The images and the entire text used on this and all other USMBOOKS web pages are the copyrighted property of USM Inc.  Those images and the text may be used by others ONLY AFTER completion of a formal international licensing agreement and payment of a licensing fee! It is therefore, illegal for anyone to take any of the material found on USMBOOKS.com and use it for their own purposes without our written permission, irrespective of any excuse they may feel they have for doing so.

While the Reichssportfeld (State Sports Ground) in Berlin was designed specifically for the Olympic Games in 1936, it was conceptualized by Adolf Hitler as a venue that would still be in use hundreds of years after his death. It was built from the finest materials on the best piece of land available in Reichshauptstadt Berlin, the capital of Nazi Germany and was so important to the Führer that it had its own subway station. It is an important historical note that this subway station was not called "Olympic Stadium", but rather S-Bahnhof Reichssportfeld.

Unlikely as it may seem, the responsibility for designing and building the Reichssportfeld was not left to people who simply had experience in construction, but was placed in the hands of the Reichsministerium des Innern (the National Interior Ministry).

The presentation card dated December 1936 (shown above) states that this example of Das Reichssportfeld was given in the name of Interior Minister Dr. Wilhelm Frick and that the book shows a detailed overview of the planning and three years of construction of the Olympic facilities - all of which had not been possible without the vision and support of Führer und Reichskanzler, Adolf Hitler.

A very rare oversized hardcover Third Reich photo book in superb condition, complete with a very scarce original gift card from Nazi Staatssekretär Hans Pfundtner.

It was a very important National Socialist job that was intended to reflect the Nazi image of the nation of Germany, not only in 1936 but in the centuries to come. Hitler may have very well been right! Recent governments of Germany considered destroying the Reichssportfeld recently but decided that the facilities were so well built that it would be a much better idea to provide them with adequate maintenance and continue to use them in the foreseeable future.

The book we offer here, Das Reichssportfeld, is a very rare MINISTERIAL PRESENTATION example produced with a brown leather hard cover with gold blocking, rather than the half-leather binding found on more normal examples of this book. It was published for the Reichsministerium des Innern by Reichssportverlag in Berlin in 1936. It measures 9-3/8 x 12-1/4 inches, is printed on very high quality paper with many, many illustrations and contains 192 pages.

The first white page of this book has nothing on it but a huge 3-1/4 inch black eagle and swastika. The first picture in the book is a full-page photo of Adolf Hitler explaining his vision of the Reichssportfeld to Dr. Frick, then the Minister of Interior (photo above). The illustrated contents of the book begins with a large two-page spread showing the Werner March drawing of the Olympic Stadium from directly above.

That is followed by the same sort of superb view of the entire Reichssportfeld area from the Dietrich Eckart Stage to the horse riding facilities, the railway station, Olympic square, to the swimming venue.  There are photographs of the destruction of the old buildings on the site and the construction of the massive foundations for the new Olympisches Stadion, the preparations for the installation of the Olympic Bell, etc. The photos that follow show the site and its buildings in incredible detail inside and out. The sculptures, the halls, the rooms and the landscaping are all shown in wonderful detail as in no other Third Reich publication.

This brown leather example of Das Reichssportfeld, comes with a very rare "gift" card from Hans Pfundtner, State Secretary of the Nazi Interior Ministry. Pfundtner was a member of the German National Olympic Committee and Deputy President of the Organizational Building and Finance Committee for the XI Olympiade in 1936. An interesting historical aside is that longtime constitutional lawyer and Staatssekretär Pfundtner was instrumental in the 1935 Nürnberg Racial Laws (Gesetz zum Schutze des deutschen Blutes und der deutschen Ehre) as well as the 1939 law to abolish pension payments to Jews in Nazi Germany. He was an early member of the NSDAP and a top Nazi bureaucrat.  Pfundtner and his wife killed themselves before Soviet capture on 25 April 1945.