The grand prix car that beat Hitler
Tazio Nuvolari’s victory in the 1935 German GP remains among the most significant in motor racing history. It was partly the way he drove his Alfa, but mostly the political context
No longer fastest, but still first. Tazio Nuvolari won the 1935 German GP for Ferrari’s nascent Alfa Romeo programme. The car was the only non-German runner inside the top nine at the flag.
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Taken from Motor Sport, March 2017
Adolf Hitler was first to take advantage of the opportunity offered by modern international sport to ambitious leaders looking for ways of demonstrating the irresistible power of the forces at their command. Very soon after he and his National Socialists came to power in 1933, all sports organisations connected to religions and other political parties were banned outright. The head of the existing national sports office, Theodor Lewald, was removed when he was found to have a Jewish grandmother. Into Lewald’s place, charged with developing a new generation of champions, came Hans von Tschammer und Osten, a member of the SA, the paramilitary wing of the Nazi party. The new Reichssportführer sat at the head of the Deutscher Reichsbund für Leibesübungen (DRL), the Third Reich’s national league of physical education, an umbrella body to which all individual sports bodies now reported.
If Hitler’s athletes were to be promoted as higher beings, thus fulfilling the Führer’s belief in the inherent superiority of the Aryan race, then so were German engineers. Before 1914, teams from Mercedes-Benz and Opel had competed successfully in Grand Prix racing. Between 1918 and 1933, however, the French and the Italians fought for supremacy: Bugatti and Delage versus Alfa Romeo and Maserati. By giving his blessing to a revived Mercedes team and the new Auto Union outfit, Hitler brought Germany back into the equation.