sure. Remember they had it pretty easy in that camp. Right, so yeah, I think there were a lot of political reasons why they were taking it easy on them and following the Geneva Convention.

But doesn't it just feel dirty to give the Nazis credit for anything? No, for sure. But I think it was one of those cases where I wasn't really joking when I said they were like, hey, remember this after the war, because they were trying to set themselves up for being treated okay after the war and also to draw comparisons to at the time Russian prison camps and saying like, they're the really bad ones. This one isn't so bad specifically here in Poland. So part of that was allowing an Olympic Games to be held at Waldenburg. It was a POW Olympics that was organized and carried out in cooperation with the German captors that were

supposed to be in London and then got canceled and then popped up again at the Waldenburg POW camp. Yeah. I doubt if the real Olympic Games people knew about it, although you never know. You never know. I mean Games people know about it, although you never know. You never know. I mean, we know about it, so maybe they did. Well, I know that the Chinese held a 1952 POW Olympics

at a camp in Korea, in North Korea, with Korean war captives as a huge propaganda coup. Like, they kept records, they followed the IOC instructions to a T and they let the world know about it. So I wouldn't be surprised if the Nazis told people that this was going on as a PR thing. Yeah. And since we're talking about other POW Olympics, got to talk about 1940, because they were supposed to be in Tokyo. World War II was

just getting cranking up there. So, they moved it to Helsinki, Finland, and then they canceled those altogether. And there was a German POW camp in Langfasse, Germany that had, they called it the International Prisoner of War Games. But that one was a little bit different. That one was in secret. There would have been penalties by the German captors for, for holding that Olympics. So somehow they managed to pull off a secret Olympics in 1940. Yeah. I guess the, the captors just thought they were watching a basketball game or something like that. Yeah, maybe. And that weird Olympic flag with the rings was,

I don't know, just for fun. Yeah. Let's take a break, Chuck. All right, let's do it. For so many people living with an autoimmune condition, the emotional toll is as real as the physical symptoms. Starting this May, join host Martine Hackett for Season 3 of Untold Stories, Life with a Severe Auto-Immune Condition, a Ruby Studio production, and partnership with Arginics. From myasthenia gravis, or MG, to chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy,

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Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts Babe, yeah babe, you think they can hear us? Yeah, those are mics. Guys, we are back We are so excited. It is season two of your favorite new girl rewatch podcast We have got a new season. We got a new name and we got a brand new episode every week starting a July 2nd. Yeah I am so excited for you folks to check out this mess around. When I say it's gonna get weird, I mean it's gonna get weird. Just save it for the show. Okay that's probably for the best. We've got some of your favorite people from the New Girl universe. We've got the creator and showrunner Liz Merriwether. We got the Max Greenfield, Olivia Munn. We also have

some of your least favorites, like Jake Johnson. Lamour. No, no, I'm just saying, if you're listing off your favorites, like he'd be- Lamour. He's still a favorite. He just, Hannah, what's up?

We do have Jake Johnson, though. Yeah. Listen to The Mess Around on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right. So, geez, we've now covered very quickly two Olympic games, POW Olympic games. But we're going to go back to the one in 1944 and fold it in book because they, like you said, had the permission of the Nazis to do this and it was, it kind of became one of those stories of the war, kind of like the Christmas where the ceasefire happened. Yeah, the Christmas truce.

Yeah, and they got together. It sort of has that air about it. Man, that's just such an amazing story. It was. So yeah, they are probably the most famous. Longwasser and Waldenberg are about the most famous of all of the POW games. So we know the most about them. And Waldenberg's, they had a bunch of different events. They really kind of followed the Olympics at the time to a tee. There was soccer, AKA football, handball,

basketball, track and field. But there were some events that they're like, we're going to draw the line at that because we don't trust you still. This is a POW camp. Yeah. It's pretty funny. Of course, they were like, maybe nothing where you shoot an arrow. Uh, so archery was out.

Uh, they said maybe nothing where you hold a sword. So archery was out. They said maybe nothing where you hold a sword. So fencing was out. And then they said- What about throwing a spear? While we're at it, let's get rid of the javelin. Because I imagine that would not feel good in the chest. And it seems to me that practicing for pole vaulting is just another way of saying practicing for getting over that fence over

there. Right. Tough to slip it past them while you're having an Olympics. They also had to say no boxing, not because there was any, they were worried about it, getting beaten up I guess by the boxers. They were worried about the boxers killing one another because they were, again, even though they were officers, these were held in POW camps, and so the boxers were essentially too frail to box.

It was just too dangerous for the boxers. Yeah, and we can't not mention the great, great World War II soccer film victory with Sylvester Stallone and Michael Caine and Pele. Pele was in it. Pele was in it. Neat. What year was this it? Pele was in it. Neat. What year was this?

This is in the 80s, but it told the story of a soccer match that was held between the Nazis and the POWs, but there was an escape plan at halftime where they were to bust out, they had people digging in, and they were gonna bust into the locker room and get them out, and I'm not gonna spoil it, but let's just say they are faced at halftime with the choice, do we escape during this game,

or do we go back on that field and try and beat the Nazis at soccer? You escape. It's unequivocal. Great, great movie. One of the great sports movies. It sounds like it was remade as the longest yard. Isn't that kind of like the plot of that too?

Hmm. I mean, no, it wasn't like a remake, but the longest yard was. That was the Burt Reynolds football movie about prison. Yeah. Well then remade again by Adam Sandler. But I don't think there was an escape thing in the Longest Yard, was there? That's what I thought. That's why I said that.

I thought there might be, but maybe I just put that in there to entertain myself because I was bored. It's been, thanks a lot. Appreciate that. No, no, no. I mean, with the movie, not with your anecdote. Oh, okay. No, I don't think there was, unless I'm wrong, I think the longest yard was just about a football game, but I may be wrong, it's been a minute.

Okay, well this conversation's boring, let's move on. Psh. Psh. Stallone plays the goalkeeper. Does he really? He takes your one, yeah. Does he take one in the face? Well, they had to teach him, he wasn't very good at it,

but they needed him on the escape team, so he was not the most gifted goalkeeper, but they had Pele. And they had all these other English football stars from the time that I didn't know about, but my friend Justin's like, oh, that was Bobby something, something, and whatever. I hadn't realized Pele had been a POW.

Oh my God. We could just stop. Well, wait a minute, wait a minute, before we stop, we have to say that, um, in addition to those like, uh, basketball, handball, track and field, that kind of stuff, they actually held cultural, um, events as part of the Olympic competitions at Waldenberg in 1944 for, um, things like sculpture and painting and chess.

And you would just normally think like, okay, they were just trying to round some stuff out. Maybe they were trying to replace the javelin event with something else, so they came up with chess. No, from 1912 to 1952, the Olympics awarded 151 medals to original works in the fine arts. Like you could go see a sculpture exhibit and a long jump competition in the same place,

maybe even during that 50 years or 40 years. You can see a sculpture battle. A sculpt off. Yeah, I had no idea. So that was sort of my big one takeaway out of this whole thing, was that they actually for four decades Yeah, I had no idea. So that was sort of my big one takeaway out of this whole thing, was that they actually for four decades

gave out Olympic medals in the arts. Yeah. So cool. It is very cool. It was a surprising little factoid that I had not expected to learn from this one. Yeah, that and that Pele was a POW in 1983 or whatever. Right.

So hats off to everybody who participated in Olympics and POW camps. It is kind of a triumph of the human spirit, you know what I mean? Totally. Like the purest form of Olympic competition. That's right. And I guess since Chuck is agreeing with me, then we should just go ahead and say the short stuff is out. Stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio.

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