On 12 April 1933 Theodor Lewald gave in to the Nazi authorities and resigned as leader of the German Sports Office after it was revealed his paternal grandmother was Jewish.

[2] The Nazi minister of the interior, Wilhelm Frick, interfered with the process of the election of a new Sports leader, and the decision was made by a hurriedly instituted three-man commission.

Von Tschammer, however, would keep his predecessor in a high position in the sports body, and years later he would appoint Theodor Lewald as president of the Organizing Committee of the Berlin Olympic Games.

The Deutscher Reichsbund für Leibesübungen (DRL) was established on 27 July 1934 as the official Sports governing body of Nazi Germany.

[5] Among the controversial measures taken by the Sports Office of the Reich at the time, the staging of the massive Reichssportfest event on Trinity Sunday was a decision that shocked devout Catholics.

He became the personal advisor and consultant of the Reichssportführer in 1936, and subsequently became the chief editor of NS-Sport, the official organ of the Reich Sports Office.

This lavishly illustrated work had many pictures and information about the various Nazi organizations, i.e. SA, NSKK, Bund Deutscher Mädel, Hitler Jugend, etc.

This was in line with the ideals of Friedrich Ludwig Jahn, the "Father of physical exercises", who connected the steeling of one's own body to a healthy spirit and promoted the idea of a unified, strong Germany.

[11] In 1936 Hans von Tschammer und Osten, as the head of the Deutscher Reichsbund für Leibesübungen, played a major role in the structure and coordination of the Summer Olympics in Berlin.

The Olympic Games, the first in history to have live television coverage, provided an ideal setting to showcase the Nazi regime and what Hitler deemed to be his exploits.

The German eagle with the swastika on the chest,[13] worn as a badge by the athletes of the 1936 German Olympics team, became the official symbol of the Nazi Sports Body; "the swastika on the eagle's chest displays ... the ideology of the DRL" ("Das Hakenkreuz aber, welches der Adler in seinen Schwingen trägt, bekennt, aus welcher Gesinnung ... im DRL gearbeitet wird).

Felix Linnemann, the German Football Association (DFB) president, was one of the greatest campaigners for amateurism in sports in Nazi Germany.

[17] Following the 1938 Munich Agreement and the liquidation of Czechoslovakia as a state, the ethnic Sudeten German football teams played in the Gauliga Sudetenland.

This highly nationalistic sports event commemorated the 125th anniversary of the German Wars of Liberation against Napoleon and the first award of the Iron Cross in the city of Breslau itself in 1813.

On 21 December 1938 a decree was issued by Adolf Hitler changing the name of the Reich Sports Body to Nationalsozialistischer Reichsbund für Leibesübungen (NSRL), thereby "elevating it to an organization served by the NSDAP".

The military re-armament and dire war preparations would make the influence of physical exercises in Nazi German society wane in favour of militarism.

The massive sports pageantry events in the large cities, carefully organized to arouse nationalistic fervor, were replaced by military parades of German warriors.

Successful sportsmen found it increasingly difficult to compete with frontline war heroes in capturing the attention of the German public.

Many Germans were subjected to conscription and left for the different fronts, so the NSRL concentrated in training and staging local or regional events for younger athletes.

Contributors felt emboldened to deny funds to the formerly influential branches of the Nazi Sports Office owing to the war-related shifting of priorities.

This structuralization, whose nationalistic seriousness was often outright theatrical, was in line with the Nazi Party's goal of reminding Germans constantly that they were members of a large extended country.

Among the events directly organized by the NS Reichsbund für Leibesübungen the most important were: Final solution Pre-Machtergreifung Post-Machtergreifung Parties