Hitler's Olympics
Page 27
Owens never ran as an amateur again. He was, in any case, ‘pretty sick of running’.11
That night Brundage contacted coach Snyder and asked what was going on, specifically about the supposed contracts offered to Owens, which inevitably would destroy his amateur status. Synder would not be drawn. Brundage also wanted to know if Owens was going to the meeting in Stockholm, even threatening ‘dire consequences’ if Owens wasn’t there. Synder pointed out Owens had not signed an official entry form and under the rules could not be punished. The AAU and American Olympic Committee officials weren’t having any of that. Athletes did what they were told and, anyway, there was money to be made for them.
Owens stayed in London.
Not to be outdone by Goering, or possibly to outdo Goering, Goebbels threw a party on an island in the River Havel to mark the end of the Games. Called the Pfaueninsel, the island had once had a dairy, a big dipper and a mansion but the ruling Hohenzollerns, treating it as their personal fiefdom, eventually lost interest in it and lovers went there for its privacy. It was ideal for Goebbels, who wanted a gigantic party. There were reasons.
It was ‘the parties given by the three senior Nazi paladins, Goering, Goebbels and the future foreign minister Ribbentrop, that were the most keenly anticipated events in the social calendar’ during the Games. ‘The three men were not only political rivals but also bitter personal enemies and they could be relied upon to compete with each other in the extravagance of their entertaining.’ Ribbentrop, who had been a wine merchant and had married money, would be lavish ‘at the dinner and dance he gave at his house in the exclusive suburb of Dahlem. But Ribbentrop was a prize bore, and his party was utterly conventional.’12
Goering had outdone him and Goebbels intended to outdo both of them.
Trees were turned into luminous candelabra. The Reichswehr Pioneer Corps threw up a bridge of boats to link the island with the land and soldiers mounted a guard of honour, presenting their oars to the guests, who were shown to their places by a swarm of young girls dressed as Renaissance pages. At midnight there was a splendid firework display that reminded everyone of an artillery barrage.13
Helen Stephens met Goering during the Games and thought she’d had the first glass of beer in her life with him. She went to the party with room-mate Bland, the relay runner from St Louis. At the party Goering sent a message saying he wanted to see her upstairs. She reasoned it could be fun but told Harriet not to tell anybody afterwards. They went past a soldier guarding the door and inside were confronted with Goering sitting on a huge divan accompanied by two women in skimpy clothing. He offered them wine and as they demurred the telephone rang. He answered it. A young officer said that this was no place for girls like them and shepherded them out. Goering stood, said goodbye and blew Stephens a kiss.14
And that was the fourteenth day.
The weather remained pleasant on the Sunday although it began with a heavy mist and towards midday the sky became overcast. During the day more than 200,000 people were registered by the control gates at the railway stations, a record. Berlin buzzed.
The hard news, however, came from the AAU in Berlin and Owens and Snyder in London. A conference was called in mid-afternoon at the stadium when Brundage and Ferris learnt that Owens hadn’t boarded the plane for Stockholm. ‘We had no alternative under the circumstances but to disbar Owens,’ Ferris said. ‘It’s an open-and-shut case of violating an agreement. It means that Owens will not be able to engage in any competition controlled by the AAU or in college meets either so long as he is under the ban.’15
Owens was informed of his suspension by telegram.
Snyder struck back accusing the AAU of sacrificing anybody ‘to get its 10 per cent’.
Owens said: ‘There’s nothing I can gain out of this trip. This suspension is very unfair to me. All we athletes get out of this Olympic business is a view out of a train or an airplane window. It gets very tiresome, it really does. This track business is becoming one of the greatest rackets in the world. It doesn’t mean a darn thing to us athletes. The AAU gets the money.’
At the 1936 Games, only one competition remained to be decided, the timed jumping in the equestrian event. The rest was already settling into memory, and not just the track and field centrepiece. There had been the four-day pentathlon with its riding, fencing, swimming and cross-country running won by Germany’s Gotthard Handrick.
There had been the men’s swimming fought out between the Japanese and the Americans but a Hungarian medical student, Ferenc Csík, took the 100 metres freestyle beating the world record holder, Peter Fick (USA), and three leading Japanese.
There had been the gymnastics with their graceful yet somehow curious movements and scoring. In the open Dietrich Eckart Stadium sometimes sunlight caught these movements and cast eerie, elongated shadows from them. The German men and women won.
There had been the men’s diving where among Marshall Wayne’s opponents was the Japanese he had watched practising so diligently and then, with Dick Degener, psyched him out. In the springboard final the Japanese, Tsueno Shibahara, landed firmly on his bottom on his first dive. The officials felt that someone in the crowd had made a noise distracting him – perhaps dropping a bottle – and approached Wayne and Degener to see if they’d object to him retaking the dive. They applied the psychology again: Let him dive all day and you pick his best dive out of that. Degener won the springboard from Wayne, Shibahara was fourth. Wayne won the highboard from room-mate Root.
There’d been the women’s diving. ‘I got a silver medal, three-tenths of a point away, that’s all,’ Velma Dunn says. ‘To me it was close and it wasn’t bad – three-tenths of a point in the entire world. I was very proud because I figured that that was a very good result. I wasn’t disappointed at that time because I thought of Tokyo in 1940. I practised hard for that. I was seventeen in 1936 so I would still only have been twenty-one in 1940 – and Dorothy [Poynton-Hill, gold] was older than that.’16
There had been another American diver at the threshold of a career, thirteen-year-old Marjorie Gestring, who became the youngest Olympic gold medal winner of all when, with Hitler watching, she took the springboard diving. She was only twenty-six when she tried to qualify for the 1948 Games – but didn’t.
There had been the men’s fencing with Italians taking the foil – Giulio Gaudini, and the épée – Franco Riccardi. A Hungarian, Endre Kabos, took the sabre. He’d started fencing when he’d been given a fencing outfit for his birthday but, embarrassed, hid it in his wardrobe. A friend discovered it and teased him. Kabos joined a fencing club the following day. By 1932 he had become good enough to win gold in the team competition. Now he added the individual gold and won twenty-four of his twenty-five matches in Berlin. The Hungarian team returned to Budapest undefeated.17
There had been the wrestling and boxing: the one grunt and grab, the domain of the Hungarians, the Finns, Americans and Swedes; the other noisy, totally direct and mostly the domain of the Germans and the French. The rules said boxers had to be weighed every day, which made those struggling to make their weights suffer agonies with so much food available in the Village. The daily agony became so intense that one report suggested the British and American teams threatened to go home and regretted that they did not.
There had been the weight-lifting where an Egyptian, Khadr El Touni, won gold in the middleweight division by 35 kilograms, a world record and so impressive that his name was etched on an official plaque outside the stadium. Mythology cloaks him. Some claim that to keep himself interested during training at home he sat his four wives at different corners of the stage; some claim Hitler said to him ‘I wish you could have been a German.’ Egypt took five medals.18
There had been the rowing, sculling and canoeing at Grunau, Germans, Austrians, Czechs strong here. There had been the yachting at Kiel, stately little galleons line astern and tacking.
There had been the cycling, either on a banked track or the road race out into the Grünewald,
and some lively action woven into it. In the 1,000 metres sprint Toni Merkens (Germany) swerved in front of Arie van Vliet to keep him in second place. The Dutch protested, leading to a 100 mark fine for Merkens – but he kept the gold. The individual road race reached a desperate climax with one Frenchman, Robert Charpentier, preparing a final assault against another, Guy Lapébie, considered the stronger sprinter. Charpentier launched his attack and as he did so he leant across and gripped Lapébie’s saddle, literally holding him back. Lapébie said ‘I’d have had to hit him to make him let go.’ Charpentier got the gold, Lapébie, 0.2 of a second behind, the silver. Charpentier was one of the men of the Games, apart from this: he won golds in the team road race and the team pursuit.
There had been the shooting at Wanssee – that exacting test of controlling the nervous system, intense concentration and remaining motionless.
There had been the hockey where the Indians won – magical, magisterial, mystical in their skills. Victorious as they had been in 1928 and 1932 and would be again in 1948, 1952 and 1956, a complete dynasty of triumph.
After their initial practice match – the one which they had lost 4–1 to Germany – they sent for reinforcements in the shape of a great player, A.I.S. Dara, although he wouldn’t arrive until the semi-finals. As they waited for him to come the team moved with gathering strength in their other practice matches: 5–1 against Berlin Hockey Club, 13–3 against Berlin Select, 15–0 against Brandenburg, 5–1 against Stettin, 8–2 against Afghanistan, 9–1 and 15–0 against America. They began the competition by beating Hungary comfortably 4–0, and afterwards they and the rest of the Indian party went to Hotel Adlon where the Maharaja and Maharani of Baroda received them ‘graciously. The Maharaja was dressed in a navy blue suit and the Maharani had a gold-bordered blue sari on.’19
Their hockey team dealt with America 7–0 and Japan 9–0.
In the semi-finals Germany beat Holland 3–0 just before India, plus Dara at inside right, beat France 10–0. It meant they had scored 31 goals and conceded none. Now they faced Germany, of course, in the final – a match put back a day because of torrential rain. While in the dressing room, a crowd of 40,000, the largest attendance at an Olympic hockey match, waited, among them the ‘ruler of Baroda, the princess of Bhopal. All the players reverently saluted the tricolour of the Indian National Congress, which their Assistant Manager had taken with him to Berlin.’20
The Germans held this immensely strong Indian side until 3 minutes before the interval but after it the Indians cut loose. From a penalty corner 7 minutes into the second half they made it 2–0, urgently adding a third and fourth. That was 12 minutes after the interval. A minute later they scored again and added a sixth.
The Germans now decided to play rough. Going for Dhyan Chand, the German goalkeeper removed one of his teeth. Coming back after receiving first aid, the bare-footed Dhyan Chand instructed his team to go easy on goals. ‘We must teach them a lesson in ball control,’ he said. As the stunned crowd watched, the Indians repeatedly took the ball up to the German circle and then backpassed to dumbfound their opponents.21
India won 8–1 and afterwards when Dhyan Chand told Hitler, who had watched the match, that he was a sepoy (ordinary soldier) in the army Hitler is said to have replied: ‘If you were a German, I would have made you at least a major general.’
There had been the water polo where the Hungarians retained their gold medal but the Austrians won the crowd by shouting ‘Heil Hitler’ when they jumped into the water, the salute being held in mid-air.
There had been the polo – Argentina won, beating Great Britain and Mexico. There had been basketball, that game of the gentle giants, now an official Olympic sport. America won (and would be undefeated until 1972 when the USSR took the gold).
All these events must have seemed very close, just yesterday or the day before, and yet very far away – gone forever – as the Closing Ceremony began at 9 p.m. that evening when the timed jumping in the equestrian event had finally been decided. And that decision caught the mood of the whole Games (although much earlier the cross-country course had proved horrific with three horses being killed and twenty failing to complete it). One of the German team, Lieutenant Konrad von Wangenheim, had fallen in the steeplechase the day before, breaking his collarbone. He remounted and finished the course. If he withdrew because of his injury Germany would lose the team medal so he arrived at the stadium with his arm in a sling. As each German rider entered the arena they gave the Nazi salute and Hitler returned it. Von Wangenheim reached the first fence but fell again and his horse came down on top of him. The horse got up and he did, too. He completed the course and Germany had the gold, giving a final flourish to the medal table.
Gold
Silver
Bronze
Germany
33
26
30
United States
24
20
12
Hungary
10
1
5
Floodlights came on to illuminate the stadium, haunting spotlights rising to form an arch of light. The nations paraded by, speeches were made, thunderous music played.
The big scoreboard carried the legend THE LAST SHOT IS FIRED.
Shirer recorded that for this Closing Ceremony he had had to use his wits to ‘smuggle’ Mrs William Randolph Hearst, wife of the newspaper tycoon, and a couple of her friends into the ceremony. They’d arrived the night before with no tickets. Shirer persuaded the SS guards to let them have diplomats’ seats from where they could see Hitler.22
Shirer, who enjoyed the Games but found covering them a nuisance, was concerned that the Nazi propaganda had seduced foreign visitors, especially Americans and especially big businessmen. Shirer and a colleague, Ralph Barnes of the Herald Tribune, had been asked to meet some and discovered they had indeed formed favourable impressions. These businessmen met Goering who complained that the American reporters in Berlin were being unfair to the Nazis. Shirer asked the businessmen if Goering had discussed, for example, the Nazi suppression of the churches. Yes, they replied, and said that he had insisted there was no truth in what was being written. Shirer and his colleague reacted strongly to this but didn’t feel they were convincing the businessmen.
In the stadium, Baillet-Latour thanked Hitler and the Germans with ‘deepest gratitude’ and summoned the youth of the world to Tokyo in 1940.
The Olympic flame flickered and died, the arch of light dimmed and 100,000 stood in silence for a long minute.
Pat Norton caught the mood. ‘The Games finished and we thought, no more until 1940, Japan! The Closing Ceremony had a sad ring to it as the flags of all the nations were marched round the arena accompanied by the sound of rolling guns firing, followed by a choir singing “Song of the Flags.” It was saying goodbye to the friends we made at Friesenhaus that saddened us. Jeanette from the Argentine, who just waved “goodbye” and did not look back, our giggly little Japanese girls and South Americans. Somehow it didn’t seem right – we were very subdued realising we would never see them again.’23
And that was the fifteenth day.
It was over.
Notes
1. Stephanie Daniels and Anita Tedder, ‘A Proper Spectacle’ – Women Olympians 1900–1936 (Houghton Conquest, Beds., ZeNaNa Press, 2000), pp. 116–17.
2. Velma Dunn; interview with author.
3. William J. Baker, Jesse Owens, An American Life (New York, The Free Press, 1986), p. 112.
4. Christine Duerksen Sant, ‘“Genuine German Girls”: The Nazi Portrayal of its Sportswomen of the 1936 Berlin Olympics’, pp. 90–1. Unpublished doctoral thesis, Winston-Salem, Wake Forest University, 2000.
5. www.cishsydney2005.org/images/ST25-PAPER%20FOR%20ICHSC%20(SAKAUE).doc -
6. Daniels and Tedder, ‘A Proper Spectacle’, p. 121.
7. New York Times, 12 August 1936.
8. Baker, Jesse Owens
, p. 113.
9. Crown Prince Wilhelm (1882–1951) was the eldest of Kaiser Wilhelm II’s five sons. He fought in the First World War but afterwards went into exile in Holland. Promising to stay out of politics, he returned to Germany in 1923 and lived the rest of his life as a private citizen.
www.firstworldwar.com/bio/princewilhelm.ht (visited 20 August 2005).
10. www.sport.nl/boek.php3?artid=2691 (visited 20 August 2005).
11. Baker, Jesse Owens, p. 116.
12. Anthony Read and David Fisher, Berlin: The Biography of a City (London, Hutchinson, 1994), p. 213.
13. Quoted in Giles MacDonogh, Berlin (London, Sinclair-Stevenson, 1997), p. 159.
14. Lewis H. Carlson and John J. Fogarty, Tales of Gold (Chicago, IL, Contemporary Books, 1987), p. 142.
15. New York Times, 16 August 1936.
16. Velma Dunn; interview with author.
17. www.webenetics.com/hungary/olympic_1936.htm (visited 18 April 2005).
18. www.athens2004.com/en/ParticipantBiography?noc=EGY&rsc=ARM070000 (visited 21 August 2005).
19. M.N. Masood, The World’s Hockey Champions (Dehli, Model Press, 1937).
20. sify.com/sports/hockey/fullstory.php?id=13392134 (visited 21 August 2005).
21. Ibid.
22. William Shirer, Berlin Diary (London, Hamish Hamilton, 1941), p. 59.
23. Daniels and Tedder, ‘A Proper Spectacle’, p. 126.
Chapter 10
VILLAGE PEOPLE
The way I see it now as an old man, you only become a true Olympic champion when you add your credibility to the role of an idol, which you may acquire through winning Olympic medals. Berlin gave me the role of the idol; I have done my best to fill this role with my personal credibility. And thus there exists between Berlin and me an inseparable bond of reflection and feeling.