Commentary: Allowing China to host the Olympics would be a mistake Todd L. Pittinsky FacebookTwitterEmail It worked for Hitler. The 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin provided the Nazis with propaganda and legitimacy. Opposition within Germany was weaker after the Olympics than it had been before them. In fact, while the games were underway, the Nazis were using slave labor to build a huge new concentration camp in nearby Sachsenhausen. And now, the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing offer a perfect opportunity to repeat this mistake. China today under Xi Jinping is more than a little like Hitler’s Germany in 1936. We have the dictator with no term limit. We have the arbitrary incarceration of political enemies. We have the bans on religion. We have an aggressive—even vengeful—foreign policy. The Chinese Communist Party secretary described Uyghur terrorists as “rats that needed to be chased and ‘beaten down.’” But while Germany in 1936 was on the verge of the genocide of a people the Nazis described as vermin, China is already in the middle of one. And President Joe Biden has already openly and publicly acknowledged that.