Hitler's Olympics

by Christopher Hilton

  During this meeting someone raised the possibility of having a torch relay from Greece to Berlin. It must have seemed like just another item on the agenda, novel and worth some consideration. Those round the table surely cannot have understood they had hit upon something of such simplicity and profundity that it would become a defining symbol of the whole Olympic movement, carefully preserved at every subsequent Games; that the arrival of the flame would bring every host city into physical contact with Greece and the Games’ very origins; that the ritual act of lighting the bowl in the Olympic stadium with the flame of the final runner would represent an instant of light in an often dark world.

  The political theme sharpened. A mass meeting at Madison Square Garden, New York, condemned Hitler and the direction Germany had taken. A mock trial convicted him; the indictment read: ‘We declare that the Hitler government is compelling the German people to turn back from civilisation to an antiquated and barbarous despotism which menaces the progress of mankind towards peace and freedom, and is a present threat against civilised life throughout the world.’ Timed to mark the first anniversary of Hitler’s ascent to power, it attracted a wide range of people including former Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, the editor of a Jewish paper and Samuel Seabury of the American bar who put the case against Hitler in a great, echoing oration.

  Gustavus Kirby, the American Olympic Committee’s treasurer, described the official German policy of discriminating against Jewish sportspeople. When he said, in condemnation, that the swastika, an overt political symbol, was being associated with the Games, the audience booed and hissed in his support. When he demanded that Jewish sportspeople be allowed to try and qualify for the German teams he was loudly applauded.18 The big question was alive now: to go to Berlin or not?

  In April the International Amateur Athletics Federation approved plans for the stadium’s arena.

  The IOC met in Athens and Baillet-Latour gave a progress report. ‘The two most important questions appearing on the agenda of the session last year,’ he said, ‘were the concession of the guarantees, demanded from the German Olympic Committee, which have permitted the holding of the Games of the XIth Olympiad in Berlin, and the study of the means of combating semi-professionalism. The repeated assurances that these guarantees are being respected, given to certain National Olympic Committees both by our German colleagues and by the Sports Director of the Reich, allow us to reckon on the participation of all countries and it is with the hope of a brilliant success that your Executive Committee have pursued, with the Organising Committee and the international federations, the study of the programme of the Games which will be submitted to you.’

  Baillet-Latour described a visit he had made to Rome where he had the honour of an interview with Mussolini who gave him ‘the opportunity of judging for myself the care which the Duce takes in providing “l’Education Physique” in Italy with the most perfect resources. The progress attained in the realm of sports in Italy is but the just result of a marvellous organisation.’

  Baillet-Latour found himself trapped among the competing ideologies of the 1930s which veered hard right and left. Germany had embraced Nazism, Italy Fascism, Spain was turning Fascist, and Stalin was applying brutal coercion in the construction of a communist state – and he was not alone. Who knew how to cope with the present? Who knew what the future would bring? Baillet-Latour could not and did not because there were no precedents. Better, perhaps, to salute Mussolini’s supposedly wholesome fitness programme and leave it at that. Baillet-Latour would find holding the middle ground harder and harder.

  Lewald reported on the state of preparations, covering the demolition of the racecourse, the erection of new buildings beside the stadium, progress on the Olympic Village and the swimming pool, the organising of the yachting at Kiel on the Baltic coast. He raised the idea of the torch relay from Olympia to the Marathon Tower at the stadium. If it was approved, he asked the Olympic Committees of the countries it would pass through – Greece, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Hungary, Austria and Czechoslovakia – to organise athletes to take part.

  Without any warning Hitler struck at the heart of the 2 million storm troopers who were threatening to get out of control. Their leader, Ernst Röhm, was dragged out of bed and shot, and so were countless others in what became known as the ‘Night of the Long Knives’.

  Gretel Bergmann, in London, will never forget that day. Enrolled on a language course, she competed in the high jump at the British Championships and won. Her father travelled over to watch. ‘We celebrated and had a wonderful time. My father invited a few of my friends for lunch and then we went back in a taxi and on the way we saw evening newspaper placards: Extra! Extra! Extra! We asked the cab driver what this was all about and he said “It’s the Nazis killing each other off.” It was the day when Hitler had I don’t know how many SA men shot, it was 30 June, and we thought it might be the beginning of the end of the Nazi regime. Then we got to the hotel.’

  Once in his room her father gave her a chilling message – although from which body is not clear – that she should return to Germany. ‘He said I had been asked to go back and I said, “No, I’m not going.” He said, “I’m not forcing you to do anything but just listen to what I have to say.” And he told me what they had told him. He said that they were hinting. I don’t think they were absolutely telling him, but hinting at it – and in Germany then a hint was enough. You did what you were told or else.’19 In her own words she had been ‘blackmailed under threats to my family and the whole Jewish sports movement. I had absolutely no choice but do what I was told. I packed my bags and sailed with him the next day.’20

  At this stage the idea ‘that I might have to represent Nazi Germany sickened me and yet I desperately wanted the chance to compete. My motivation was different from that of any other athlete and not at all compatible with the Olympic ideals. I wanted to show what a Jew could do, and I wanted to use my talent as a weapon against Nazi ideology.’

  The Germans had their token Jew and, like Lewald, would exploit her as they liked, holding her up to counter international and IOC misgivings about anti-Semitism by saying she was training for their Olympic team! Between now and the Games Gretel received at least four standard letters instructing her to go to the big German national training camp at Ettlingen, near Karlsruhe. ‘I figured I’d better go or else.’ None of this extended to a reversal of the ‘Aryan paragraph’ covering membership of athletics clubs.

  Training when I got back from Britain? That is a very interesting thing. I was so completely unaware of anything like this – you’re Catholic, you’re Jewish, you’re this, you’re that – it didn’t matter. There was never any unpleasantness in any of the clubs that I belonged to. We all got along beautifully and then – bingo.

  I was an official member of the German Olympic team and I was not allowed in any stadium or a gym or anything because I was Jewish (except once at Hanover in 1934, twice in 1935 and once at Ettlingen). And the only time I had training was when they sent us to this Olympic training camp for three days or four days once a year. It was a very bad time and, you know, every time I had to go to those training camps there were always different people involved, different girls, so they tried out everybody. I thought, “Maybe this bunch will hate me, maybe this bunch will call me a dirty Jew”, and it never happened. We got along so well it was unbelievable.

  [Apart from that] I could train in the corner of a field: we tried to get an acre of land where we could but after a while everybody was so concerned about what was going on that that was not important anymore. We played field handball on it for a little while but it died off very quickly.

  I couldn’t train at all until I was invited to come to Stuttgart where there was an organisation set up by Jewish soldiers from the First World War and it branched off into a kind of sports organisation. They allowed me to train there so I travelled to Stuttgart a few times every month but there was no coach there. Between 1930 and 1933 I used to go to one of the best coaches in G
ermany for training and of course I had a great crush on this guy and tried to do as well as I could to impress him – but, after the Nuremberg Laws, nothing for any Jew. We were not allowed in even as spectators. You could not be in any public place.21

  Behind all this hangs a tale, one of the most astonishing in all Olympic history.

  A high-jumper called Dora Ratjen was, Bergmann says, ‘always at the training camps and she was always assigned to be my room-mate. I never suspected anything. I just said “she’s kind of weird” but she was a nice kid, we got along very well. I never looked when she undressed or most likely she never got undressed in front of me completely. We had this huge shower room and we all took our showers in there and she never came in, she always went into this little room which had a bath. That was supposed to be off-limits to us but she went in there.’

  Dora Ratjen was a man. How the Nazis came to coerce him into competing as a woman will be explored later. ‘Maybe she/he shaved in there, I don’t know. All the girls thought she was a little unusual. Pretty deep voice, and they made fun of her.’22 The surviving film of Ratjen jumping gives an ambiguous impression, because if you already know the truth you look for confirmation (and doubtless find it), but if you don’t know there are precious few clues. His legs were slender and the muscles show under stress, but then women’s do, too. He wears a blouse and appears to have small breasts. His face is slightly square, slightly mannish and appears much more so in head-and-shoulders photographs. His mop of dark hair is distinctly unfeminine but it isn’t particularly masculine either. In sum, there is not enough visible evidence to decide it either way, and so the status quo was maintained. Picked as a woman, he was able to compete as a woman.

  Afghanistan became the thirtieth nation to accept Germany’s invitation.

  The Games were to be people-friendly, with air and train fares reduced for athletes and spectators, and a competition for Olympic poster designs.

  In August, von Hindenburg died at the age of eighty-seven and Hitler waited no longer than three hours to abolish the office of president. He decreed that from this moment he would be known as Führer,23 Reich Chancellor and Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces. He put this to a national plebiscite and received a 90 per cent endorsement. Germany had delivered herself into the hands of a primitive man with strange powers.

  The patronage of the Games passed to him as the new head of state, which is how he threw a tantrum about the stadium of glass and said he wouldn’t open the Games in a place like that (see n. 13).

  On 29 September America accepted their invitation.24

  The first plans for the torch relay and its route went out:

  Greece

  (Olympia–Athens–Saloniki)

  1,108km

  Bulgaria

  (Sofia–Zaribrod)

  238km

  Yugoslavia

  (Nis–Belgrade–Novisad)

  575km

  Hungary

  (Szeged–Budapest–Oroszavar)

  386km

  Austria

  (Karlburg–Vienna–Waidhofen)

  219km

  Czechoslovakia

  (Tabor–Prague–Teplice)

  282km

  Germany

  (Dresden–Liebenwerda–Berlin)

  267km

  Total 3,075km

  The route was divided into sections of 1 kilometre and a different runner would be assigned to cover each, the flame being passed from one to the next and forming a great chain extending across Europe. The Olympic countries taking part ‘were authorised to make special provisions such as increasing the stretches in thinly populated sections or allowing more time for traversing difficult districts. To ensure the smooth progress of the run, each participant was required not only to be acquainted with his own stretch but the following one as well so that he could continue in the case of an unforeseen emergency.’25

  The flame had to stay alight. Expert historical advice was sought and initially it seemed the original Greek method – using only fagots of a certain wood found at Ephesus, whose pith retained fire – might be the solution, but these fagots didn’t burn for long enough. In an emergency, a runner would be covering 2 kilometres and that meant the flame had to burn for 10 minutes. The problem was exacerbated by the fact that various different torches could not be carried in the open and keep burning whatever the weather – ‘heat, rain, storms’ – never mind for 10 minutes.

  The German Organising Committee commissioned their own magnesium torches, each containing two fuses so that if one failed the other would reignite it. The top of the torches contained a special substance enabling rapid ignition in the flame’s transfer from runner to runner.26 Sample torches were sent to the six Olympic countries for trials.

  The Olympic flame in the stadium posed a much bigger problem because it had to burn throughout the Games – 363 hours – once it had been lit by the 3,075th and last runner. The organisers wanted the flame to be very visible and settled on a height of 3 metres. They intended to use lighting gas from the Berlin Municipal Works but that didn’t give the right flame and to get enough of it would require construction of a pipeline to the stadium costing 300,000 Reichsmarks: a Volkswagen car was 1,000 Reichsmarks, the average weekly wage 35 and, even with Hitler’s backing, 300,000 was a fortune. Worse, this ordinary gas contained chemical and oil substances that created smoke, giving rise to the potential scenario of thousands of spectators coughing even if they could see through it. Attempts to use oil pressure burners, coal tar and benzol all failed. To get the height of the flame right and sustain it needed from 350 to 400 tons of heavy benzol, costing 36,000 Reichsmarks. Eventually a company in Hannover solved the problem by providing new liquid propane gas.

  In October 1934 the official Olympic poster was selected and the warrior at the Brandenburg Gate became an enduring icon.27 Hitler visited the Reich Sports Field and the stadium to inspect progress and keep his eye on the details, expressing ‘several wishes for slight changes’. There was no mistaking the subtext: Hitler was watching. More than that he had the sort of mind which remembered what he had asked for, and if you had not done it, he would not forget.

  The promotion of the Games within Germany started with a touring exhibition in an Olympic caravan designed to generate interest for the event in every citizen under the slogan

  OLYMPIA, A NATIONAL MISSION

  ‘It was intended that no German should feel himself merely to be a visitor at the Games but that everyone should share in the responsibility of presenting them.’28

  Goebbels knew his craft and, club-footed or not, was just getting into his stride.

  Notes

   1. Duff Hart-Davis, Hitler’s Games (London, Century Hutchinson, 1986), p. 43.

   2. www.athensenvironmental.org/modern_olympics/modern_olympics06.asp (visited 5 May 2005).

   3. ‘Jewish Women in Gymnastics and Sport in Germany 1898–1938’, Journal of Sport History, Vol. 26, No. 2 (Summer 1999); (visited 5 May 2005).

   4. William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (London, Pan Books, 1971), p. 171.

   5. Los Angeles Times, 3 August 1932, p. 9.

   6. The XIth Olympic Games, Berlin, 1936 Official Report.

   7. Milly Mogulof, Foiled (Oakland, CA, RDR Books, 2002), p. 61.

   8. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, p. 236.

   9. The XIth Olympic Games, Berlin, 1936 Official Report.

  10. IOC Official Bulletin, 1933.

  11. The XIth Olympic Games, Berlin, 1936 Official Report.

  12. The XIth Olympic Games, Berlin, 1936 Official Report.

  13. There is confusion about chronology because March presented the new stadium plans but a long time afterwards Hitler reacted violently when construction began. According to Albert Speer in his Inside the Third Reich (London, Sphere Books, 1979 reprint), p. 129, Hitler ‘went to inspect the site and came back in a state of anger and agitation’. March’s design was a ‘c
oncrete structure with glass partition walls’ like one in Vienna but Hitler stormed that he would ‘never set foot inside a modern glass box like that’. Speer remembered Hitler ordering Pfundtner to cancel the Games because, as head of state, he – Hitler – had to declare them open and he wouldn’t do it in such a stadium. Overnight, Speer added, he himself sketched how natural stone cladding could be attached to the steel skeleton now up. The glass partitions went, bringing Hitler back. Speer wondered irreverently whether Hitler really would have cancelled the Games or whether he used a ‘flash of pique’ to get his way, a tactic he deployed often.

  14. The XIth Olympic Games, Berlin, 1936 Official Report.

  15. Ibid.

  16. Ibid.

  17. Ibid.

  18. New York Times, 8 March 1934.

  19. Gretel Bergmann; interview with author.

  20. Paul Yogi Mayer, Jews and the Olympic Games (London, Valentine Mitchell, 2004), p. 15.

  21. Gretel Bergmann; interview with author.

  22. Ibid.

  23. I am indebted to my neighbour Inge Donnell for pointing out that although Führer does mean leader – and could be used quite innocently, as for the leader of a trade union or a troupe of boy scouts – Hitler decreed that it only be used about him, and as a consequence it became intimately associated with him, and acquired a strength and force through the connection.