In 1936, Adolf Hitler and his regime used the meticulously staged 1936 Olympics as a propaganda tool to promote the rise of the Nazi Party. To prepare for this event, Germany invested heavily in new facilities like the massive Olympiastadion and introduced theatrical elements like the torch relay to project an image of a prosperous, peaceful, and modernized nation. As part of this effort, the Nazis’ usual antisemitic signs were temporarily removed from Berlin’s streets, and the state-controlled press downplayed Germany’s militaristic ambitions, which would plunge the world into World War II with Hitler’s invasion of Poland in 1939. Yet the Nazi regime’s attempts at subterfuge were best exemplified by the work of filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl, whose state-funded documentary Olympia used groundbreaking cinematic techniques to glorify the games—and by extension, the Nazi state. Although there were calls to boycott the games, International Olympic Committee member Avery Brundage led the US team, insisting that politics should be kept out of sports.

In War Games, most international athletes and visitors to Germany initially experience nothing more than this sanitized veneer, but the narrative systematically dismantles this illusion through characters like Heinz, who reveals the truth of Nazi Germany. During this time frame, book burnings were a public spectacle and a grim warning, and the novel dramatizes this fact when Karl notes, “Where they burn books, they will in the end also burn people” (76). The full extent of the Nazi worldview was revealed in the 1935 Nuremberg Laws, which stripped Jewish citizens of their rights and institutionalized racist persecution. In the novel, this historical context informs the dire circumstances of Heinz’s family, who are forced into hiding, and Karl, whose partner is imprisoned in a concentration camp. Thus, the novel critiques the glittering spectacle of the 1936 Olympics by drawing as a stark backdrop to expose the brutal reality it was designed to conceal. Evie, in particular, falls victim to these tactics, acknowledging that she did not know about the calls to boycott the event, the discrimination German Jews and marginalized peoples faced in Germany under the Nazis, or how close to war Germany was.