A legendary track performance in front of Hitler. A record-breaking baseball game. The most famous head-butt in sports. Guns N’ Roses and the N.F.L. Europe.
When the Champions League final comes to the Olympiastadion in Berlin for the first time on Saturday, it will join a long list of famous and infamous events held in the venerable stadium.
Designed by Werner March, whose father, Otto, was the architect of an earlier stadium at the same site, the 120,000-capacity Olympiastadion was finished in 1936 as part of the Nazis’ sweeping propaganda-through-architecture plan.
Hitler was on hand to open the 1936 Olympics there, and the titanic ceremony, captured in Leni Riefenstahl’s lauded and reviled documentary “Olympia,” featured the first torch relay.