The modern Olympic Games started with a modest, but international event in Athens in 1896, the result of a long preparation process launched by Baron De Coubertin. Some ancient elements were included, but as a whole these and subsequent Olympics were purely modern manifestations. Several classical references in the modern games were only introduced in the 1936 games which took place in a sinister Nazi Berlin. Here the organizers, in the context of a temporarily international and ‘open to the world’ national socialism, connected classical antiquity to contemporary ideology and instrumentalized ancient body culture as expressions of the ideology of Aryanism and German superiority. These claims of the Nazi games on antiquity form the subject of this contribution.