Located in the former German Sport Forum on the grounds of the Olympic Stadium and constructed in preparation for Berlin’s XIth Olympiad in 1936, the Sportmuseum Berlin offers exhibitions and seminars on the history of German athletics. While its collections are the result of the merging of the former East German and West German sports museums, the museum likes to consider itself the descendant of the Museum for Body Exercise—the world’s first museum of sport—which was opened in 1924, only to be closed ten years later when the Nazis seized power.

The exterior of the museum offers as much history as the materials inside, as the building and its environs are home to architecture and artworks commissioned by the Nazi authorities for their Olympics, including sculptures by party-approved artists such as Arno Breker and Georg Kolbe. After the Nazi’s defeat the entire area served as headquarters for the British military authorities and was only returned to German control in the mid 1990s, after Berlin’s reunification.