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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 going to hop in the old Wayback Machine and go back to 1944. In Woldenburg 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.
Yeah. Did you say that the POWs were all officers? I did. Okay. So that was why this POW camp was called Auflag 2C. Auflag 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.
OK, sure. Remember, they had it pretty easy in that camp. Right. So, yeah, I think there was 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. Right. 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. Yeah.
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, we know about it, so maybe they did. 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. Yeah.
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 Langfassa, 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 territory.
there would have been penalties by the German captors for holding that Olympics. So somehow they managed to pull off a secret Olympics in 1940. I guess 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.
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All right. So, geez, we've now covered very quickly two Olympic game, POW Olympic games. But we're going to go back to the one in 1944 and Voldenburg because they, like you said, had the permission of the Nazis to.
to do this and it was uh it kind of became one of those stories of the war kind of like the the christmas where the ceasefire happened on christmas 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 Waldenburg are about the most famous of all the POW games. So we know the most about them. And Waldenburg's, they had a bunch of different events. Like they really kind of followed the Olympics at the time to a T. There was soccer, a.k.a. 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. So archery was out. They said, maybe nothing where you hold a sword. So fencing was out. 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?
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 going to bust into the locker room and get them out.
And I'm not going to 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? I mean, no, it wasn't like a remake, but The Longest Yard was...
That was the Burt Reynolds football movie about prison. And Adam Sandler. 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 is boring. Let's move on. Stallone plays the goalkeeper. Does he really? 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, it was Bobby something, something and whatever. I hadn't realized Pele had been a POW. Oh, my God. Yeah.
We can just stop. Well, wait a minute. Wait a minute. Before we stop, we have to say that in addition to those like basketball, handball, track and field, that kind of stuff, they actually held cultural events.
as part of the Olympic competitions at Waldenberg in 1944 for 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. 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 could see a sculpture battle. A sculpt-off. Yeah.
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 this short stuff is out. Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple Podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows.