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

by Jeremy Schaap

  “Thank you,” Riefenstahl said, heaving a sigh of relief (as she later recalled).

  “You know, Leni,” Hitler continued, echoing the sentiments he had expressed on Christmas day, “I’ll be glad when the entire Olympic commotion is over. I’d much rather not visit the games at all.”

  Riefenstahl was dumbstruck—all the more so when she realized that the Führer was also uninterested in her film. Still, she walked out of the chancellory satisfied—armed with the Führer’s permission to do as she pleased.

  When August 1 finally arrived, Riefenstahl went to the stadium at dawn, dodging the steady rain, fretting over every camera position and angle, barking orders to her cameramen, preparing to bark at the still cameramen, who she sensed would ruin her shots by impudently trespassing on her space. She was exhausted but well dressed. A fashion reporter covering the opening ceremony wrote in the Los Angeles Times that Riefenstahl was wearing “a smart gray flannel culotte suit.”

  Meanwhile, out on the streets of the city, now teeming with visitors from around the world, excitement was growing. Five years after the games had been awarded to a very different Germany, they were finally about to begin. Never before had the capital experienced anything like this—not even in 1871, when Bismarck had united the country. This was different. Now the whole world was watching, and the Germans were prepared to give it the greatest show ever staged, certainly the greatest Olympics.

  As the countdown to the lighting of the Olympic caldron continued, the athletes made their way from the village to the stadium (the male athletes, anyway; the women were staying in a dorm adjacent to the stadium). Spectators began filing in hours before the ceremony was to begin, and more crowds were on the streets, behind barriers, hoping to catch glimpses of all the athletes and officials and celebrities who were motoring to the ceremony. As much as they wanted to see Karl Hein and Luz Long, their brilliant hammer thrower and broad jumper, respectively, there was one man above all others they waited for. Only when their anticipation became a desperate hunger would he satiate them with his appearance. Only when the crowds were frothing with excitement would he make his triumphal approach.

  Finally, hours after assembling, the crowds lining the streets sensed that their Führer was approaching. Their excitement, undimmed by the gray skies, now reached fever pitch—as it would throughout the games whenever he was about to appear. They would line the route to the stadium, hoping merely to catch sight of him as he came and went each day. Thomas Wolfe was among the throngs and wrote, “From noon till night they waited for just two brief and golden moments of the day: the moment when the Leader went out to the stadium, and the moment when he returned.” When the Führer could at last be seen, the crowd surged and gasped. “At last he came,” Wolfe wrote, “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.”

  Now, as Hitler neared the stadium, a frenzy transformed the crowd into a shrieking, writhing, almost inhuman mass. Berlin was suddenly Nuremberg—festooned with black-and-red banners, populated by hysterical Nazis. For Grantland Rice, the scene was undeniably ominous. “Just twenty-two years ago this day the world went to war,” he reminded his millions of readers. “On the twenty-second anniversary of the outbreak of that great conflict I passed through more than 700,000 uniforms on my way to the Olympic Stadium—brown shirts, black guards, gray-green waves of regular army men and marines—seven massed military miles rivaling the mobilization of August 1, 1914. The opening ceremonies of the eleventh Olympiad, with mile upon mile, wave upon wave of a uniformed pageant, looked more like two world wars than the Olympic Games.” Apparently the effort to tone down the martial atmosphere that had been apparent in Garmisch-Partenkirchen had not yet succeeded.

  Inside the stadium, the crowd of more than 100,000 could sense that the Chancellor was nearing. First they saw the gigantic dirigible Hindenburg fly by. Then, Frederick T. Birchall wrote, “from far away, a sound of cheering and a fanfare of distant trumpets, a sound ever growing nearer.” Hitler was close.

  The crowd waited as the Olympic hymn was conducted by its eminent composer, Richard Strauss. (“To Strauss the composer I take off my hat,” Toscanini once said. “To Strauss the man I put it back on again.”) After the hymn, cannons were fired and pigeons released. And then, at four o’clock, with the crowd hushed, Hitler presented himself at the west portal. He was wearing a plain brown uniform and a peaked cap. Flanked by Lewald and De Baillet-Latour—both dressed like World War I-vintage statesmen in dark tails and starched wing collars, with heavy medals around their necks—the Chancellor projected an unmistakable air of modernity. Here was a man for his time, not a spiked-helmeted Prussian weighed down by decorations, not a penguin-suited diplomat in black and white, but a prophet of the new Germany, the creator of a thousand-year reich. Together, Hitler’s entourage marched across the field as a hundred thousand “Heils” bounced against each other in the muggy bowl. “At his coming,” Birchall wrote, “these assembled thousands rose to their feet, with their arms outstretched and voices raised in a frantic greeting.”

  The musical accompaniment to this procession was, of course, Wagner, whose most martial strains blared through the stadium loudspeakers. The music faded when Hitler and his small attachment reached the honor stand, where Professor Carl Diem’s four-year-old daughter, in a blue dress, ran out to greet them. Her blond hair was tied together by a chaplet of flowers. She saluted the Führer, curtseyed, and offered him a nosegay. He touched her hair, spoke softly to her, and accepted her gift. Then he turned around to acknowledge the cheering multitude.

  Meanwhile, Leni Riefenstahl’s army of sixty cameramen was exposing tens of thousands of feet of film in an effort to capture everything that was going on in the stadium. Two cameramen had been positioned on the rostrum where Hitler and the loftiest dignitaries were ensconced for the ceremony, but their equipment was unsightly, and Goebbels ordered the cameras removed. Riefenstahl refused.

  “Have you gone mad?” Goebbels screamed as Riefenstahl blocked two SS men from the camera position. “You can’t stay here! You’re destroying the whole ceremonial tableau. Get yourself and your cameras out of here immediately!”

  Quivering with rage and frustration, Riefenstahl broke into tears. “Herr Minister,” she said, “I asked the Führer for permission way ahead of time—and I received it. There is no other place from which we can film the opening address. This is a historic ceremony—it cannot be left out of an Olympic film.”

  Unmoved by this entreaty, Goebbels continued to shout. “Why didn’t you set your cameras on the other side of the stadium?” he bellowed.

  “That’s technically impossible!” Riefenstahl countered. “The distance is too great.”

  “Why didn’t you build a tower next to the rostrum?”

  “They wouldn’t let me.”

  Still furious, Goebbels barely acknowledged Hermann Göring as he made his way to his seat. In defiance of conventional wisdom, the general’s all-white uniform actually made him seem less obese. Intensely distrustful and disdainful of the propaganda minister, Göring raised his gloved hand, as if to say, Silence, and Goebbels obeyed.

  “C’mon, my girl, stop crying,” Göring said in his most consoling tone. “There’s room here even for my belly.”

  Down on the field, as the old men and the younger man and the little girl walked together to the Chancellor’s box, a band struck up “Deutschland Über Alles” and then, of course, “The Horst Wessel Song,” Nazism’s anthem to one of its martyrs, a pimp who had been murdered by Communists. The rain stopped falling, and a tremendous gong was heard from the highest platform in the stadium. The Olympic bell, on which the words “I summon the youth of the world” had been inscribed, was pealing, signaling the commencement of the parade of nations. The Greeks, as always, led the procession, followed in alphabetical order by all the nations participating—except the Germans, who wou
ld be last. One by one, the athletes and officials marched by the reviewing stand, their flag-bearers in front.

  The question in thousands of minds was which nations would give the Nazi salute as they passed Hitler and which would give the Olympic salute. The spectators took careful note. Naturally, Nazi salutes were greeted with cheers and Olympic salutes mostly indifferently. Complicating the situation was the similarity of the two salutes. The Nazis saluted by jutting out their right arms directly in front of their bodies, while in the Olympic salute the right arm was presented at a slight angle to the right. Still, in mass formations, the crowd generally could distinguish between the two.

  When the Afghans, Bermudans, Bolivians, Icelanders, and of course the Italians honored Hitler by holding their right arms stiffly in front of them, the crowd cheered. But no one could match the obsequiousness of the Bulgarians. Not only did they perform perfect Nazi salutes, they went a step further, by breaking into a goose-step in front of the Führer. The Chinese and the Filipinos, in contrast, did not use either salute; instead they put their hands on their hearts. The New Zealanders mistook a German athlete clad in white for Hitler and removed their hats when they passed him. Oddly enough, the French received the most thunderous applause, despite their Olympic salutes—the Germans were probably still feeling grateful for French indifference to their reoccupation of the Rhineland, although it’s also possible that they simply thought the Olympic salutes were Nazi salutes. In any event, Albert Speer detected something profound in the crowd’s reception of the French delegation. The French “had marched past Hitler with raised arms and thereby sent the crowd into transports of enthusiasm,” he wrote. “But in the prolonged applause Hitler sensed a popular mood, a longing for peace and reconciliation with Germany’s western neighbor. If I am correctly interpreting Hitler’s expression at the time, he was more disturbed than pleased by the Berliners’ cheers.”

  The Germans also loudly cheered their Austrian cousins, whose national ambivalence on the subject of Nazism was reflected in their salutes. As they passed Hitler—their once and future countryman—about half of the Austrians gave exaggerated Olympic salutes, while the other half, including all the female Austrians, gave the Nazi salute. The Hungarians and Japanese were also warmly received, but the Czechs and Romanians were not. Not cold but utterly frigid shoulders were reserved for the Australians and the British, clearly nemeses of the burgeoning Third Reich.

  Finally it was time for Avery Brundage and his compatriots to march down the red cinder track. Jesse Owens, Ralph Metcalfe, and their fellow sprinters had been excused from the parade in order to rest for their heats the following day, but hundreds of their teammates were smartly dressed in white flannels, blue blazers, and straw boaters. As usual at an opening ceremony, the Americans presented a defiantly unmilitary image. They were barely marching, much less goose-stepping. As they prepared to amble down the track, they were undoubtedly wondering how they would be received. Yes, the Germans had treated them well face-to-face, but it seemed only a matter of time before the residual resentment of the boycott movement would somehow manifest itself. They thought that they would be booed, especially when they passed Hitler.

  Since 1908, American Olympic teams had sometimes refused to do what all the other delegations did as a matter of course. When Olympic teams march past the host nation’s head of state, their flag-bearers, in a show of respect, dip their flags. But not the Americans—not always, anyway. The American quasi-tradition had been born at the games of the Fourth Olympiad, in London in 1908. That year the American flag-bearer happened to be an enormous Irish-American shot-putter named Ralph Rose. Like most sons of Erin of his time, Rose had no use for the English or their king, Edward VII. When Rose, holding the flag rigidly with one arm, marched past Edward’s royal box, his arm and the flag stayed rigid. (He and his teammates had been provoked, it could be argued. Flags of all the participating nations had been raised at the Olympic stadium—all except the Stars and Stripes.) At an Olympic games best remembered for the enmity between the American and British teams, Rose’s defiance was the opening salvo (unless we include the flag snub). Explaining Rose’s action, or lack thereof, his teammate and fellow Irish-American Martin Sheridan famously said, “This flag dips to no earthly king.” Thus a precedent was set, a precedent that still is invoked by American flag-bearers. A gesture now generally regarded as a token of American independence of thought was in fact mostly a byproduct of Anglo-Irish hostility.

  Despite Rose’s insistence that the flag dip to no earthly king, it did dip, in 1912, for King Gustav of Sweden (definitely an earthly king), and again in 1924, in Paris, for President Gaston Doumergue (earthly, if not a king). But in 1928, in Amsterdam, the president of the American Olympic Committee banned dipping, insisting on military protocol. Almost eighty years later, Douglas MacArthur’s order still stands—although in 1932 the flag was dipped for Franklin Roosevelt, then the governor of New York, at the winter games in Lake Placid, and for Vice President Charles Curtis at the summer games in Los Angeles.

  In any case, in 1936, tens of thousands of eyes were focused on thirty-four-year-old Alfred Jochim of Union City, New Jersey. A gymnast, Jochim had won two silver medals four years earlier in Los Angeles, in the vault and the team combined exercise. He looked nothing like Ralph Rose or any of the meaty weight throwers who had so often carried the American flag. He was not quite five foot six. Flanked by Wally O’Connor and Fred Lauer, two burly members of the water polo team, Jochim, strong but slight, struggled slightly under the weight of the flag. As he neared Hitler’s tribunal, the spectators wondered whether he would keep the flag upright or not. He did. It did not dip to Hitler. Jochim’s teammates, sloppily marching in rows of eight, did snap their heads to the right and, with their right hands, placed their boaters over their hearts in their traditional salute.

  Like so many of the best-remembered moments of Berlin’s Olympic fortnight, what happened next was remembered differently by different eyewitnesses. In fact, the reaction of the crowd to the American team remains a matter of considerable debate in Olympic circles. According to many observers, the Americans were jeered and whistled at. According to others, they were not. According to still others, they were greeted unkindly but not vocally. Grantland Rice always stood firmly in the last camp. “It was quite evident that the United States and Great Britain were social outcasts,” Rice wrote, “especially the American team, which has been picked to win the Olympics by a big margin . . . [The Americans] received an even fainter demonstration from the crowd than did the British.”

  Gallico, however, believed that the Americans were simply victims of timing. “There was a moment of silence,” he wrote, when the American flag did not dip, “and then was started what I believe would have been a great and genuine roar of welcome, but it was spoiled by an accident of timing and sequence. The German team followed hard on the heels of the Americans. The band quit the march time and burst into ‘Deutschland Über Alles’ to accompany the German team on its march and the welcome to the Americans was drowned in the greeting to the Fatherland’s athletes.”

  Gallico was outnumbered. Gayle Talbot of the Associated Press, also a witness to the ceremony, wrote extensively about “the debate over whether the American delegation received the German equivalent of the ‘Bronx cheer’ shortly after passing Chancellor Hitler in the parade of nations. A score of American, British, and German newspapermen as well as spectators were asked their opinion and were about evenly divided on the delicate question,” Talbot wrote. One of the German journalists “was positive” that the whistling “was of the barbed variety. ‘You must excuse them,’ he said, ‘because they don’t understand America’s rule that its flag must not be dipped.’”

  With everything else that was going on, Talbot noted that eighty-six-year-old Field Marshal August von Mackensen was “the most uncomfortable looking man in the stadium.” Perhaps the finest German commander of World War I, a hero of the Battle of Tannenberg, Von Mackensen was rar
ely seen without his enormous busby—a relic of his days in the famed Prussian Death’s Head Hussar regiment, which he had joined in 1869. The busby, naturally, featured an absurdly prominent death’s-head. For some reason, though, Mackensen’s busby was conspicuously death’s-head-free at the opening ceremony. “Possibly he thought it wouldn’t fit into the spirit of the day,” Talbot wrote.

  Mackensen’s legendary stoicism was the perfect counterpoint to Eleanor Holm Jarrett’s whimpering. Situating herself near press row, Holm made herself available to any writer who wished to help her wipe away her tears. “I still can’t realize that I am out,” she told Grantland Rice as she sobbed into his handkerchief. “I never meant anything wrong. I am just as capable of winning here as I did in two other Olympics. I am still ready to win for America and break another record.”

  “There, there,” Granny said, ever the gentleman.

  “How could they do this to me? I could start tomorrow and win my race and at least equal the record. Please tell the American public that I was ready and in condition to win honestly. My heart is broken.”

  “There, there,” Granny said. “Don’t worry. The Olympic Committee is on the spot, not you.”

  “That doesn’t help me,” Holm said, touching his elbow. “They have put me on a cross. I still don’t believe it. It just can’t be. I did nothing really wrong. I have been foolish but nothing else.”

  “There, there,” Granny said. A few moments later, he described the scene in his column: “The most pathetic figure at the Olympic opening pageantry was Eleanor Holm Jarrett, swimming ace barred by the stupidity of American Olympic officials.”

  Weeping young women were too much for a southern gentleman such as Grantland Rice to bear. Appalled by the callousness of the AOC and the arrogance of the Nazis, he rather wistfully wrapped up his thoughts on the eve of the first day of competition. “I still believe,” he wrote, “the United States will dominate the military-athletic pageant.”