Hitler's Olympics

by Christopher Hilton

  The Greek route was prepared in a most thorough manner. The runners were conveyed to their posts in motor-coaches, and those who had completed their stretch were collected by a following car. At other times an automobile preceded them, depositing the fresh bearers at their posts and taking in those who had completed their stretch. This system was used wherever changes had to be made on the highways or in streaming rain so that the runners would not have to wait in the open. Since sporting clubs existed only in the larger cities, peasant youths from the districts through which the Fire passed were usually enlisted as torch bearers. They had enrolled in the lists circulated by the Greek Olympic Committee and ran in their national costumes, which included the short, full skirt or ‘fustanella’.75

  The broadcasting crew faced difficulties because Greece had no radio network to plug into. More than that, the crew recorded their broadcasts onto disks for posterity and the temperature began rising towards 122 degrees Fahrenheit. The disks became so soft the recording needle cut into them. In all the laboured, seemingly meticulous planning and rehearsing, the consequences of the fierce heat of a Greek summer, had been overlooked. The crew stepped outside the box: they used their initiative and poured their drinking water over the disks to keep them cool. It worked, just the way forward planning sometimes doesn’t and human initiative usually does.

  The Manhattan kept on coming.

  Notes

   1. John Thomas Lang (1876–1975) was a prominent Australian politician during the early twentieth century. He was a member of the Australian Labor Party, and the Premier of New South Wales for two terms, from 1925 to 1927, and again from 1930 to 1932. He is the only Premier of any Australian state to have been dismissed by the State Governor (the representative of the British monarch) without there being an election or parliamentary vote of no confidence. This was due to his refusal to pay interest on government loans borrowed from financiers in the United Kingdom at the height of the Great Depression.

   2. Stephanie Daniels and Anita Tedder, ‘A Proper Spectacle’ – Women Olympians 1900–1936 (Houghton Conquest, Beds., ZeNaNa Press, 2000), p. 100.

   3. Australian Olympic Report.

   4. Ibid.

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

   6. Giles MacDonogh, Berlin (London, Sinclair-Stevenson, 1997), p. 64.

   7. N.M. Masood, The World’s Hockey Champions (Delhi, Model Press, 1937) in www.bharatiyahockey.org (visited 21 November 2005).

   8. Australian Olympic Report.

   9. Daniels and Tedder, ‘A Proper Spectacle’, p. 100.

  10. Australian Olympic Report.

  11. According to Owens’s biographer William J. Baker: ‘Crucial to Jesse Owens’s fame in August in Berlin was the fall of Joe Louis in June just a few weeks before. All the team sports were segregated in America and Joe Louis and Jesse Owens were the only two really visible black athletes. With the fall of Louis the king had died, long live the king! Jesse Owens becomes king. His glamour, his acclaim is all the greater, I contend, because the king was dead.’

  12. Jesse Owens and Paul Neimark, JESSE: The Man Who Outran Hitler (New York, Fawcett Gold Medal, 1978).

  13. Ibid.

  14. usatf.org/athletes/hof/snyder.asp (visited 18 May 2005).

  15. William J. Baker, Jesse Owens, An American Life (New York, The Free Press, 1986), p. 54.

  16. www.ubcsportshalloffame.com/cgi-bin/search.cgi?person (visited 25 April 2005).

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

  18. Masood, The World’s Hockey Champions.

  19. Presumably the Australians were described as the first team to arrive because, prior to that, only the five Japanese had come rather than the entire Japanese team.

  20. www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/olympics.html (visited 16 November 2005).

  21. Masood, The World’s Hockey Champions.

  22. Daniels and Tedder, ‘A Proper Spectacle’, p. 106.

  23. Masood, The World’s Hockey Champions.

  24. New York Times, June 1996.

  25. www.bharatiyahockey.org/granthalaya/goal/1936/page5.htm

  One report suggests that during the voyage the Indian hockey team practised so assiduously on deck that hundreds of balls were lost – hit into the sea.

  26. iwitnesstohistory.org/ResidentPages/Wenzel/Wenzel%2036% 20olympics.htm (visited 10 October 2005).

  27. www.bharatiyahockey.org/granthalaya/goal/1936/page5.htm

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

  29. www.canadianboxing.com/profiles_content.htm (visited 23 April 2006).

  30. The American selectors can afford to be ruthless because they have such strength in depth: if you don’t make the qualification on the day you don’t go. Other countries simply couldn’t do this – witness the British controversy over whether Sebastian Coe should have gone to Los Angeles in 1984 on reputation and known world-class achievement rather than present form. Britain was simply not strong enough in talent to leave him at home. See also below, Michael Johnson, Chapter 10, ‘Village People’.

  31. New York Times, 12 July 1936.

  32. Mack’s brother Jackie made a profound social impact when he became the first African-American to play in a major league baseball match, for the Brooklyn Dodgers, in 1947. www.walteromalley.com (visited 16 November 2005).

  33. Marty Glickman with Stan Isaacs, The Fastest Kid on the Block (Syracuse, NY, Syracuse University Press, 1996).

  34. Masood, The World’s Hockey Champions.

  35. www.bharatiyahockey.org/granthalaya/goal/1936/page5.htm (visited 4 November 2005).

  36. Christine Duerksen Sant, ‘“Genuine German Girls”: The Nazi Portrayal of its Sportswomen of the 1936 Berlin Olympics’, unpublished doctoral thesis. Winston Salem, Wake Forest University, 2000, p. 67.

  37. Ibid.

  38. Sant, ‘“Genuine German Girls”’, p. 89. NB: blond used in America for women, blonde in Britain.

  39. Gretel Bergmann; interview with author.

  40. Sant, ‘“Genuine German Girls”’, p. 69.

  41. The story of the United States in Olympic football needs a book of its own. Suffice it to say, that the $7,000 enabled them to go to Berlin to lose to Italy 1–0, and get home again.

  42. Lewis H. Carlson and John J. Fogarty, Tales of Gold (Chicago, IL, Contemporary Books, 1987), p. 171.

  43. Sharon Kinney Hanson, The Fulton Flash (Carbondale, IL, Southern Illinois University Press, 2004).

  44. Velma Dunn; interview with author.

  45. Carlson and Fogarty, Tales of Gold, p. 150.

  46. Ibid., p. 146.

  47. Baker, Jesse Owens, p. 78.

  48. Owens and Neimark, The Man Who Outran Hitler, p. 67.

  49. The Man Who Outran Hitler reads like a post-event justification for many things and at crucial moments does not seem to ring true – something we shall meet again. I have used what is recorded in the book with caution.

  50. Smallwood, in fact, recovered sufficiently to qualify for the 400-metre semi-finals in Berlin, only to fall ill again. He finally had his appendix removed in a Berlin hospital.

  51. Baker, Jesse Owens, p. 79.

  52. Carlson and Fogarty, Tales of Gold, p. 173.

  53. John Woodruff; interview with author.

  54. Hanson, The Fulton Flash, p. 64.

  55. Gretel Bergmann; interview with author.

  56. Ibid.

  57. My neighbour Inge Donnell spent a long time with her magnifying glass trying to decipher the signature and it really is a scrawl. By a careful examination of each individual letter – and some deduction! – we concluded it had to be Tschammer’s.

  58. Gretel Bergmann; interview with author. Interestingly, Christine Sant wrote in ‘“Genuine German Girls”’: ‘Tolerating Bergmann at training courses and some track meets, although in conflict wi
th Nazi racial principles, was a small price to pay in order to keep the aim of hosting the Olympics alive. But in the final moments, priorities shifted again. Allowing Bergmann actually to compete in the Olympics would have appeared an egregious violation of Nazi racial policies. A victory by her most likely would have been taken as an embarrassing blow to the political leadership, who sought to impress the huge national and international audience. In the case of Bergmann, racism clearly won out over the chance for a medal for Germany and the promises of fair competition.’ (p. 60).

  59. Ibid., p. 63.

  60. Official US Report of the Games.

  61. Baker, Jesse Owens, p. 78.

  62. www.usc.edu/dept/pubrel/trojan_family/summer03/F_Zamperini.html (visited 26 September 2005).

  63. Baker, Jesse Owens, p. 79.

  64. Daniels and Tedder, ‘A Proper Spectacle’.

  65. Velma Dunn; interview with author.

  66. Hanson, The Fulton Flash.

  67. Fritz Wandt; interview with Birgit Kubisch.

  68. www.swimming.org (visited 13 April 2005).

  69. Velma Dunn; interview with author.

  70. Masood, The World’s Hockey Champions.

  71. Baker, Jesse Owens, p. 78.

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

  73. Ibid.

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

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

  Chapter 5

  LIGHT MY FIRE

  I refer to the mock marriage and mock trial ostensibly given as an entertainment feature but so shocking that many athletes walked out of the social hall. The trial was presided over by Gustavus T. Kirby who so handled the dialogue having to do with marital situations that it was open to questionable interpretations and altogether unsuitable for youthful ears.

  Eleanor Holm, US swimmer

  The city of heavy stone had a population of over 4 million, making it the third largest in the world behind London’s 8 million and New York’s 7. It had its own accent and its own irreverent, quick-fire humour like any Cockney barrow boy, self-respecting New York cab driver or Parisian barman. Hitler never felt comfortable with the Berliners and a lot of them never felt comfortable with him.

  Albert Speer recorded how, during the nations’ march past at the Opening Ceremony, the Berliners’ open enthusiasm for the French team, which they applauded long and loud, ‘jolted’ Hitler.1 He sensed ‘a popular mood, a longing for peace and reconciliation’ with France which was not what he had in mind after the humiliation of the Versailles treaty. Their reaction, Speer thought, disturbed Hitler.

  Berlin’s stone-clad facades, the imposing avenues and ornate palaces, the squares and museums, the ponderous streets of three- and four-storey apartments with their secluded communal courtyards, gave the city its public face. It had another. The 1920s had been gloriously decadent, especially the city’s nightlife with the nude reviews, upper-class brothels, homosexual haunts and artists’ quarters (one club/restaurant even had phones on the tables so one customer could proposition another by ringing their table). Whatever the puritans in the Nazi movement did to this they did not get their way all over the city. Entire working-class districts remained staunchly communist and would do for generations. Berlin was not a placid capital, unifying the aspirations of a people with their politics. Right and left lived their principles not as matters of academic debate or fuel for ballot boxes but as something to fight and die for.

  The city, squatting so heavily on the flat Brandenburg plain, could be arctic cold in winter and jungle hot in summer. Despite that, outdoor café life flourished and Berliners loved to walk their Sundays away in the woodlands close by or lie along the shore of Lake Wannsee. They even called the fresh air – Die Berliner Luft – their own because, they claimed, it invigorated and refreshed.

  A visitor peering out of a carriage easing into any of Berlin’s railway stations with their beguiling names – Schleisser, Gorlitzer, Anhalter, Potsdamer, Lehrter, Friedrichstrasse, Zoologischer, Charlottenburg – immediately sensed that they had arrived somewhere important, that the city felt like a capital. Now it prepared to open its arms to embrace the Olympic Games and, by extension, the attention of the world. Big, old capital cities know how to do that.

  The difficult part is trying to reconstruct this assumption of welcome, or rather the apparent truth of this assumption. There is no easy evidence to the contrary, that any residents of Berlin thought the whole thing a waste of time and money; no easy evidence that the nightlife people made cutting asides about how horribly healthy they thought the whole business of the Games; no protests about disruption to daily life, especially traffic; certainly no sense that there were questions raised about value for money or, more sensitively, about what was really being done to the purity of the Olympic movement; no mention of any of the other questions one would be tempted to ask, especially anyone who loathed everything the Nazis represented. The ultimate question – ‘Do you want this?’ – was never asked, either. All the black-and-white pictures of crowds show herd-like groups, but what else would they be? About the Games, the cynical Berliner – sharp, perceptive, living in the current of the moment – remains silent. The rest comes to us as caricature, which is precisely what was intended. Powerful people would make simple, obedient, normal people enact the rituals which the powerful people demanded. And that is just what happened.

  The Nazi machine orchestrated a unified Olympics, the same front of unified approval cloaking the Führer and everything else.

  There were a couple of chinks in this presentation of unity in the form of cartoons. The publication details are not clear because both were potentially very dangerous to anyone associated with them. One shows the Brandenburg Gate with Nazi flags and figurines giving the salute. A slogan is scrawled across the Gate: ‘Jews Warmly Welcome’. A sign nearby reads: ‘Jews Out!’, but the ‘Out’ has a line through it and ‘In!’ is written above. The second shows a pygmy Goebbels, his club foot evident, holding a Nazi flag in his left hand and strings to the five Olympic rings, each through the nose of a runner as if he is pulling them all along, in his right. The caption, in Berlin slang, says ‘The Point of the Whole Thing’.

  There is a further insight into the Berliners’ true feelings provided by Werner Schwieger, speaking in 2005. ‘You know, things were not like they are today, at least as far as I can see it. The population was not so much interested. Of course, the stadium was crowded, they came from all over Germany, from all over Europe. Even from America.’ By this he means the population may have liked – even thrilled at – the idea of hosting the Games without necessarily wanting to follow them event by event.

  Clearly the vast majority of Germans did favour the Games because by mid-July ticket sales exceeded 6 million Reichsmarks. What is not recorded are the views of those who did not dream of buying a ticket, not least because these Olympics had to be viewed as the Nazi regime incorporating the Games into its own forms of pageantry, co-opting them for the purpose of endorsing the vision of a united Germany; nor were those mentioned who thronged the Olympic venues and oggled artefacts simply because it was something happening, offering extraordinary sights in otherwise ordinary lives.

  Schwieger’s comment is illuminating – he ‘did not really notice’ the atmosphere in Berlin because, ‘you know, those who had a job went to work and the unemployed had no money to go there’. Mind you, even though he had a job he’d go ….

  And we might listen to Fritz Wandt, living so close to the Olympic Village. He collected autographs, as we shall see. The family talked about his collection as it grew. ‘But my parents were not so much interested. They had other things to care about: their business. They worked on the farm from dawn til dusk – well, starting at 5.30 a.m. finishing at 7.30 in the evening. We youngsters tried to go to the Village as often as possible. For us it was a big thing. My parents, they took notice of it b
ut weren’t much interested.’

  The stone-clad city dressed for the occasion with tall masts along Unter den Linden, through the Brandenburg Gate and all down the rod-like avenue to the stadium. Nazi banners fluttered everywhere. As the Opening Ceremony drew near, the number of foreign visitors rose.

  MONDAY 20 JULY

  The flickering flame and the padding feet moved across the rugged, difficult Greek terrain from the western side of the Peloponnese to the east. At some points the route threaded through narrow mountain passes cut into cliffs and rose, unprotected, to 1,500 metres.

  Three hours were needed to cover the first 37 kilometres and a further six the 50 to Vytina, a historic mountain town with a small population – 2,988 runners to go. The flame kept coming across the Greek mainland and at midnight there were twelve days to the Opening Ceremony.

  TUESDAY 21 JULY

  By mid-morning the flame turned north for Corinth. At 7.20 in the evening it reached Athens and was run into the big stadium where King George of Greece waited. The Greek Olympic Committee had organised popular festivals at points along the route but this place, with the King taking part, became laden with symbolism. It was here, in 1896, that the modern Olympic Games had been born, growing ever stronger, through Paris, St Louis, London, Stockholm, Antwerp, Paris, Amsterdam and Los Angeles. Now, for an enchanted moment or two, what had become a sturdy adult returned to the cradle of its birth, as if completing a great historic loop of time and, in the completion, opening another, towards Berlin.

  The German radio transmitting car got a connection but when the runner appeared and the speaker started to make his report the crowd stood so deep the cable was broken underfoot: a pity, because the commentator had a lot to describe – the white marble stadium, the crowd, the runner bringing the torch to the King who used it to light a flame on an altar, maidens in period dress and fifty-two guards holding the flags of the nations going to Berlin.