The Forgotten Legacy of Stella Walsh

by Sheldon Anderson

  Other top athletes also boycotted the Berlin Games, including Tulane University sprinter Herman Neugass and Harvard University teammates Milton Green and Norman Cahners. Basketball was on the Olympic program for the first time in Berlin, but the Long Island University basketball team, one of the favorites in the qualifying tournament at Madison Square Garden, decided against participating. The tournament came at the end of a long college basketball season and conflicted with players’ classes, and several of the Long Island players were beginning baseball season. But with four Jewish players on the team, the anti-Semitic Nazi regime was a decisive factor in their decision to stay home.

  Jesse Owens was torn about what to do. In November 1935, he declared in a radio interview, “If there is discrimination against minorities in Germany then we must withdraw from the Olympics.”15 Walter White, secretary of the NAACP, wrote Owens a letter pleading with him to stay home: “I am sure that your stand will be applauded by many people in all parts of the world,” White argued, “as your participation under the present situation in Germany would alienate many high-minded people who are awakening to the dangers of intolerance wherever it raises its head.” Owens’s coach urged him to compete, and in early 1936, Owens changed his mind.16

  Poland’s great discus thrower Jadwiga Wajs was of Jewish heritage, but she decided to go to Berlin. Sprinter Tollien Schuurmann of the Netherlands, who had beaten Walsh twice in 1933, joined many other Jewish athletes in boycotting the Olympics.

  Walsh and Wajs did not have to worry that the Polish government would stand in the way of their team going to the Berlin Olympics. Poland’s boycott movement was among the weakest in Europe. At first Jews had been optimistic about their future in the new Poland. The first Congress of Jewish Poles pledged their allegiance to the state in 1919: “The Poles of the Jewish faith, penetrated with a sincere feeling of love for Poland, will, in spite of the difficult conditions of their existence, serve their country as devoted sons, and will always be ready to sacrifice their lives and fortunes of its benefit and glory.”17 Polish Jews would be disappointed. The parties on the right were openly anti-Semitic, and as the Depression worsened in the 1930s, the left became indifferent to Poland’s minorities. Although the Polish parliament never passed racial laws, discrimination against Jews in the population was the norm. Most Polish Catholics had little sympathy for the plight of Polish Jews, let alone German Jews.

  The Polish government also had a difficult balancing act between Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. Both countries were mortal enemies bent on retaking territories lost after World War I. The specter of Bolshevism brought shudders throughout Europe; for many, Fascism and Nazism seemed to be the lesser of two evils. The European right coined the phrase “Better Hitler than Stalin.” Josef Beck, the Polish foreign minister in the 1930s, was also of this mind, and Polish diplomacy leaned toward Nazi Germany. Each winter, Hitler’s right-hand man, Hermann Goering, went on a hunting trip to Poland. Aside from retaking Danzig and the Polish Corridor, Hitler was unsure about what to do with the rest of the Polish state. His big target was the Soviet Union, and for a time he imagined Poland as a puppet state much like Slovakia became shortly before the start of World War II.

  As Jewish organizations throughout the world were calling for a boycott of the Summer Olympics, the success of the 1936 Winter Games in the Bavarian resort of Garmisch undermined their cause. The Nazis carefully toned down their anti-Semitic rhetoric during the Winter Olympics and took down any anti-Jewish signs that visitors to southern Germany might see. The Berlin Olympics would go on as planned, and the Nazi regime was afforded an opportunity to prove it could organize the best Olympics ever, show off the superiority of its athletes, and present a peaceful Germany to the rest of the world. The Berlin Games proved to be a spectacular success for the Nazi regime.

  The big news in European newspapers as the Olympics neared was the Spanish Civil War, which broke out in July. Italian and German forces came to the aid of General Francisco Franco’s right-wing nationalist rebellion. London and Paris were reluctant to support the increasingly leftist Spanish Republic, especially when Stalin began sending it supplies. The Western powers stayed on the sidelines as the Spanish Republic went down in flames in April 1939.

  Forty-nine national teams went to the Berlin Olympics, the most ever. Unlike the Los Angeles Olympics, it was much cheaper for European teams to make it to Berlin. The Polish team consisted of 127 men and only seventeen women (three in track and field). Walsh arrived in Poland on July 10. One Polish periodical wrote, “She is our hope in the 100-meter sprint at the Berlin Olympics, where she will be involved in a sensational duel with Canadian Stephens.”18 Of course Stephens was from Missouri.

  From left to right, Polish Olympians Maria Kwas´niewska, Jadwiga Wajs, and Walsh on the train from Warsaw to the 1936 Berlin Olympics. Kurier Codzienny, Narodowe Archiwum Cyfrowe [National Digital Archive].

  Walsh and Wajs were Poland’s only favorites to win medals in track and field. Janusz Kusociński, the gold medalist in the 10,000 meters at Los Angeles, had retired from competition. Walsh was ready. The Polish journal Polacy Zagranica wrote, “As much as we know from America, Walsh is in excellent form and should take first place in the 100 meters.”19 Polish American Review declared, “Walsh Walasiewicz [sic] is burning up the cinder path. . . . This Mercury-footed miss . . . announces herself to be in the best physical and mental condition for the strenuous events in which she will participate.”20

  Walsh beat her own world record in the 80-meter dash at the Polish Women’s Championships in mid-July. At a meet in Warsaw a week before the start of the Olympics, she equaled the world records in the 50 and 100 meters, the latter time in 11.6, which was Stephens’s unofficial record. Although none of these times were recognized by the IAAF, Walsh seemed primed to defend her 100-meter Olympic title. In its July 29, 1936, installment, the Plain Dealer predicted that the Stephens–Walsh race would be the biggest “feminine feud” in Berlin.

  The Nazis were determined to improve on the embarrassing showing of the German team at the 1932 Los Angeles Games. After finishing second to the United States at the 1928 Amsterdam Olympics, Germany fell to fourth at Los Angeles, winning only three gold medals. The German women’s Olympic team at Berlin was the most formidable in the world, and its sprinters were expected to challenge Stephens and Walsh for gold in the 100 meters and win the 4 × 100 relay. One American reporter wrote, “With this fine pair [Marie Dollinger and Käthe Krauss] running against Helen Stephens and Poland’s veteran, Stella Walsh, there should be fun at Berlin.”21

  The Nazis kept most of the German-Jewish athletes out of the Berlin Games. Everyone knew that Gretel Bergmann was one of the best high jumpers in the world, so it would be difficult for the German Olympic Committee to keep her off the team without risking a boycott from the Americans. Other countries might follow suit. Worried that the boycott movement was gaining momentum, the German Olympic organizers designated the regional championships in Stuttgart in late June and the German championships in Berlin on July 11 and 12 as the last chances to make the German Olympic team. In Stuttgart, Bergmann equaled the German high-jump record of 1.60 meters.

  On July 15, the U.S. Olympic team set sail for Europe on the SS Manhattan. The boycott threat was over, and the Germans named their Olympic team on the same day. Although Bergmann was ranked as one of the top five high jumpers in the world, she was left off the team, allegedly for “recent levels of performance.” “Damn it, I was one of the four best high jumpers in the world,” Bergmann fumed. “And now because I came into the world as a Jew, they threw me away like an old shoe.”22 Three days after the Olympics ended, Bergmann went to the U.S. Consulate in Stuttgart to apply for emigration. In 1937, she left Germany for good.23

  Bergmann vowed never to return to Germany, although the postwar West German Federal Republic was a democratic state and a NATO ally. In 1986 she declined an invitation to come to the fi
ftieth anniversary of the Berlin Games. “Although fifty years have passed since my exclusion from the German Olympic team in Berlin,” she said, “My disappointment and bitterness have only slightly abated.” In 1999 she finally accepted an offer to attend the opening ceremony of a Berlin sports arena named in her honor.24

  The Nazis allowed one “half-Jew” on its women’s Olympic team, fencer Helene Mayer. Mayer had been studying at Mills College in California, and she ignored pressure from American Jewish organizations not to return to Germany to compete. She did not think of herself as Jewish and at first was not particularly fond of sunny Southern California. After she and the other German athletes fared poorly at the Los Angeles Olympics, she offered this excuse: “Possibly, after I have been here longer, I will enjoy it very much, but now I find myself getting so tired in the afternoon. It has not been good for our team. I am not alone in my defeat. Our whole team had troubles. Something here is not so good for us.”25

  The Nazis warned the German press not to cover Mayer’s arrival in Hamburg, but she was a favorite among German fans. Shops were selling little figurines of her. Evidently she liked the cold, gray weather in Berlin better, because she won a silver medal. In one of the most memorable images of the Berlin Games, Mayer proudly gave the Nazi salute on the winners’ podium. On the top rung was Hungarian gold medalist Ilona Elek. She was Jewish but evaded Adolf Eichmann’s deportation of Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz in 1944. At the 1948 London Olympics, Elek successfully defended her Olympic championship. Mayer returned to the United States after the Olympics, changed her name to Meyer, and became a U.S. citizen in 1940. In the early 1950s, she went back to West Germany and got married but was dead of cancer three years later, at the age of forty-two.

  The big story on the SS Manhattan was the controversy surrounding Holm, one of the world’s best backstrokers. She was only fourteen when she took fifth in the 100-meter backstroke at the Amsterdam Olympics. The comely Holm worked with the Ziegfeld Follies for a short time but left the revue to train for the Los Angeles Games. This time she won the gold medal in her specialty. Holm and fellow swimmer Helene Madison were the darlings of the press at Los Angeles. In qualifying for Berlin in 1936, Holm was the first U.S. woman to make three Olympic teams.

  Holm was the life of the party on the Atlantic crossing, although she was married to bandleader Art Jarrett at the time. Invited to one all-night party with some sportswriters, she got stinking drunk. Brundage warned her about breaking curfew, but at a stopover in Cherbourg, France, Holm allegedly got so inebriated that Brundage threw her off the team. “All I did was drink a couple of glasses of champagne,” she complained. She claimed that Brundage was exacting revenge because she had repulsed his romantic overtures: “I was everything Brundage hated. I had a few dollars, and athletes were supposed to be poor. I worked in nightclubs, and athletes shouldn’t do that.”26 Holm was devastated at the time, but the incident made her a celebrity. “I got more publicity than Hitler,” she quipped.27 Holm went on to act in a few Hollywood films, most notably in the role of Jane in the B-movie Tarzan’s Revenge (1938), which costars 1936 Olympic decathlon champion Glenn Morris as “Tarzan the Ape Man.”

  The Polish team arrived in Berlin on July 29. The 3,638 male athletes at the Berlin Games were housed in the Olympic Village on the western edge of Berlin, ten miles from the Reichssportfeld, the site of the track and field events. The Nazi goal of revising the Versailles Treaty was revealed in the naming of the Olympic Village houses. Each was identified by a German town, some of which had been in German territories lost to France and Poland after World War I. Much to the dismay of the Polish team, one house was called “Danzig,” the German port city that had been ceded to the League of Nations. Poles feared the loss of the city they called Gdańsk would begin the dismemberment of their country. Indeed, World War II began on September 1, 1939, when a German gunboat shelled Polish naval installations near Danzig. During the Berlin Games that seemed to be a mad nightmare.

  At the 1932 Los Angeles Olympics, Walsh and her fellow female Olympians had stayed at the Chapman Park Hotel, far away from the men at the Olympic Village. In Berlin, the 328 women athletes were again housed separately at the Friesenhaus on the Reichssportfeld. While in Los Angeles, some athletes had complained that the Chapman was too far from the training facilities, but the Friesenhaus was situated in the shadow of the Olympic Stadium, a short walk to most of the Olympic venues. The women were assigned a roommate, but as usual, Walsh insisted on having her own room.

  The Germans organized a memorable event. They wined and dined their foreign guests; added pageantry to the festivities; and introduced such new innovations as the torch relay, electronic timing, and photo finishes. The podium medal ceremony, first used at the British Empire Games in 1930, and adopted at the 1932 Los Angeles Olympics, was now exploited to exhibit German athletic superiority. One French journalist gushed about the impressive opening ceremony: “Never was the war threat on the Rhine less than during these moments. Never were the French more popular in Germany than on this occasion. It was a demonstration, but one of comradeship and the will for peace.”28 Approximately 1 million spectators attended the 1932 Los Angeles Games, while Berlin drew 3.7 million. Another 300 million listened to the Olympics on the radio.

  The Berlin Games were a huge propaganda success for the Nazi regime. After Germany’s political and economic troubles of the early 1930s, the Nazis seemed to have righted the ship, and the Olympics further legitimized the Nazi dictatorship. For a regime that was trying to establish its credentials at home and abroad, merely having the top teams in the world competing on German soil was a victory. Holm said that she and her teammates “were just amazed with the Nazis’ organization.”29 According to historian Arnd Krüger, the “German people liked their Olympic Games. This was the way Germans liked to see themselves: open to the world, tolerant, splendid hosts, perfect organizers. It was a complete sell-out.” For decades after World War II, Germans refrained from criticizing what others were calling the “Nazi Olympics.”30

  The Nazis had purged Berlin of its edgy, cosmopolitan feel. In the 1920s, the city was in the vanguard of modern art, architecture, theater, and movies, exemplified by Josef von Sternberg’s acclaimed film Der Blaue Engel [The Blue Angel] (1930), in which upstanding school teacher Dr. Immanuel Rath’s life is ruined when he falls for Lola Lola (Marlene Dietrich), a singer in a sleazy nightclub. Now all of that was considered culturally decadent. Expressionism was replaced by kitschy classicism. The Nazis pulled works of modern art by Jews and others, and created an exhibition called “degenerate art.” Philistines agreed that these unintelligible works were un-German. During the Olympics, the Nazis took down anti-Semitic signs and pulled anti-Semitic newspapers and magazines off the newsstands. The overt persecution of Jews, homosexuals, Social Democrats, Communists, and other “undesirables” was temporarily halted.31 The Nazis could not tamp down all the anti-Semitic demonstrations. Betty Robinson recalled seeing swastikas on Jewish stores in Berlin, and Nazi street thugs were heard chanting, “Wenn die Olympiade sind vorbei, schlagen wir die Juden zu brei” [When the Olympics are over, we will beat the Jews to a pulp].32

  No one paid much attention to the notorious concentration camp of Sachsenhausen, located about thirty miles north of the German capital. Pierre Coubertin said that Berlin lived up to the highest ideals of the Olympic Games and thought that Rome and the Italian Fascists should get the 1940 Olympics. Responding to some French journalists who claimed that the Games had been “disfigured,” Coubertin praised Hitler directly for holding an event that had “magnificently served, and by no means disfigured, the Olympic ideal.”33 “What’s the difference between propaganda for tourism—like in the Los Angeles Olympics of 1932,” he asked, “or for a political regime?”34

  August 3 was a typical gray, overcast day as the women’s 100-meter preliminaries began. The contrast between the blue skies in Los Angeles four years earlier and cold and rainy B
erlin was stark. The weather in Germany was miserable for most of the Olympics. The women nicknamed the Friesenhaus—their residence during the Games—the “Freezin’ House.” The men’s 100-meter final was scheduled for the same day. Fellow Clevelanders Walsh and Owens, a Pole and an African American, were running in the capital of the Third Reich in front of Hitler, his entourage, and thousands of Germans, trying to embarrass the Aryan master race and Nazi theories about the inferiority of Slavs and black Africans. Owens blew away the competition to win the first of four gold medals.

  Cleveland’s Jesse Owens at the 1936 Berlin Olympics. Library of Congress.

  For at least the next twenty-four hours, Owens and Walsh—the 100-meter champion four years earlier—could claim to be the “fastest man” and the “fastest woman,” respectively, on earth. Owens was the sensation of the Berlin Games, taking home three more gold medals, in the 200 meters, the 4 × 100-meter relay, and the broad jump. Much has been made of Hitler’s refusal to congratulate Owens on his victories, but the story is fabricated. After Hitler had personally congratulated some German gold medalists in his private box, the IOC warned him against repeating this breach of protocol with any athlete. Hitler obliged, although he continued to receive athletes in a room beneath the stands, including Helen Stephens after her win in the 100 meters. Although Owens was certainly an embarrassment to Nazi racial theorists, they explained it away as a manifestation of the animal-like traits of the Negro race. The German press gave Owens’s exploits full front-page coverage. Even the radically anti-Semitic Nazi party organ Völkischer Beobachter [Folkish Observer] published photos of Owens, along with articles on his gold-medal performances.