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

by Jeremy Schaap

  Most significant, they would be a grand opportunity to show off the gleaming new capital he had been building. He had replaced the filth, decay, and decadence of Weimar with grand boulevards and marble palaces. Poverty had been all but eliminated. Most Berliners—at least those who had not yet been consigned to special yellow benches in far-off corners of public parks—were buoyant, floating on the tide of economic and patriotic renewal fostered by the Chancellor. The Olympics would be an important moment for Hitler and Germany, because for two weeks in February in the Alps and then for two weeks in the summer in Prussia, the eyes of the world would be trained on them. Of course, it simply wouldn’t do if Germany failed to perform well at its own games. Since the revival of the Olympics in 1896 in Athens, Germany had been one of the great underachievers of the games. No German man had won a gold medal in track and field, ever. And at that time, for most people, track and field was the Olympics.

  Strangely, in a roundabout way, Germany was the driving force behind the revival of the Olympics. Pierre de Coubertin, the French nobleman who founded the International Olympic Committee and ran it for forty years, was inspired to rekindle the games by the German victory in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1871. Coubertin blamed France’s humiliation on the moral and physical decline of its youth. He hoped the Olympics would encourage young Frenchmen to spend less time loafing and more time running, swimming, and shooting. Ultimately, his most cherished hope was that they would be less easy prey for the Germans. By the 1930s, though, near the end of his life, Coubertin had fully embraced pacifism, like many Frenchmen who had seen the flower of French youth perish in the trenches from 1914 to 1918. The man who had created the Olympics as a hedge against German invasion now insisted that the games must be above politics. Coubertin was too blinded by his love for his creation to realize that it was the Nazis, not those agitating for boycotts, who were using the Olympics for political aims.

  From the beginning, Hitler knew the games would afford him a unique opportunity to promote the thousand-year reich he envisioned. (As noted, the Third Reich was not the only fascist regime interested in hosting the Olympics. The Italians and the Japanese both made it known that they would accept the torch, as it were, if an international movement to take the games from the Nazis was successful. It should have occurred to someone that if Mussolini, Hitler, and Tojo all wanted the same thing, they must have had reasons beyond a shared love of shot-putting and dressage.)

  “The Chancellor is taking an enormous interest in the Olympic Games,” Sir Eric Phipps, the British ambassador to Berlin, wrote in a dispatch to the Foreign Office on November 7, 1935. “In fact he is beginning to regard political questions very much from the angle of their effect on the Games . . . The German government are simply terrified lest Jewish pressure may induce the United States Government to withdraw their team and so wreck the festival, the material and propagandist value of which, they think, can scarcely be exaggerated.”

  Phipps, who was sixty and a career foreign service officer, had been appointed in May 1933 to succeed Sir Horace Rumbold. In the mid-1930s, even as his government fiddled, Phipps urged Parliament to increase military expenditures to keep pace with the German rearmament campaign. He was roundly ignored. More than most observers, he knew the Nazi mentality well. To him, it seemed absurd to give Hitler and propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels—the twin masters of the promulgation of anti-Semitism, militarism, and fascism—a platform to promote their agenda. It was Hitler, after all, who increased the Olympic budget from 1.5 million to 28 million reichsmarks. It was Hitler who, in his eagerness to impress foreign visitors, diverted military funds to effect the swift completion of Berlin’s new airport, well in time for the games.

  Before he assumed power, Hitler had been dismissive of the Olympics because of their inclusiveness. (Any activity in which Aryans competed with Jews and blacks naturally aroused his ire.) But when he became chancellor, he changed his mind. In early March 1933, Der Angriff, Goebbels’s newspaper, said that it was in Germany’s interest to maintain its international sporting relationships. And then Hitler threw his support behind the Olympics. “I will advance the games as well as all sports interests in every manner possible,” he said on March 16, 1933, the day he first met with Lewald. A month later, however, when it became clear that the regime’s anti-Semitism might lead to a boycott of the games, Hitler distanced himself from the preparations. If the Jews were going to get the games moved, he was not going to allow himself to appear to have been defeated by them.

  As the games approached, the Third Reich worked feverishly to make both the winter and summer games shining examples of its competency. More than anyone else, Goebbels knew precisely what was at stake. His thoughts were captured by Der Angriff, which wrote that the summer games would offer “a veritably historic opportunity for Germany to remove all those prejudices which have been attached to the German people not only in recent years but for decades. We are not only going to show the most beautiful sports arena, the fastest transportation and the cheapest currency; we are also going to be more charming than the Parisians, more lively than the Romans, more worldly than the Londoners, and more efficient than the New Yorkers.”

  As Janet Flanner put it in her “Berlin Letter” to The New Yorker, “For two weeks Germany profoundly wants visitors to feel at home.” To make visitors feel at home, Germany had to pretend that it wasn’t what it had become since 1933. Flanner reported that the brown-shirted men of the SA and the black-shirted men of the SS had been ordered to keep their uniforms in the closet as much as possible for the duration of the summer games, and that they had also been ordered not to discuss “racial problems in public, and to give a foreign lady, no matter what her profile, their seat in a tramcar.” (The uniforms that would be in closets during the summer games were on full display at the winter games in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, however. During that event, foreign journalists were troubled by the omnipresence of the German military. Goebbels would not allow that to happen again. )

  Like so many recent visitors to Berlin, even those disgusted by Nazism, Flanner wrote glowingly of the rejuvenation of Frederick the Great’s capital. She said “the only blot” on the glittering city was “the drab” new American embassy, a token of America’s financial woes in the mid-1930s. Berlin’s boulevards had been beautified, its buildings repainted, its windows decorated with fuchsias. All previous efforts by Olympic host cities were amateurish in comparison. The Nazis had taken what had always been a rather clubbish, overgrown track-and-field meet and turned it into the spectacle that even now we recognize as the modern Olympics. (The 1984 games in Los Angeles were criticized for their garish, kitschy displays of patriotism. In fact, the Los Angeles organizers had nothing on Hitler and his minions.) Sounding like an official of the Berlin chamber of commerce, the eminent foreign correspondent Frederick T. Birchall wrote in the New York Times on July 20, “There has never been such a setting for the Olympics. Never has there been such organized landscaping, such refurbishing and polishing to show the Games at their best . . . The effect will surely be to send thousands of foreigners home with excellent opinions of the effects of dictatorship and wish that democracy might some time show itself similarly showmanlike.”

  At sixty-five, Birchall, an Englishman, had been the chief of the Times’s European bureau since 1931. With a gimlet eye, he surveyed the Nazis’ Olympic preparations and aspirations—as he had observed the first three years of the Nazi reign. “All considerations of cost have been set aside,” he wrote. “Every resource of German ingenuity and German organization has been brought to bear to produce equipment and setting never before attained for the Olympics. Germany has set out to show the world and she will. These games promise to be the greatest sports festival ever staged anywhere.”

  Of course, the games would be virtually useless to the Nazis if Jeremiah T. Mahoney succeeded in his plan to block American participation. The American athletes were the best in the world, and staging an Olympics in their abse
nce would be akin to holding a wine-tasting competition without offerings from Burgundy and Bordeaux—a giant waste of time.

  But Mahoney was blocked on both the right and the left, by the crypto-fascists like Brundage and by a large segment of the black intelligentsia. In October 1935, for instance, he ran full-speed into the double-standard argument. Speaking at Columbia University, he explained to his audience why it was a moral imperative for the United States to boycott the German Olympics. Already he was making plans for an alternative athletic festival—it would be called the People’s Olympics—to be staged in (still) Republican Spain, in Barcelona.

  To Ben Johnson, the black Columbia sprinter who was expected to compete for a place on the American Olympic team, Mahoney’s argument was the apogee of hypocrisy. “The Negro in the South is discriminated against as much as the Jews in Germany,” Johnson said shortly after Mahoney’s visit to campus. “It is futile and hypocritical that Judge Mahoney should attempt to clean up conditions in Germany before cleaning up similar conditions in America.”

  Johnson—who, unlike the other sprinter named Ben Johnson, never tested positive for steroids—had a pretty good point. For fifty years blacks had been banned from the major leagues. Much more recently, the National Football League had drawn the color line. (After Ray Kemp was released by Pittsburgh in 1933, no blacks played in the league until 1946. Incidentally, Kemp became the track coach at Tennessee State, where his charges included Ralph Boston, who eventually broke Jesse Owens’s world and Olympic broad-jumping records.)

  Additionally, in 1935 no one could have foreseen the horrors awaiting European Jewry. Many German Jews themselves were still optimistic that things would get better, not worse. Johnson could not be blamed for equating the plight of America’s blacks with the plight of Germany’s Jews. At that time Hitler had probably murdered more Nazis than Jews, most notably during the so-called Night of the Long Knives, in 1934, when he had purged the party of some of his oldest comrades, including Ernst Roehm, the brutal chief of the SA, or Brown Shirts. Kristallnacht, the infamous state-sponsored pogrom, was still three years away.

  But Johnson did not speak for all black Americans. For instance, in August 1935, the Amsterdam News, which was published only a few blocks from Columbia University, had already urged Olympic hopefuls to take a stand against fascism by staying home. Not surprisingly, though, most athletes—including the Jewish sprinters Marty Glickman and Sam Stoller—were against the boycott. The black athletes rationalized their decision by pointing to domestic prejudice and, like the Jewish athletes, by suggesting that winning in Berlin would embarrass the Third Reich and repudiate its claims of racial superiority.

  In early October, Mahoney announced the formation of the Committee on Fair Play in Sports. Its mission was stated clearly on its letterhead: “No American Participation in the Olympic Games under Nazi Auspices.” Committee members included Heywood Broun, Governor Curley, Reinhold Niebuhr, Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., and Norman Thomas.

  Meanwhile, the anti-boycott position was laid out nicely in a letter to the sports editor of the New York Times by a reader named George S. Schuyler. “With the possible exception of the Scandinavian countries,” Schuyler wrote,

  where could the Olympic Games be held where liberty is not stamped into the mud and millions are not ruthlessly persecuted and exploited? Right now it probably would be impossible for the much-lauded Ralph Metcalfe, Jesse Owens, Eulace Peacock, Cornelius Johnson, Al Threadgill, Archie Williams, Ed Gordon, Jimmy LuValle or any of the other sepiatinted stars to get a decent meal or a room in any public hotel or café below the Mason-Dixon line (and but few above it), to say nothing of actually competing in a track meet with the Southerners. Why does the Fair Play Committee remain silent about this condition? Must we move our jim-crow areas to Germany before these gentlemen will break their silence?

  Schuyler’s points—and Ben Johnson’s—were quite fair but in the final analysis irrelevant to the AAU’s decision. Brundage and his lieutenants were no more interested in the civil rights of black Americans than in the civil rights of German Jews. They were mostly concerned with the perpetuation of their own power. And there was little power to be wielded by an Olympic committee that could not send a team to the Olympics.

  6

  “We Are with You, Adolf”

  * * *

  NEW YORK: DECEMBER 1935

  AS BRIGADIER GENERAL Charles Sherrill of the American Olympic Committee disembarked from the Normandie in New York Harbor on October 21, 1935, after seven weeks in the fatherland, he was met by William Chamberlain, an aide to Mahoney on the Fair Play Committee. In full view of the assembled reporters, Chamberlain handed Sherrill a copy of an angry letter Mahoney had written to Lewald. Sherrill accepted it grudgingly and tucked it into his jacket pocket without reading it. He had been warned that Mahoney might attempt such a stunt.

  A former U.S. ambassador to Turkey, Sherrill had been in Germany on September 15, when the Nuremberg Laws were announced. If he had been paying attention, he would have seen the Hitlerites at their worst to that point. Still, his views remained unchanged, and like his friend Brundage, he declared that the games must go on. “I went to Germany for the purpose of getting at least one Jew on the German [winter] Olympic team,” Sherrill said,

  and I feel that my job is finished. As to obstacles placed in the way of Jewish athletes or any others in trying to reach Olympic ability, I would have no more business discussing that in Germany than if the Germans attempted to discuss the Negro situation in the American south or the treatment of the Japanese in California. I am surprised at the extent to which the movement to keep America out of the Olympic Games has gone in this country. I am sorry that what I have done has not pleased all of my Jewish friends, many of them the most prominent Jews in New York. But I shall go right on being pro-Jewish, and for that reason I have a warning for American Jewry.

  Remarkably, Sherrill had the audacity to tell America’s Jews that he was motivated, at least in part, by a concern for their safety. He said that if American Jews continued to agitate for a boycott, there would surely be a backlash. “There is grave danger in the Olympic agitation,” he said.

  Consider the effect of several hundred thousand youngsters training for this contest throughout the United States, if the boycott movement gets so far that they suddenly are confronted with the fact that somebody is trying to defeat their ambition to get to Berlin and compete in the Olympic Games. We are almost certain to have a wave of anti-Semitism among those who never before gave it a thought and who may consider that about 5,000,000 Jews in this country are using the athletes representing 120,000,000 Americans to work out something to help the German Jews.

  Sherrill pointedly refused to acknowledge that Jeremiah T. Mahoney was no more Jewish than he, even as the Fair Play Committee insisted that its goal was to pressure the Third Reich on several fronts, not just its institutionalized anti-Semitism. “The issue is not Germany against its Jewry,” Chamberlain, Mahoney’s deputy, said, “but fair play. It has been denied not only to Jewish athletes in Germany but also to Catholic and Protestant sports clubs that do not accept Nazi doctrines of conscience.”

  That night, in Yonkers, just north of New York City, Mahoney dismissed Sherrill’s rationalizations and maintained his attack on the Nazis. Meanwhile, as Mahoney was holding forth, Sonja Branting, a prominent Swedish judge, was speaking on Manhattan’s West Side, at the West End Synagogue. Decidedly gentile, she praised Mahoney and insisted that there would be more protests if the Olympic games were held in Berlin.

  The following day the controversy continued to boil. Attacks were launched and countered. Frederick W. Rubien, the secretary of the American Olympic Committee, even out-Sherrilled Sherrill. “Germans are not discriminating against Jews in their Olympic trials,” he declared, ridiculously. “The Jews are eliminated because they are not good enough as athletes. Why, there are not a dozen Jews in the world of Olympic caliber—and not one in our winter sports that I know
of.”

  That in itself was an astonishing statement. Rubien must have known that Irving Jaffee, a Jewish speed skater, had won two Olympic gold medals at the Winter Olympics in Lake Placid in 1932. No other American had ever won two gold medals at a Winter Olympics. In fact, twenty-three Jewish athletes had won Olympic medals—not merely competed—at the winter and summer games in 1932. Additionally, in 1935 Jews were well represented in all major sports in the United States. That year Hank Greenberg of the Detroit Tigers was the Most Valuable Player in the American League, Max Baer defended the heavyweight championship wearing a Star of David on his trunks, and Barney Ross won the world welterweight championship. In track and field, it was thought that young Sam Stoller might one day duplicate the feat of another great Jewish sprinter, Harold Abrahams of Great Britain, who won the 100 meters at the Paris Olympics in 1924.

  In short, Rubien, a sixty-four-year-old New York City tax official, was talking like a Nazi. He too had gone to Germany, in August, and upon his return had said that there was “absolutely no discrimination” against Jews or anyone else competing for an Olympic spot. “These stories about discrimination against German-Jewish and Catholic athletes are not based on fact,” he said.

  Rubien also dismissed as “absolutely absurd” reports that anti-Semitic signs had been put up in the area around Garmisch-Partenkirchen, where the winter games were to be held. There were, in fact, anti-Semitic signs all over Germany, including, most famously, one that William L. Shirer, the foreign correspondent who eventually wrote the definitive English-language history of the Third Reich, saw at a sharp bend in the road near Ludwigshafen, which read: