Jesse Owens' Wins Didn't Hurt Hitler

The movie “Race,” opening Friday (Feb. 19), tells the story of African-American track-and-field star Jesse Owens and his role in the 1936 Olympics in Adolf Hitler’s Berlin. As the history is often told, Owens’ four-gold-medal performance was a dramatic rebuke to Hitler and his ideology of racial supremacy. But Owens faced racial issues in the U.S. as well, before and after the games. History professor Peter Fritzsche has written extensively about the Nazi period in Germany, making significant use of diaries and letters, in books such as “Life and Death in the Third Reich.” He spoke with News Bureau social sciences editor Craig Chamberlain.