ABSTRACT
At the end of World War II, sports facilities in Germany were either seriously damaged or, for lack of care and maintenance in the pre-war and war years, in a pitiful state. Nevertheless, the facilities available prior to the war (in 1935, for instance, there were about 150,000 facilities for a population of 67 million) had formed an excellent basis for club and school sport at the time. This situation in the sports facility sector was achieved with carefully prepared orchestration and encouragement on the part of the sports organisations at the beginning of the twentieth century and immediately after World War I. As noted in earlier chapters, the state and status of sport itself was suffering in 1945: the Allies had dismantled the organisational structure of sport as it was in the Third Reich, and the intellectual leadership elite at that time had its reservations about sport. Not until the formation of new sports associations in 1949–50 did sport begin to get back on its feet. What has been achieved in sport and in the facilities sector since then has been remarkable.
