Hitler's Olympics

by Christopher Hilton

  [Coverage] suggested the idea of ‘Aryan supremacy’ in a number of ways when reporting on the women’s team. Most blatantly, the press drew attention to ‘Aryan’ physical characteristics when applicable. Publications took note of the sportswomen’s hair color, if it was light, when relaying information about the competition. They described Ruth Halbsgut and Tilly Fleischer, for example, as blond, and Anni Steuer as dark blond. In addition, publications indicated whether an athlete was of tall stature. Steuer and Fleischer happened to be given both the ‘tall’ and ‘blond’ designations.38

  Gretel Bergmann was not invited to compete in the German Championships. Dora Ratjen won but was disqualified – the reason lost in the mists of time – and the next three girls, led by Kaun, did 1.54 metres. Since Bergmann had done 1.60 metres at Stuttgart she clearly merited a place in the Olympic team, something highlighted by the fact that in virtually every event the Germans fielded three competitors but in the women’s high jump only two.

  Bergmann thinks she ‘only found out in the 1990s, when I got connection again with Elfriede Kaun. We met for the first time when I was in Germany in 2001, 2002 and they got her to come to Berlin and we met again. It was very emotional. I’m not a crying person but when I think of that meeting tears come to my eyes. I knew only two women had been picked but I didn’t know why. She told me that they were told “Bergmann is injured and we are keeping the place open in case she recovers.” They didn’t want to put anybody else on the team to show their manoeuvring.’39

  A much greater highlight to absurdity was coming soon.

  The media paid particular interest to the American women’s team, ‘mainly because journalists considered them to be the toughest competition. Showing them as such allowed the German press to make winning or losing against them seem more meaningful.’

  [The media] perceived some of the American women, especially the swimmers and divers, as having ‘star-like’ qualities, which their readership may have found appealing. Before the Olympic trials in the United States, for example, Der Angriff ran a photograph and short piece on some of the swimmers titled, ‘Seven beautiful girls from the USA,’ in which the reporter commented that, ‘one only wishes that all of them will be at the Games.’ … Diver Dorothy Poynton Hill, for instance, appeared in German periodicals wearing various custom-made swimsuits and was described as the ‘lovely’ gold medallist from the 1932 Los Angeles Olympics and as ‘pure grace.’

  Another American woman the German press singled out was the 1932 winner in the backstroke, Eleanor Holm Jarrett, dubbed ‘the Diva’ by reporters. Publications featured her as ‘the pretty swimmer,’ who was also an actress, singer, and the wife of a popular musical group leader. Der Angriff, for instance, devoted a full page to Jarrett – more space than they gave to any of the German women. Likewise, [the] Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung hailed her as America’s ‘surest mainstay’ for Olympic gold.40

  Holm would lose no time in drawing a great deal more media attention to herself, just hours after the American team sailed from New York on 15 July.

  Meanwhile, the US Football Association wrestled with the dilemma of whether to go or not and decided in favour, ‘despite the unpalatable political situation. However, heavy snowfall during the winter of 1935–36 wreaked havoc with attempts to raise money for team preparations and it was only three weeks before the Olympics that Joe Barriskill, the USFA secretary, transferred just under seven thousand dollars to the Olympic Committee to fund the team.’41

  The American track and field team stayed at the Hotel Lincoln on Eighth Avenue (1,400 rooms from $2.50 up) before sailing. Many slept little the night before and the day of departure started early. Helen Stephens, the sprinter of awesome potential from Fulton, stayed up late talking to her room-mates, woke around 6 a.m. and ate breakfast quickly. One report uses the word ‘hysteria’ to capture the mood of excitement. They were already down in the lobby before the dawn shift of porters and clerks started work.

  Some competitors carried instructions with them. Forrest ‘Spec’ (Freckles, shortened to Spec) Towns, 100 metre hurdler and son of a railroad man, was being coached by Weems Baskin at the University of Georgia, and Baskin told him to ignore whatever one of the Olympic team’s coaches, Lawson Robertson, said. ‘You know what you have to do’, Baskin concluded. ‘Do it.’42

  They were to sail on the steamer SS Manhattan, a five-year-old ship whose funnels were appropriately red, white and blue, moored at the pier at the end of West 20th Street. It regularly plied the route to Hamburg via Cobh – the cove of Cork, a place with deep resonance for many Americans because thousands of Irish people emigrated from there – then on to Plymouth (another place of resonance because the Pilgrim Fathers had sailed from there to Massachusetts), Le Havre and up the North Sea coast.

  The Manhattan departed at midday and shuttle buses from the Lincoln began to transport the American teams at 9 a.m., but in their eagerness the boxers took taxis and were the first aboard. From 9.30 a current of competitors flowed up the gangplank and some, to oblige the photographers, even did it twice. Autograph hunters had their favourites, mainly Eleanor Holm and Owens. The Manhattan had other, commercial passengers and the autograph hunters noted actresses Mary Astor and Helen Hayes boarding. When Owens appeared, looking dapper in his only suit, a dark-blue pinstripe, the photographers, reporters and autograph hunters swarmed.

  Stephens had never travelled by ship before. When she arrived she saw one of her teachers in the crowd. The teacher gave her a small, cherry-red leather-bound travel diary and said she should record all the exciting events of the trip. Stephens promised she would. Then she went to Cabin 35 on Deck 6.43

  Velma Dunn, a member of the diving team, ‘had never been out of America. I’m from California and I went to New York by train, about four days at that time. I don’t think I had been to New York. I had been to Chicago. It was a huge adventure.’44

  The competitors had their bunks on the two decks below the waterline and Owens made his way to Room 87 on Deck D, in the hold of the ship.

  Archie Williams, the 400 metres runner, found the black athletes were to room together because, as someone said to him, ‘Well, you guys want to be with your own kind.’ His cabin mate was James LuValle, who had been his hero but now represented a direct threat in the 400 metres. Williams thought that whoever had allocated the cabins simply did not realise that two rivals might indulge in ‘heavy psyching’, although, as he would claim, he himself was ‘too dumb’ to be subtly undermined.45

  Williams, from California, studied at Berkeley for a degree in mechanical engineering, the first member of his family to go to college. Study had taken preference over preparing for the Olympics, not least because athletics was ‘an end in itself’ rather than opening the golden door to money. Wrong era. And when he arrived at Berkeley his counsellor queried the engineering degree because, even with it, no big company would be hiring a black man. Wrong era again.46

  On board the Manhattan

  physically segregated by a sealed door were a few wives and parents who were making the trip, whose section divided male from female athletes. Regular passengers nearly filled the two upper decks to capacity. Among them were American Olympic officials and coaches, who traveled first class. To one of their own members, they seemed like ‘a bunch of junketeers taking the gravy that should have gone to the athletes.’ Unaccustomed to anything different, most athletes scarcely noticed the contrast.47

  The sleeping arrangements did not suit Eleanor Holm, bunked with two young swimmers, at all. ‘I had been around – I was no baby,’ she said. Evidently she had tried to pay for her own passage across first class but Brundage forbade it. That didn’t suit her, either.

  Betty Robinson, twenty-five, competed in the 1928 Games as a 100-metre sprinter, but injuries from a plane crash three years later meant she could not assume the crouch position for the start of the race, so she went to Berlin as part of the relay team. Kathlyn Kelly from Seneca, South Carolina, was 16 years
and 309 days old when she qualified for the Olympic high jump, which still makes her the fifth youngest high-jumper to do so.

  Twenty minutes before the ship sailed a vast white flag with the Olympic rings was hoisted to the top of a mast by five female competitors and visitors were asked to go ashore. One official had two bags with him, one for soiled clothing and the other clean. His wife, who disembarked, took the wrong one leaving him without so much as a razor.

  Three tugs backed the Manhattan away into the Hudson. As she went the competitors stood behind the ship’s white railings and shouted ‘Ray! Ray! for the USA’ with, as a sort of echo, ‘A–M–E–R–I–C–A!’

  As the United Press reported, the team sailed aboard the ‘gaily be-flagged Manhattan in a bedlam of bon-voyage cheers from more than 10,000 well-wishers and an ear-splitting din from the tied-down whistles of harbor craft’. Aeroplanes and small airships ‘soared and dipped’ and the whole spectacle became ‘a virtual tornado of massed joy’. After all the bitter wrangling over whether to go or not, only one anti-Olympic picket came and the placard he carried was an advertisement for a book he had written.

  Owens would later say that as the shoreline receded and disappeared a simple thought held him: the next time he saw it he’d have won or lost, with all that those two possibilities implied.48 He gazed at the expanse of the Atlantic and wanted to get on his knees to thank God for this chance. But he didn’t. He wondered if he didn’t because of his team-mates around him, or because ‘there was a stranger inside of me now’.49

  The Manhattan had 1,064 passengers, 688 in the Olympics entourage (344 competitors, the rest were officials, coaches, journalists and relatives) while most of the remaining 376 were going to the Games as spectators and supporters. A further forty-eight competitors completed the team, some – yachtsmen, equestrians and two baseball players – were already in Germany, and the ten canoeists were to follow a week later. Taken together, United States had never sent a larger team. It contained eighteen black athletes (sixteen men, two women), three times the number at the Los Angeles Games four years earlier.

  The Manhattan churned on into the Atlantic and the passengers prepared to settle down to the rhythm of shipboad life, whatever that brought. For 400-metre relay sprinter Harold Smallwood it brought appendicitis and confinement to his quarters wearing an icepack. While Smallwood underwent surgery the ship slowed dramatically, making people think it was to keep it steady, but the captain explained over the PA that he was trying to avoid a school of whales.50

  The rest were fit enough to eat 700lb of beef, double the normal amount for the ship and bringing the possibility of rationing by banning second helpings.

  The delicate matter of race relations has spawned two conflicting testimonies.

  The first: Owens went to his assigned table ‘only to find all three of his dining mates to be outspoken, wisecracking Southerners…. All were whites, and to Jesse their necks appeared red. For all his easy-mannered adaptability, he could not cope with that situation. He found another table.’ Afterwards, one of them teased Owens ‘for his prejudice against white Southerners’.51

  The second: Towns remembered that he, shot-putter Jack Torrance and Glenn ‘Slats’ Hardin, a 400 metre hurdler – three white Southerners – had been assigned a table for the voyage. Owens came up and hesitated but Hardin, who knew him, asked if it was his table, too. Owens said yes and Hardin said, ‘Well, sit your ass down here.’ Towns claimed that Owens ate with them all the way across and it didn’t bother them at all.52

  John Woodruff says ‘there was no discrimination amongst the athletes on the team’.53

  After dinner the competitors watched a film or danced to live music.

  That night the competitors were settling to life on board. Some had already been seasick but evidently Helen Stephens was not affected as she covered eight ‘laps’ of the deck after dinner.54

  In Berlin the radio links with foreign countries were tested ‘after the removal of many international difficulties which ordinarily exist. The authorities in the different countries concerned gave every assistance to the German Broadcasting Company.’

  In Laupheim, Gretel Bergmann waited in a kind of nightmare to hear if she had been selected. ‘I didn’t know what was going on, I had no idea. I didn’t think they were going to let me compete. I mean, how can 100,000 people look at a Jewish girl high-jumping for Adolf Hitler? Nobody will know what psychologically I went through. Day and night I was thinking: What am I going to do if they let me compete? I had this idea that the madder I got the better I jumped and I said, “Am I going to have to give the Hitler salute?” All these things were weighing on me and I didn’t want to talk about it to my parents because I didn’t want to make their lives harder than they already were. It was a horrible time. Horrible. Psychologically I don’t know how I got through it. By being a normal human being, I think! If I hadn’t had my sense of humour I don’t think I would have.’55

  An official letter from the German Reichs Union for Sport in Charlottenburg, dated 16 July, settled it. For months the German team trained at Ettlingen. Jewish athletes had much poorer conditions and might or might not be invited to regional qualifying competitions. Bergmann, by contrast, had been to Ettlingen and there found no discrimination among her fellow athletes, particularly from fellow high-jumper Elfriede Kaun – as we have seen.

  The letter, delivered quite normally with the post to Bergmann’s home in Laupheim, read:

  The Reichssportführer, who has selected the team for the Olympic Games, has not been able to include you in the team representing Germany during the time of 1 to 9 August in the Olympic stadium. For each competition – except relay – only three competitors could be chosen. Due to your recent performances you yourself probably did not reckon on being selected.

  But Dr. von Halt [of the German Olympic Committee] is prepared to reward your willingness and hard work by offering you, free, standing tickets to the track and field week, including the Opening Ceremony, for the days 1./ 2./ 3./ 4./ 5./6./ 7./ 8./ 9 August.

  Should you intend to make use of this offer please let us know. The tickets will be sent to you immediately. Unfortunately travel and living expenses cannot be included.

  Heil Hitler!

  Tschammer

  ‘I opened it and I cursed my head off. I used every word I had ever learnt and that was a lot because I was the only girl in my class – we were thirteen, I think, and I was the only girl. They cursed and I learnt. I was absolutely stunned.’56

  The letter made no mention of the fact that she was joint holder of the German record or that only two competitors had been selected for the women’s high jump, Kaun and Ratjen. To pass up a likely gold medal for anti-Semitic reasons is startling enough, even in Nazi Germany. To have selected Ratjen the man instead was far more than startling. Ratjen, first name Hermann, was a member of the Hitler Youth and had been threatened with consequences if he did not agree to compete. The reasoning: a man has to beat the women, and he’ll have Bergmann’s gold.

  The Bergmann and Ratjen cases, contrived as they were from a blind adherence to Olympic ideals, represent a neat insight into insanity.

  It was measured insanity, too. Again as we have seen, Bergmann and Ratjen were ordered to be room-mates during training because, Bergmann insists looking back, as a seventeen-year-old male with testosterone pumping he might have been tempted by an Aryan girl but would never dare touch a Jew. It cut the other way, too, because she, as a Jew, would never have dared denounce Ratjen the Aryan even if she had discovered his real gender.

  Bergmann ‘could never figure out’ who signed the letter dismissing her from the team – the signature is an indecipherable scrawl.57 ‘Tschammer was the overall boss, I guess. But you know this is a letter that was sent, I am sure, to all the people who didn’t make the final team. That wasn’t just a letter to me, this was just a form letter. To so-and-so-and-so, then the text, so-and-so-and-so, you didn’t make it. This had nothing to do with a personal
letter to me – but I am convinced that that letter went out much earlier to the others, mine got sent at the last minute after the American ship sailed. I never had any proof of this but I said, “If that’s a coincidence, I’ll eat my hat.” I was joint German record holder: of course it is nonsense to say I wasn’t good enough. I did that four weeks before the Olympics, four weeks before.’58

  Once the Manhattan set sail, with her coveted cargo of American competitiors, the Nazis judged it safe to dump Bergmann without fear of repercussions, even explaining away her absence to the German Olympic team by claiming she was injured. Bergmann said this was the first time ‘I really realised my candidacy as an Olympic athlete was all a sham.’

  As a ‘half Jew’ Mayer received quite different treatment. Her physical appearance was that of a stereotypical Aryan: blonde hair and fair-skinned in contrast to Bergmann’s dark eyes and hair. By one grotesque irony among so many, years before the Ministry of Propaganda had described Mayer as a perfect Nordic woman – but that was before they discovered her Jewish ancestry. The Ministry now ordered that ‘coverage should not mention there are two non-Aryans [Mayer and Bergmann] among the women on the team’. The presumption must be that Bergmann’s continued public ‘inclusion’ was intended to prolong the pretence even after she had been ditched. Whether the German public could see through these manoeuvrings – the word ‘posturings’ has been used – in a situation of tight censorship seems highly unlikely, although a day later Der Angriff explained that, apart from the two high-jumpers selected, no others were world class.59

  The Ministry held daily press briefings at noon to exercise the censorship. That involved control over what would be printed and what omitted as well as identifying subjects to be given particular prominence. If newspapers and magazines did not have a reporter present, confidential directives were sent to editors and section editors. These directives had to be kept in a safe place and destroyed at regular intervals.