Triumph: The Untold Story of Jesse Owens and Hitler's Olympics

by Jeremy Schaap

  The Germans might have been able to play this game with the quivering western democracies and the pseudo-diplomats of the International Olympic Committee, but not with Arturo Toscanini. The day before the IOC meeting in Vienna, the great conductor announced his decision to cancel his contract to direct the Wagner festival in Bayreuth, Germany. He sent a telegram to Winifred Wagner, the widow of Richard Wagner’s son. “The lamentable events which injured my sentiments as an artist have not yet undergone a change, notwithstanding my hopes,” he wrote. “It is therefore my duty to break the silence I have observed for two months to inform you that, for my peace and yours, I no longer have any thought of going to Baireuth (sic).” The Germans responded by banning Toscanini’s recordings.

  The same day that Toscanini made his stand, so did twenty American Olympic champions. Together with the American Jewish Congress, they sent a cable to the International Olympic Committee urging the IOC to stand firm against the Nazis. Gustavus T. Kirby, the former president of the American Olympic Committee and the Amateur Athletic Union, also weighed in against the Third Reich. “The Olympic games will not continue to Berlin unless and until there is a change in the German attitude toward Jews,” Kirby wrote. Naively, though, he assumed that amateur athletic organizations such as those with which he had long been affiliated might actually be able to effect change in the new Germany. “I have a strong feeling, based on direct information that I have received from Germany, that the German campaign against Jews will change,” he went on, “particularly if pressure is brought to bear on them.” An amateur sportsman and a gentleman, Kirby apparently had no idea what kind of people he was now dealing with.

  In fact, the entire relationship between the American amateur athletic community and the German authorities was warped by the Americans’ fundamental misunderstanding of the Nazis. The Americans simply could not fathom that the Nazis were serious when they made speeches about cleansing German society by eliminating Jews. The (mostly) patrician American officials incorrectly came to the conclusion that Nazi rhetoric was nothing more than an instrument to control the masses. They really did not believe that the Nazis meant what they were saying.

  It was also convenient for them to think this way. Their decisions were thus made much easier. For the most part, American athletes, including Jesse Owens, allowed themselves, too, to feel that the Jewish situation could not be as bleak as it sometimes seemed—on the rare occasions that they thought about the situation at all. There were many Americans, of course, who simply did not care.

  But some did. In addition to Mahoney, other prominent Catholics, such as Governor Smith and Governor James Curley of Massachusetts, supported the boycott. They opposed Hitler not only because he was a racist and an anti-Semite but because his policies were also anti-Christian. In its November 8, 1935, edition, the liberal Catholic journal The Commonweal endorsed the boycott of an Olympics that would “set the seal of approval upon the radically anti-Christian Nazi doctrine of youth.”

  The boycott movement was gaining momentum. In his syndicated column, Heywood Broun wrote, “I think that one of the most useful kinds of protest that can be made against the fascist regime of Hitler lies in our staying away from the Olympic Games in Berlin.”

  In his syndicated column, Westbrook Pegler wrote, “Now that it is admitted that the German Olympics are to be a political undertaking intended to glorify the Nazi program, the American Olympic Committee has no right to commit support to participation.”

  But Avery Brundage saw no evil—not in 1935, anyway. In 1933, though, immediately after Hitler became chancellor and began implementing his anti-Semitic agenda, he had sided with those who were reconsidering America’s support for the 1936 Olympics, the winter games to be held in Garmisch-Partenkirchen and the summer games in Berlin. Brundage was made uneasy by the German decision to drop Dr. Daniel Prenn, a Jew who was one of the country’s greatest tennis players, from its Davis Cup team. He was also troubled by reports that Dr. Lewald was to be dismissed from the Olympic committee because he was Jewish.

  Lewald had been known to most American sports officials for decades; in 1904, at the world’s fair and Olympics in St. Louis, he had thrown a party in honor of Alice Roosevelt, President Theodore Roosevelt’s daughter. In Germany, he was a man of immense prestige. In 1930, on the occasion of his seventieth birthday, Dr. Lewald had been awarded the Eagle Shield, Republican Germany’s highest honor, by President Paul von Hindenburg. Still, as early as April 1933, the newly installed Third Reich sought to have him removed from his post organizing the 1936 Olympics because his father, who had been baptized in 1826, was of Jewish descent. Politically, Lewald was an archconservative. In fact, he had been dismissed from the reich ministry in 1921 by his socialist superiors because they deemed him reactionary. For the Nazis, though, all that mattered was the fact that his father had been born a Jew, albeit around the time Abraham Lincoln had been born and long before the birth of the German state.

  But by targeting Lewald, the Nazis overstepped, if not their authority, at least good sense. Even the usually compliant German press raised concerns. “The issue becomes all the more difficult because all experts agree the success or failure of the 1936 Olympics depends on Dr. Lewald,” the Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung reported. “Rome and Tokyo are making strenuous efforts to have the 1936 games transferred there. Is it worthwhile to provoke such a decision?”

  The Nazis’ treatment of Lewald incensed Brundage, who, ironically, was among the first Americans to suggest that the games might have to be boycotted or moved. In a letter to K. A. Miller, the managing editor of the Jewish Times of Baltimore, Brundage wrote, “To my mind the situation in Germany is analogous to a case that the Amateur Athletic Union encountered six or seven years ago. We had awarded the national track-and-field championships to New Orleans. Shortly before the meet we discovered that Negroes would not be permitted to compete. So we immediately transferred the event to another city.” But in reality, Brundage was less concerned with German prejudice against its Jewish citizens than with the possibility that the Germans would somehow try to bar all Jews from competing—in his mind a real possibility. “If Jews were barred from American Olympic teams, I know that the AAU would voice a stern protest,” Brundage, wearing his AAU hat for the moment, wrote. Then, switching hats, he continued, “And I am sure that the American Olympic Committee would do the same. Should this eventually happen I doubt that the United States would be represented in Berlin in 1936 . . . The situation in Germany may change overnight. But at any rate we are not going to permit the barring of Jews from the Olympics.” This was Brundage in a nutshell. Reluctantly, he might be stirred to action. If Germany banned American Jews from the games, he would voice a “stern protest.”

  Brundage said he would see for himself how the Third Reich was treating its Jewish citizens, including, of course, its Jewish athletes, several of whom were among Germany’s best, such as the high jumper Gretel Bergmann and the ice hockey star Rudi Ball. But Brundage’s tour of the country in August 1934 was merely a public relations event. Before leaving for Germany, he made it clear that his sympathies were with his hosts, not with their Jewish subjects. In the Olympic News, he wrote, “The German committee is making every effort to provide the finest facilities and plans to reproduce the Los Angeles Olympic village. We should see in the youth at Berlin the forebears of a race of free independent thinkers accustomed to the democracy of sport; a race disdainful of sharp practice, tolerant of the rights of others and practicing the Golden Rule because it believes in it.”

  It was surmised, and reported, and of course true, that Brundage had already made up his mind. But the Germans were taking no chances. Hitler wined and dined the prickly construction magnate. Over the course of six days, Brundage spoke to several Jews—but only in the presence of Nazi chaperones such as Dr. Karl Ritter von Halt and Arno Breitmeyer. Not so shockingly, no one told him how bad the situation had become, and he failed to witness any overt displays of Nazi hostility to Jews.
Dismissing Mahoney’s concerns and changing his tune, Brundage declared that the Olympics “are an international event and must be kept free from outside interference or entanglements, racial, religious or political.” He also said, “Certain Jews must understand that they cannot use these games as a weapon in their boycott against the Nazis.” In other words, Brundage was saying, as he would famously say after the massacre in Munich in 1972, that the games must go on.

  Even American diplomats thought that Brundage was dangerously myopic. “Should the Games not be held in Berlin,” George Messersmith, the United States consul general in Berlin, wrote to his superiors in the State Department, “it would be one of the most serious blows which National Socialist prestige could suffer within an awakening Germany and one of the most effective ways which the world outside has of showing to the youth of Germany its opinion of National Socialist doctrine.” It was “inconceivable,” he continued, “that the American Olympic committee should continue its stand that sport in Germany is non-political, that there is no discrimination. Other nations are looking to the United States before they act, hoping for leadership; the Germans are holding back on increased economic oppression against the Jews until the games are over. America should prevent its athletes from being used by another government as a political instrument.”

  Still relatively sensitive to bad press and desperate to keep the Olympics, the Nazis used semantics to assuage the international community. They allowed the nomination of several Jewish athletes for the Olympic teams, but none were actually invited to tryouts. The national sanctioning bodies for each sport were to choose Germany’s Olympians, but Jews were not allowed to be members of any of these athletic associations. It was a clever catch-22. To make the Olympic team, you had to be in one of the official sports clubs. To belong to one of the official sports clubs, you had to be Aryan.

  Despite the obvious—and well chronicled—games the Germans were playing, Brundage went out of his way to praise their efforts to include Jews and to insult Jewish athletes. “The fact that no Jews have been named so far to compete for Germany doesn’t necessarily mean that they have been discriminated against on that score,” Brundage said on July 26, 1935. “In forty years of Olympic history, I doubt if the number of Jewish athletes competing from all nations totaled one percent of those in the games. In fact, I believe one-half of one percent would be a high percentage.”

  Most famously, Brundage absolved himself of all moral responsibility when he said that organized amateur sport “cannot, with good grace or propriety, interfere in the internal political, religious or racial affairs of any country or group.”

  Of course Brundage’s statements were greeted with great enthusiasm in Berlin. After all, he had just given the Third Reich free rein to do as it pleased without fear of reprisal from the American Olympic Committee.

  Seven weeks after Brundage’s statements, Hitler made an important trip to Nuremberg, the quaint medieval city that the Nazis considered their spiritual home. It was there, on September 15, 1935, that he announced the new anti-Semitic decrees that came to be known as the Nuremberg Laws. In an instant Germany’s Jews were stripped of their citizenship, deprived of protection by the laws of the land, and forbidden to marry Aryans or to employ Aryan women as servants.

  At the time, the United States was far from a bastion of equality itself. Jim Crow was still very much alive and well, and not just in the South, and that made it difficult, even hypocritical, for Americans to lecture the Germans about their attitude toward Jews. But whereas race relations in the United States were for the most part getting better, Germany was clearly heading in the opposite direction. In a mere thirty-three months in power, the Nazis had turned back the clock to the Middle Ages for the country’s Jews. Hitler had decided that the Olympics would serve as a spectacular showcase for his regime, so now it was all the more important that Jews be excluded from the games.

  Even before Hitler’s thoughts turned to the games scheduled for 1936, he had been impressed by the Olympics. The Greek Olympics, in fact, were the inspiration for the enormous party rallies that took place in Nuremberg beginning in 1927. “As I wished as many towns as possible—big, medium, and little—to participate and to become centers of German cultural life,” Hitler later said, “I chose Nuremberg for our rallies, and our annual gathering there must, I think, give the city for ten days the atmosphere of the Olympic festival of ancient days.” The pseudo-Greek pageantry of the modern Olympics appealed to him. He always had a weakness for pagan pomp.

  On March 16, 1933, six weeks after he became chancellor, Hitler met with Lewald, already the chairman of the Olympic organizing committee, and Dr. Heinrich Sahm, the mayor of Berlin and the vice chairman of the organizing committee. According to the committee’s official report, Hitler “welcomed the allotting of the Games to Berlin” and “would do everything possible to ensure their successful presentation.” He also asserted that the games “would contribute substantially towards furthering understanding among the nations of the world.” Of course, there was nothing Hitler more fervently desired than international understanding.

  After seizing the reins of state, Hitler started transforming the fields ringing Nuremberg into a vast ceremonial plain, an expanse of stadiums, official buildings, and parade grounds that would dwarf anything that had preceded it. “This sacred site with its unique concepts of architecture and use of space,” a Nazi party spokesman said in 1935, “will be the highest symbol of National Socialist life and National Socialist culture; in it the unique style of National Socialism will find its strongest expression.”

  So it is not surprising that Hitler was entirely disgusted by the initial plans for a fairly modest and modern Olympic stadium in Berlin. In his first six months in office, despite official statements to the contrary, he showed little enthusiasm for the games, which were still three years away. His mind was elsewhere. But it was only a matter of time before the Chancellor, who, as Albert Speer makes clear in his memoirs, loved nothing more than to immerse himself in the minutiae of architecture, inserted himself into the Olympics debate, which was soon no longer a debate. On October 5, 1933, Hitler visited the 350-acre plot of land that had been selected to become the site of the Olympic complex, accompanied by Werner March, the architect who had been chosen to create it; Interior Minister Wilhelm Frick; Von Tschammer und Osten, the new minister of sport; and Lewald. The area was known as the Grunewald, within the city limits of Berlin but eight miles west of the center. Hitler immediately nixed March’s plans to rebuild the existing stadium on the site—it had been built by his father, Otto March, twenty years earlier on the grounds of a racetrack—and ordered him instead to build a new stadium that could seat 100,000 spectators. “The stadium must be built by the Reich,” he said, his temper flaring. “It will be the task of the nation. If Germany is to stand host to the entire world, her preparations must be complete and magnificent.”

  Five days later, Otto March presented Hitler with a blueprint for the new stadium. Clearly, March was unfamiliar with his patron’s aesthetic sensibilities. The stadium he envisioned was modernist, with enormous glass panels attached to the exterior, more in the style of Mies van der Rohe or Le Corbusier than Mussolini. Hitler threw a tantrum. In Speer’s presence, he told Hans Pfundtner, one of Frick’s deputies, to cancel the Berlin Olympics. According to Speer, Hitler said that the games “could not take place without his presence, since the Chief of State must open them. But he would never set foot inside a modern glass box like that.”

  “Overnight,” Speer wrote, “I made a sketch showing how the steel skeleton already built could be clad in natural stone and have more massive cornices added. The glass partitions were eliminated, and Hitler was content. He saw to the financing of the increased costs; Professor March agreed to the changes, and the Olympic Games were to be held in Berlin after all—although I was never sure Hitler would actually have carried out his threat or whether it was merely a flash of pique, which he often used to get his way.
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  Speer’s attempts to make the stadium grander were only partially successful. From the outside, it was drab, low-slung, and decidedly frumpy. On the inside, it was much more impressive and monumental. The contrast was a result of the decision to build most of the stadium underground, so that it appeared from the outside much smaller than it actually was. If one walked toward the stadium from the east, the Berlin side, it seemed almost cozy. Cozy was not Hitler’s style. In fact, his taste for monumental architecture reached its apotheosis in his directive to Speer, eventually the Third Reich’s court architect, to create a stadium in Nuremberg that would seat 405,000. (Speer hoped the structure would be finished by 1945, but no cornerstone was ever laid.) Hitler often said that once Germany had subdued its enemies, the Olympics’ permanent home would be Nuremberg. “In 1940, the Olympic Games will take place in Tokyo,” he said to Speer as they inspected a wooden model of the never-to-be-built mega-stadium, “but thereafter they will take place in Germany for all time to come, in this stadium.”

  It has been pointed out, by figures from Thomas Mann to Speer, that above all else Hitler was an artist—not a great artist, but a tortured, frustrated artist, whose greatest passions were opera, painting, and architecture. Not only did he design his own homes and the Reich Chancellery, he even drew the blueprint for the bunker in which he eventually took his own life. Party rallies were orchestrated as scenes from Wagner. Spectacles were the order of the day in the new Germany, and few spectacles could match the Olympics, with their rapt crowds, teams marching in unison, uniforms, flags, anthems, medals, and fatuous rhetoric. To Hitler, the Berlin games were a fascist fantasy come true—and of paramount importance in several respects.