Triumph: The Untold Story of Jesse Owens and Hitler's Olympics
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Snyder was just building up a head of steam when Alan Gould of the Associated Press asked him to respond to comments Robertson had made that were critical of Owens’s starting technique. Robertson, Gould said, had used the phrase “slowness off the marks” to describe Owens’s weakness. Now Snyder was truly indignant. His head was filled with well-founded visions of Robertson and Cromwell conspiring to undermine him. It was bad enough that he had to endure their condescension at the meets with USC and the Penn Relays. It was bad enough that they had made it clear that they considered him little more than Owens’s caddy. Now they were questioning his competence. That they were the unrivaled giants of amateur track and field only made it worse. This was Robertson’s fourth consecutive trip to the Olympics as the head coach of the American track team. Before that he had served as an assistant coach, in 1912 and 1920. He had competed at the Olympics, in the standing jumps, in 1904 and 1906. Then there was Cromwell, who had more medal hopefuls on the boat than all the other track coaches combined.
“You can tell Mr. Lawson Robertson that Jesse Owens can beat any sprinter at any distance,” Snyder said. Then, measuring his words precisely, he added, “There’s no payoff at fifty meters in a hundred-meter race. Owens is no jackrabbit, but the smoothest piece of running machinery we have ever seen.”
13
The Battle Tent of Some Great Emperor
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BERLIN: JULY 1936
AS JESSE OWENS and his teammates were still at sea, the Third Reich was rolling out its red-and-black carpet for international celebrities, including America’s most famous citizen, Charles Lindbergh. Visits such as those Lindbergh made were the raison d’être of the Berlin games. As much as it meant to the Germans to prove that they were athletically capable, it meant much more to them to show off their new society—mi nus, of course, its uglier idiosyncrasies.
It had been nine years since Lucky Lindy had touched down at Le Bourget, outside Paris, in the Spirit of St. Louis, completing the first solo flight across the Atlantic Ocean. It’s difficult now to appreciate the magnitude of his achievement and his subsequent deification. He was handsome, wholesome, and heroic. He was celebrated in poetry and song. In the words of William L. Shirer, who was constitutionally averse to hyperbole, Lindbergh was “the idol of the nation, its most publicized citizen, its one authentic hero.”
Shirer had covered Lindbergh’s landing at Le Bourget and had followed, with the rest of the world, the trajectory of his life and career. He read with horror of the kidnapping and murder of Lindbergh’s infant son. He reacted with a different kind of horror when he learned that Lindbergh and his wife, Ann Morrow, had moved in 1935 to an island off the coast of Brittany, to be near the island’s best-known resident, Dr. Alexis Carrel, a French-American Nobel laureate in medicine with an affinity for fascism. Carrel, incidentally, was the first surgeon—and one of only three ever—to win the Nobel Prize for medicine.
In Berlin, Lindbergh declined to meet formally with American reporters—he had grown extremely wary of the press—choosing instead to spend most of his time in the company of his fellow aviator Hermann Göring, “the fat chief of the rapidly growing German air force,” as Shirer described him. Göring and Lindbergh spent a pleasant afternoon switching off at the controls of the Field Marshal von Hindenburg—not the famous dirigible but an enormous eight-engine plane built by Lufthansa. Lindbergh did make a speech decrying the development of bombers that, he predicted, might soon lay waste to all of Europe. But when Shirer and a few other American correspondents based in Berlin heard that he had been won over by Göring, Goebbels, and their ilk, they cornered him at one of Goebbels’s parties and tried to disabuse him of his impressions—to no avail. “Lindbergh proceeded to tell us what the situation was in Germany,” Shirer wrote, “and to express his admiration for what had been achieved here. He, too [like so many prominent visitors to Germany at the time of the Olympics], had found a happy, united people, he said. As an airman, he was particularly impressed by the German air force and the progress of German aviation in general. Once again, we did not get a word in.”
Like most reporters who had been stationed in Germany during the Nazis’ rise to power, Shirer found the Third Reich utterly contemptible. But the Nazi propagandists were talented, and in an uncertain world, Charles Lindbergh was far from the only foreigner to fall under their sway. Still, there were those capable of seeing the regime for what it truly was.
One of the more skeptical visitors to Berlin as the Olympics were about to commence was a thirty-five-year-old writer from Asheville, North Carolina. He was a drunk and a bigot, but neither of these qualities hindered his career as a novelist. In fact, by the time tuberculosis killed him at the age of thirty-seven, he had achieved a measure of fame so profound that nearly seventy years later his novels are still widely read and admired. An innocent abroad, Thomas Wolfe went to Berlin to cover the games and to see for himself what Hitler was up to. He was also taking notes for a novel that would become You Can’t Go Home Again, which was published posthumously in 1940. In it, George Webber, Wolfe’s alter ego, flits from New York to Paris to Berlin at the time of the Olympics. Like Wolfe, George Webber is both awed and terrified by Hitler’s capital. Perhaps more than any other American who attended the games, Wolfe was able to communicate the prevailing mood:
George observed that the organizing genius of the German people, which has been used so often to such noble purpose, was now more thrillingly displayed than he had ever seen it before. The sheer pageantry of the occasion was overwhelming, so much so that he began to feel oppressed by it. There seemed to be something ominous about it. One sensed a stupendous concentration of effort, a tremendous drawing together and ordering in the vast collective power of the whole land. And the thing that made it seem ominous was that it so evidently went beyond what the games themselves demanded.
Although the Germans had packed their uniforms into closets and their anti-Semitic posters into warehouses, they could not hide what was in their hearts. And the thought of it made Wolfe shiver. It was clear that a great society was building its strength and flaunting its resourcefulness and that there would be dire consequences for anything and anyone that stood in its way.
To its Olympic visitors, Berlin was both sinister and majestic. Maybe it wasn’t quite Vienna or Paris yet, but it seemed to be only a matter of time before it would match and then surpass all its rivals. Despite the official decrees mandating civility, the entire city was on an aggressive footing, jutting out its chin, daring someone to take a shot. The populace, on the whole, was still enthralled with Nazism—especially after the events of March, when the Rhineland had been remilitarized and France had done nothing to counter that action. “Hitler has got away with it!” Shirer had marveled in his diary. Unrestrained enthusiasm floated through the city, which was decked out in festive Nazi banners. “From one end of the city to the other,” Wolfe wrote, “from the Lustgarten to the Brandenburger Tor, along the whole broad street of Unter den Linden, through the vast avenues of the faery Tiergarten, and out through the western part of Berlin to the very portals of the stadium, the whole town was a thrilling pageantry of royal banners—not merely endless miles of looped-up bunting, but banners fifty feet in height, such as might have graced the battle tent of some great emperor.”
Wolfe could not have known—few people did—that more than grime had been scrubbed from Berlin’s streets in the days leading up to the games. On July 16, in compliance with an order from the Interior Ministry, Berlin police had rounded up about eight hundred Gypsies and deposited them in a filthy, verminous camp just outside the city, in Marzahn. A week later, Richard Walther Darré, the Argentine-born German minister of food and agriculture, issued a decree that was sent to local authorities throughout Germany to enforce: “All anti-Semitic posters must be suppressed during the period in question. The fundamental attitude of the Government does not change, but Jews will be treated as correctly as Aryans at this time . . . Houses on the ma
in roads must be whitened, and even repainted if possible. Street lighting must be improved. Streets and squares must be cleaned. Agricultural workers in the fields must not take their meals near the roads, nor pass near the roads.”
Darré later made a name for himself in the field of eugenics. As the head of the SS Race and Resettlement Office, he wrote, “Just as we breed our Hanoverian horses using a few pure stallions and mares, so we will once again breed pure Nordic Germans.” He was among the architects of what came to be known as the Final Solution, which led to his conviction at Nuremberg (and a stunningly brief five-year prison sentence).
In the summer of 1936, though, Darré wanted the Third Reich to appear to be inclusive—at least for a few weeks. The Nazis declared a ceasefire against virtually all their traditional targets. “No action against unruly Catholics and Protestants,” Shirer wrote. “No savage attacks against the ‘decadent’ Western democracies and ‘Jewish-dominated’ America. All was, for the moment, sweetness and light, except for an occasional diatribe against the terrible Bolsheviks.”
Under Goebbels’s direction, the Reich Press Chamber issued several decrees to domestic news outlets in the weeks leading up to the opening ceremony. Even as the Germans bowed to international pressure by allowing the fencing champion Helene Mayer to compete in the games, Goebbels’s office made it clear that her Jewishness (actually, she was half Jewish) was a taboo topic. Back in February, the press chamber had announced that “no comments should be made regarding Helene Mayer’s non-Aryan ancestry or her expectations for a gold medal at the Olympics.” On July 16, just in case anyone had forgotten, the chamber decreed that “press coverage should not mention that there are two non-Aryans among the women: Helene Mayer and Gretel Bergmann.” Bergmann, however, was dropped from the German team just before the games, despite the fact that she held the national record in the high jump.
The Nazis’ efforts to placate the international community were convincing only to those who wished to be convinced. Perhaps no one saw their true intentions more clearly than Fred Farrell of the Daily Worker. Of all the distinguished reporters and columnists who were writing about the Olympics as the opening ceremony neared, Farrell had the best sense of what was at stake—the prestige of the Third Reich. Frequently the Daily Worker’s stories were tainted by the paper’s insistence on seeing everything through the prism of its politics. In the case of the 1936 Olympics, though, its prism was perfectly focused.
In an impressive display of prescience, Farrell wrote, “I have an idea that these Olympic Games . . . will have repercussions that will not help toward the amity of nations as they are supposed to do. There will be dark trouble clouds along the horizon. They may develop into thunderstorms that will make Eleanor Holm Jarrett’s champagne party look like an afternoon tea for the kiddies.” Then he anticipated the controversy that lingers even now. “In the long run,” he wrote,
I’m afraid that noblest sportsman of them all, Herr Hitler, will find the Olympic Games the bitterest disappointment. When the time comes to present medals to Negroes and Jews his ideas of racial supremacy for the people he wants to be supreme will suffer something of a shock. Will he shake hands with Jesse Owens, for example? The Reichsführer will be on the spot—but definitely. If he doesn’t take Jesse’s hand he will be marked as a bad sportsman. If he does how can he laugh it off to his stormtruppen who have been taught that Negroes and Jews have no place in the Hitler scheme of things?
For the most part, however, the German propaganda machine was remarkably successful at portraying the regime in the most favorable light. Still too weak to state his true intentions, Hitler was forced to pretend to want nothing more than peace and a place of honor for Germany in European affairs. He needed time. Time to build strength. Time to perfect his plans. Time to rearm fully. And if he did not lull his neighbors into a false sense of at least partial security, he would not be afforded the time he so desperately needed. For Hitler and his colleagues, the Berlin games were the ultimate opportunity not to promote their agenda but to hide their agenda under a cloak of hospitality, prosperity, and efficiency. “This is the most loathsome feature of the swastika crusade,” Victor Klemperer, a fifty-five-year-old, Jewish-born history professor wrote in his diary in Dresden, “that it is conducted hypocritically and in secret. ‘We’ are not conducting a crusade, ‘we’ do not shed blood either, we are completely peaceable people and only want to be left in peace! And at the same time not the smallest opportunity for propaganda is missed.”
Two weeks before the opening ceremony, Paul Gallico arrived in Berlin. He was eager to get acclimated to the site of the Olympics—eager too to be as far as possible from Chicago, where his twenty-one-year-old second wife, Elaine, was busy testifying against him in divorce proceedings. As she was accusing him of assault and lesser misdeeds, Gallico was walking the grounds of the sparkling athletes’ village the Germans had so carefully planned and built. Gallico, who had fought the Germans as a navy gunner in World War I, was surprised to realize that his former enemies had situated the village—which was already housing the youth of the world, who were gathering ostensibly to promote international understanding—next to an army shooting range. The juxtaposition was too delicious to ignore. “Your wandering correspondent,” he wrote, “hopes he has not spoiled anything for the visiting firemen who will be arriving here shortly and who might find good copy in the fact that the anxious Germans are rehearsing for the next war right next door to where the athletes are flexing their muscles and practicing to win the great peace games of 1936.”
Unlike Gallico, though, most observers raved about the athletes’ village, despite its location on the outskirts of the vast capital. Beautifully landscaped and luxuriously appointed, the Germans’ tidy brick athletic enclave put the bungalows of the Los Angeles Olympics to shame. It was staffed by dozens of bi- and multilingual volunteers, and the chefs in residence prepared high-quality food familiar to delegations from Japan to Peru. Athletes were encouraged to mingle with one another and with visitors in common areas. Open to the public, the village became a popular destination for tourists before and during the Olympic fortnight—a situation unimaginable after the massacre of Israeli athletes in Munich in 1972.
The gifted black athletes from the United States who would soon occupy the village naturally were the chief topic for America’s black press. As the opening ceremony neared, papers such as the Chicago Defender and the Amsterdam News all but dropped every other story they had been covering. After all, sixteen black men and two black women would represent the United States (the American team in Los Angeles had included only six blacks), and in the wake of Joe Louis’s knockout at the hands of Max Schmeling, Louis was a source of embarrassment, not pride. R. Walter Merguson of the Pittsburgh Courier, one of a handful of black reporters in Berlin, was typically breathless: “Jesse Owens and his brown-skinned brothers of the United States are the ‘men of the hour’ in this ancient capital of a mighty nation today as the ‘zero hour’ for this Eleventh Olympiad approaches. On every tongue, the name of the fleet-footed sons and daughters of Ham are being bandied about.”
On June 24, 1936, the SS Manhattan docked at Bremerhaven on the North Sea. Within a few hours, Jesse Owens and his teammates—as well as Larry Snyder—were in Berlin, marching in a parade down Unter den Linden. After an audience with the mayor, the Americans were taken to their quarters 15 miles away at the Olympic village. They were greeted by members of the Hitler Youth.
Snyder stayed behind at his hotel in Berlin, but Owens and Dave Albritton threw their suitcases on their beds and headed out to find the track where they would train. After nine days aboard ship, Owens was eager to shake off his wobbly sea legs.
“You know, I feel great,” he said to Albritton as they jogged down the cinder track at the edge of the village. “I don’t think I could feel any better.”
“Take it easy, Jesse,” Albritton said, although usually Owens was telling him to take it easy. “Don’t rush it.”
Owens embraced everything about the village. Here, in the heart of the Third Reich, he found a utopian athletes’ paradise. He loved the food and the companionship—probably in that order. He wrote in his diary that he was eating “steaks, and plenty of it, as well as bacon, eggs, ham, fruit, and juices.” And for a good time, he gravitated to the easygoing Australians. “What liars they are!” he noted in his diary, admiringly.
14
The Youth of the World
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BERLIN: SATURDAY, AUGUST 1, 1936
WHEN IT WAS MADE CLEAR to Leni Riefenstahl that there would be no room for her cameras in the Führer’s box at the opening ceremony of the games of the Eleventh Olympiad, she did what she always did in such situations. She marched into the Reichschancellory and requested help from the Führer himself.
“You can put your cameras there,” Hitler said distractedly. Even with his blizzard of appointments and appearances, he usually found time to see his favorite director, but he was not as affable as usual. “I’ll approve it. They’ll only be in the way for a few minutes.”