Hitlerland
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For precisely the same reason, many Jewish groups in the United States, along with an array of other activists, particularly from the left, pushed hard for a boycott of the Berlin Olympics. They pointed out that the Nazis’ record of discrimination against Jews was in direct contradiction of the Olympic ideal that all competitors were welcome. Avery Brundage, the president of the American Olympic Committee (AOC), initially sounded sympathetic to that argument. “My personal, but unofficial opinion is that the Games will not be held in any country where there will be interference with the fundamental Olympic theory of equality of all races,” he declared.
Prodded by Lewald, the Nazis responded that Germany would welcome “competitors of all races,” but also stipulated that the composition of the German team was its own affair. In September 1934, Brundage traveled to Germany, supposedly to investigate whether German Jews were getting fair treatment. German sports officials gave him a quick tour of their sports facilities, also acting as translators when he talked to Jews. Arno Breitmeyer, a top Nazi sports official, even came dressed in his SS uniform for a meeting with Jewish sports leaders. Brundage didn’t stop to consider the intimidating effect of those arrangements on the Jews he met; he appeared satisfied that he was getting their candid assessments. He also reported that the Germans had assured him that there would be “no discrimination in Berlin against Jews.” Pleased by those declarations, he added: “You can’t ask for more than that and I think the guarantee will be fulfilled.” In one of his more expansive moments, Brundage suggested a common bond with his hosts, pointing out that his men’s club in Chicago didn’t admit Jews.
Charles Sherrill, another member of the AOC, traveled to Germany in 1935 to try to convince the Nazis to name at least one Jew to the German team, unabashedly arguing that they needed the equivalent of “the token Negro.” But in a personal meeting with Hitler, he called himself “a friend of Germany and of National Socialism” and didn’t seem at all bothered by Hitler’s adamant opposition to including any Jews in Germany’s Olympic squad. According to the Nazi leader, this would contaminate the Aryan contingent. Sherrill described his meeting with Hitler as “wonderful,” and used similarly effusive terms in describing his subsequent four days as Hitler’s personal guest at the annual Nuremberg Nazi Party rally in mid-September. “It was beautiful!” he wrote. “You could almost hear the [Nazi] units click, as each fitted into place, exactly on time.”
As the battle lines were drawn back home between the pro- and antiboycott factions, including within the AOC and other athletic organizations, several top American diplomats in Germany were offering a far more accurate picture than “fact finders” like Brundage and Sherrill. Ambassador Dodd met with Jewish sports officials privately, avoiding the kind of staged sessions that had been arranged for the visitors. He reported to Washington that his interlocutors described “flagrant discrimination” against Jewish athletes and widespread intimidation of the few who were admitted to Olympic training camps.
As early as 1933, Consul General Messersmith, who had made a habit of not allowing himself to be fooled by the Nazis, had predicted that the new regime might make a show of allowing a few Jews to compete in the Olympic trials. But he warned that “this will be merely a screen for the real discrimination that is taking place.” He and Raymond Geist, another top embassy official, kept reporting on the discrimination, trying to counter the “whitewash” of Sherrill and others. After his transfer to Vienna in 1934, Messersmith continued to urge Secretary of State Cordell Hull to oppose American participation in the Olympics. The Berlin event, he argued in a cable in December 1935, “has become the symbol of the conquest of the world by National Socialist doctrine.” If the Olympics were stopped, “it would be one of the most serious blows which National Socialist prestige could suffer within an awakening Germany.” He added that many “wise and informed observers” believed the fate of the games would have a major role “in determining political developments in Europe”—and that he fully concurred with this view.
Despite the impassioned opposition to the Berlin games by Jeremiah Mahoney, the president of the American Athletic Union, and several other sports officials back in the United States, the Brundage-Sherrill view narrowly prevailed. Hull was largely unmoved by the pleas from his diplomats in Berlin and Vienna, and Roosevelt remained studiously silent on the controversy. As David Clay Large wrote in his authoritative study Nazi Games: The Olympics of 1936: “A consummate politician, FDR certainly understood that throwing his weight behind either position carried more risks than taking no position at all.” Besides, Large continued, his administration was already perceived as too “Jew friendly,” and even Judge Samuel I. Rosenman, one of his Jewish advisors, warned him against supporting a boycott.
When the games got under way, they were every bit the triumphant pageant that both their proponents and opponents had predicted. Wolfe offered this vivid description in You Can’t Go Home Again:
The daily spectacle was breath-taking in its beauty and magnificence. The stadium was a tournament of color that caught the throat; the massed splendor of the banners made the gaudy decorations of America’s great parades, presidential inaugurations, and World’s Fairs seem like shoddy carnivals in comparison. And for the duration of the Olympics, Berlin itself was transformed into a kind of annex to the stadium… the whole town was a thrilling pageantry of royal banners… banners fifty feet in height, such as might have graced the battle tent of some great emperor.
All of which served as the stage for every triumphant appearance of the modern emperor. “At last he came—and something like a wind across a field of grass was shaken through that crowd, and from afar the tide rolled up with him, and in it was the voice, the hope, the prayer of the land,” Wolfe continued. As Hitler arrived, standing stiffly in a shining car, he raised his hand “palm upward, not in Nazi-wise salute, but straight-up, in a gesture of blessing such as the Buddha or Messiahs use.”
It wasn’t only Hitler’s followers who were impressed. “Berlin is now a handsome, hustling place to be at home in,” the New Yorker’s Janet Flanner wrote. “The past year has been closer to physical prosperity and farther from political nervousness than any Germany has known since the war, and its capital city shows it.” Everything was done to convey exactly that impression to the foreign visitors. Rudi Josten, a German staffer in the Associated Press bureau, recalled the abrupt revival of many of the attractions of the Weimar era. “Everything was free and all dance halls were reopened,” he said. “They played American music and whatnot. Anyway, everybody thought: ‘Well, so Hitler can’t be so bad.’” The Nazis even allowed 7,000 previously banned prostitutes to ply their trade once again in the German capital.
Whether it was on the streets or in what passed for the new high society, the visitors were given every opportunity to revel. “A glittering swirl of Olympic receptions,” Fromm wrote in her diary. “The foreigners are spoiled, pampered, flattered, and beguiled.” Shirer was depressed by the degree to which the visitors were taken in by the lavish show. “I’m afraid the Nazis have succeeded with their propaganda,” he noted as the games were ending.
Carla de Vries, an older American woman, was so caught up in the fervor that she managed to elude Hitler’s bodyguards and kiss Der Führer on the cheek during his visit to the swimming stadium. Swimmer Eleanor Holm Jarrett, the twenty-two-year-old wife of bandleader Art Jarrett and a gold medalist at the 1928 Los Angeles Olympics, had already partied so hard on the transatlantic crossing that Brundage had her dropped from the team. She remained in Berlin anyway, convincing Hearst’s International News Service to give her an assignment to report on the festivities. She did her job enthusiastically, showing up at receptions hosted by top Nazi leaders. When Goering gave her a silver swastika pin, she happily wore it on her chest for everyone to see.
But none of this was enough to completely satisfy Hitler. Fromm recorded in her diary that he applauded German winners in “an orgasmic frenzy of shrieks, clappings, and co
ntortions,” but that he displayed a “disgusting” lack of sportsmanship when others emerged victorious—especially Jesse Owens and his fellow black American athletes. “It was unfair of the United States to send these flatfooted specimens to compete with the noble products of Germany,” he complained. “I am going to vote against Negro participation in the future.”
When Owens scored one of his victories, Wolfe was sitting in the diplomatic box with Martha Dodd. He let out “a war whoop,” Martha recalled, which didn’t go unnoticed by the Nazi leader, who was also in attendance. “Hitler twisted in his seat, looked down, attempting to locate the miscreant, and frowned angrily.” In fact, the German leader was ignoring some of the guidelines of his own regime. A Nazi directive to the German press had warned that “Negroes should not be insensitively reported… Negroes are American citizens and must be treated with respect as Americans.”
Although such instructions were inspired by cynical calculation that an appearance of respectful reporting could fool the world into believing that the Nazi movement was based on tolerance, the irony was that many Germans were genuinely enthusiastic about the black American stars, especially Owens. Cheers went up in the Olympic Stadium whenever he appeared. The black American sociologist and historian W. E. B. DuBois, who spent nearly six months on a fellowship in Germany in 1935 and 1936, wrote: “Jesse Owens ran before the astonished eyes of the world. He was lauded and pictured and interviewed. He can scarcely take a step without being begged for his ‘autogramme.’ He is without doubt the most popular single athlete in the Olympic Games of 1936.” And while Hitler and other top Nazis bitterly complained about the black American Olympians, some of those athletes were invited by ordinary German citizens for coffee or dinner.
Little wonder that Owens and his black teammates returned from Germany with less bitterness than many of their countrymen expected—especially since these athletes all too often would see no change in the discrimination they faced at home. Richard Helms, the young United Press reporter in Berlin and future CIA chief, happened to be crossing the Atlantic on the Queen Mary with Owens after the games. In their conversations, the runner shrugged off all the stories about how Hitler had allegedly snubbed him. “Owens was a quiet, modest man,” Helms recalled. “He did not feel he had been insulted, as conventional reporting had it, when Hitler failed to award him the gold medal.”
Reflecting on his stay, DuBois elaborated on the reasons why black Americans would have mixed feelings about their experiences in Hitler’s Germany. “I have been treated with uniform courtesy and consideration,” he reported. “It would have been impossible for me to have spent a similarly long time in any part of the United States, without some, if not frequent cases of personal insult or discrimination. I cannot record a single instance here.”
He observed that Germany felt “contented and prosperous” under its new rulers, but also that it was “silent, nervous, suppressed” and all opposition was banned. He certainly noticed the “campaign of race prejudice carried on openly, continuously and determinedly against all non-Nordic races, but specifically against the Jews, which surpasses in vindictive cruelty and public insult anything I have ever seen.” The situation, he added, was “so complicated that one cannot express it without seeming to convict one’s self of deliberate misstatement.” All of which got him back to the Olympics, concluding that “the testimony of the casual, non-German-speaking visitor to the Olympic Games is worse than valueless in any direction.”
Many of the American athletes, black or white, gave little or no thought to such considerations. They were there for the competition—and, just like the spectators, out for a good time. In at least one case, this led to a German-American personal drama that played itself out almost as publicly as the races on the field.
Leni Riefenstahl, Hitler’s favorite film director, who had already immortalized the Nuremberg Nazi rallies in Triumph of the Will, was busy filming the games for what would become her second major work, Olympia. Fromm clearly detested the glamorous young director and former actress. “Wearing gray flannel slacks and a kind of jockey cap, [she] is obtrusively in evidence everywhere,” the Jewish reporter wrote in her diary. “On and off she sits down beside her Führer, a magazine-cover grin on her face and a halo of importance fixed firmly above her head.” It wasn’t the Nazi leader, however, who made Riefenstahl lose control of her emotions; it was the American decathlon winner Glenn Morris.
On the second day of the decathlon, the German champion Erwin Huber introduced Riefenstahl to Morris, who was lying on the grass resting with a towel over his head. “When Huber presented Morris to me, and we looked at one another, we both seemed transfixed,” the film director wrote in her autobiography, slipping into the tone of a sappy romance novel. “It was an incredible moment and I had never experienced anything like it. I tried to choke back the feelings surging up inside me…”
After Morris won the competition, breaking a world record, he stood with two other Americans on the podium for the medals ceremony. Riefenstahl watched, but was unable to film the ceremony because it was getting dark. As Morris came off the podium, he headed straight toward the film director. Here, her memoir goes from romance novel to bodice-ripper mode. “I held out my hand and congratulated him, but he grabbed me in his arms, tore off my blouse, and kissed my breasts, right in the middle of the stadium, in front of a hundred thousand spectators. A lunatic, I thought,” she wrote. “But I could not forget the wild look in his eyes…”
Riefenstahl claimed she tried to avoid Morris after that, but ended up encountering him again at the pole vault. “We couldn’t control our feelings,” she wrote, describing how they immediately became lovers in the midst of the Olympic events and her film shoots. “I had lost my head completely,” she confessed, and imagined he was the man she would marry. When Morris left to be feted for his triumphs in a New York ticker-tape parade, she was despondent. Then she read that he was engaged to an American teacher. He still wrote to Riefenstahl, and she still believed she loved him. Although she finally decided to break off their affair, she sent him her stills of him in action in Berlin, which helped him get the part of Tarzan in a Hollywood movie. Later, she learned he divorced in 1940 and died of alcohol and drug abuse in 1974.
By pointing out “his sad fate” in her memoir, Riefenstahl implied that Morris would have done better if he had stayed with her. In the midst of the pageantry of the Olympics, Hitler’s favorite film director had fanta-sized about a whole other life with the American who couldn’t have cared less what movement she was working for.
Truman Smith, who had been the first American official to meet Hitler, returned to Berlin in 1935 for a second tour, this time as the senior military attaché. It wasn’t until a couple of years later that he met the Nazi leader again, although he had observed him from afar on several occasions, including at the Olympics. At an official function at the Chancellery, Smith worked his way through the reception line and shook Hitler’s hand. Preparing to move on, he felt Hitler’s hand on his sleeve.
“Have I not seen you before?” Hitler asked.
“Yes, Mr. Chancellor, in Munich in 1922,” the startled attaché responded.
“Oh, yes, you introduced me to Hanfstaengl,” Hitler recalled.
It was a vivid demonstration that the German leader, like many skilled politicians, possessed an uncanny memory for significant faces and events in his life even after a long interval.
Returning to Berlin, Truman and his wife, Kay, were immediately struck by its transformation since the early 1920s. “Berlin was so familiar,” Kay wrote in her unpublished memoirs. “It was the same yet not the same. The streets, the buildings were all as I had known them. But now no more shabby fronts and broken fences. All was clean, freshly painted… It was as in a dream; all is familiar but changed… The crowds well dressed, the people looking well nourished, energetic.” Without any irony, she also observed: “Berlin was a very safe city at this time, as all the drunks, bums, homosexuals, etc. h
ad been put in concentration camps.”
If such remarks betrayed her own prejudices, Kay wasn’t blind to what she characterized as “a certain tenseness” in the air, the product of a regime that was ready to target anyone. When she and Truman returned to the house one day, a servant told them that telephone repairmen had visited the house and insisted on “checking” their connections, despite her protestations that the phone was working well. After that, the Smiths made a habit of putting an overcoat over the phone to foil any listening devices, and postponing any sensitive conversations to when they took walks in the Grunewald, the forest on the outskirts of the city. The couple assumed that it wasn’t only the Nazis who could be spying on them. According to Kay, Truman tried to engineer the removal of an American secretary in his office, a longtime Berlin resident with strong leftist views who he suspected was giving information to the Russians.
Kay also pointed out parallels between the Nazis and the Communists. The Nazis, like the Communists, hoped to replace Christianity with another doctrine—what she identified as “the old Germanic religion,” but in reality was the idea that Nazism superseded all previous beliefs. According to one of Kay’s Catholic friends, a Nazi leader had ordered schoolchildren to replace the standard grace at meals with “Dear Jesus, stay away from us. We eat gladly without thee.” When Rochus von Rheinbabin, a German acquaintance from their first tour, arrived decked out in Nazi insignia, proudly boasting about his early membership in the party, Kay questioned him about the party’s beliefs. After he finished, she said, “But Rochus, what is then the difference between National Socialism and Communism?” Her German visitor threw up his hands. “Hush Katie,” he declared. “One may not say that.”