Hitler's Olympics

by Christopher Hilton

  Esther Myers, by then Esther Wenzel, visited Germany in 1972 and went to the Olympic stadium but divided Berlin made a profound impression on her. ‘The glittering city on the West was beautiful when we were there – beautiful [but in the East] not a smile did you see on anyone’s face, not a smile. Oh, it was the most depressing place I’ve ever seen in my life.’29

  On Baillet-Latour’s death during the war his vice president, Sigfried Edström, replaced him and in 1945 Avery Brundage beame his vice president, succeeding him in 1952. It was he who took the decision that the 1972 Munich Games must continue after terrorists attacked the Israeli team. He died in Garmisch in 1975.

  Ralph Metcalfe’s career ended after the 1936 Olympics and he went into politics, serving on the Chicago City Council from 1949 to 1971 and as a US Congressman from 1971 until he died in 1978. The Ralph H. Metcalfe Federal Building in Chicago is named after him.

  Jesse Owens returned to Berlin in 1978 and said: ‘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.’

  Dhyan Chand became and remains a player of mystical skills. Some talk of his stick being broken one time in Holland to see if he had an adhesive device in it, some talk of the Japanese deciding he did – glue. When he finished playing he coached for a time, fished, hunted, cooked. He had little money: you didn’t get rich playing hockey. When the liver cancer which eventually claimed him took hold, he was taken to a Delhi hospital and put in a general ward. Nobody recognised him. Reportedly, it took a newspaper article to get him into a special room. He died in 1979.

  A lifelong heavy smoker, Owens died in 1980 of lung cancer. Glickman went to the funeral in Chicago and, arriving late, found the cathedral full. Members of the 1936 team were there and they signalled him to come up front and join them. Glickman was the only white member and found himself disappointed about that, but somehow gratified that the white person was a Jew.

  Because Owens is so central to the whole story of Berlin 1936 I asked his biographer, William J. Baker, to explore the mythology.

  ‘One time in the 1950s Owens’ daughter Marlene was named Homecoming Queen of Ohio State University and he of course was there to present to her the crown before 80,000 people. According to a local newspaper Jesse said to Marlene as they were walking out to take the crown “Remember, dear, this could only happen in America.” If I were doing my book again I think I would probably have entitled it “Only In America.” It is only in America that a kid could be exploited the way he was, and achieve what he did, that whole mix of good and bad.’

  I asked whether Baker believed there had been a deliberate attempt to construct a mythology by Owens and others.

  I don’t think people ever start out intentionally creating mythologies as a rule, except in the most Machiavellian situations. Mythology by definition is a kind of take on the world that makes sense to people and it gives meaning to people. The Jesse Owens mythology came out of some hard facts, good hard facts, honest hard facts. He won four gold medals, he really did come from a very, very poor sharecroppers’ background in Alabama, Hitler did not shake his hand – that’s where mythology happens. You assign virtue or vice to facts and to circumstance, and coincidence becomes pattern in mythology.

  With Jesse Owens the mythology is that he is this poor black boy come from the South and, by the flexibility of American life, this black boy moves north and goes to college and makes a success, goes to Berlin and wins these medals, and America honours him for that. As in all mythologies it changes in mid-stream: by the 1970s it was the ‘in’ thing to talk about black abuse at the hands of white society so Jesse was talking about ‘Hitler didn’t shake my hand but then FDR didn’t either when I came back’ – that sort of thing, to emphasise the exploitation, the abuse. Before that people had heard of him, forgotten him. Between 1937 and 1950 there was scarcely mention of Jesse Owens in the American mainstream press. Only in the black press can you find out anything about him. Then suddenly it became chic to have this background and it fits in with the American myth of log cabin to the White House, or in this case shanty in Alabama to Berlin.

  Part of the myth was to make his image pure as a kid and that’s what this Paul Neimark book was about.30 They are cleansing history. It’s hagiography. You remove the clay feet from the hero and you give him golden heels. And of course Jesse can’t bear up under that scrutiny. He had lots of flaws.

  He went back and back to Berlin and was feted more and honoured more. The Germans adored him. Always it was this myth that ‘Hitler rejected him but we loved him even in 1936 and now we love him the more and honour him the more – because he is Mr Freedom and he is Mr Right for us, and that’s a reflection on us: that’s who we are. We’re not Hitlerian Germans, we’re not Nazis, we are good Germans.’

  It’s all mythology.

  I did an essay called ‘Jesse Owens and the Germans, a political love story’. There was this passionate love affair between the German people and Owens, initially for athletic reasons and then for political reasons.

  In December 1980 Stella Walsh, an innocent bystander at the robbery in Cleveland, Ohio, was fatally shot. The woman who had accused Helen Stephens of being a man was now revealed at the autopsy to have both male and female sex organs. The deputy coroner was baffled. She was divorced. Her former husband said they’d only had sex a couple of times and ‘she wouldn’t let me have the lights on’. She was sixty-nine and although she’d lived in the United States since the age of two, she always ran for Poland.

  Larry Snyder remained head track coach at Ohio State University until 1965 and during his career the people he coached broke fourteen world records. He was head coach to the 1960 United States Olympic team in Rome. He died in 1982.31

  In March 1984 West Berlin’s Mayor, Eberhard Diepgen, said that in those August days Jesse Owens ‘jumped his way right into the hearts of the Berliners.’ With IOC President Juan Antonio Samaranch watching, Diepgen dedicated a street near the stadium to his memory:

  JESSE-OWENS-ALLEE

  His widow said she was ‘deeply moved by the dignity of the commemorative act and by the gratitude that the democratic Berlin feels towards Jesse, because, looking back on the events of 1936 from today’s perspective, the towering figure of Jesse and the admiration for him do eclipse Hitler’.

  Marty Glickman served in the Pacific where he saw a story in a newspaper about the death of a Japanese lieutenant, Suzuki, which made him wonder. Glickman thought he had raced him in Paris one time after the Olympics.

  In 1985 Glickman returned to Berlin. He went, of course, to the stadium. He walked into it as he had done in another life, for him and Berlin. He felt anger rising and the sense of injustice, still raw, openly shocked him.

  Thereby hangs an explanation for what may have happened in Berlin. At the 2005 World Athletics Championships in Helsinki the great American runner Michael Johnson, commentating for BBC television, said that a member of the American team had been saying the right things about his team-mates ‘but I never looked at any of those athletes that I competed against as my team-mates, because those are the guys I had to beat out for medals. It was extremely competitive. US athletes don’t really look at it as a team. Those are the guys I’ve got to beat. That’s one of the things you grow up with as an athlete. You come up through the ranks in an environment that is extremely competitive and we are all fighting for the same things within our country. We’re fighting for sponsorship, for the best scholarships out of high school even, we’re fighting for a spot on the US team eventually. So by the time you get here you know how to fight.’

  Surely the same ethos governed the team of 1936. Publicly, of course, in those days the world was a much politer, more reticent, more diplomatic
place. People habitually spoke in platitudes. Behind the platitudes, Johnson’s theory of extreme competitiveness must have existed in more or less the same form in 1936, especially when – as now – America produced whole clutches of world-beating sprinters. That may be the final solution to the Jewish relay mystery: in a ruthlessly competitive environment you always pick the best you have, and Owens was the best they had. The rest – racism, anti-Semitism, what might have offended Hitler and what might not – didn’t figure.

  Put it another way. If you’d had the chance to select Jesse Owens for your relay team what would you have done?

  In 1986 during celebrations to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the Games Rie Mastenbroek, Sohn of the marathon and John Woodruff were invited to Berlin. Willy Daume, President of the German Olympic Committee spoke: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, as you know Jesse Owens was the Emperor of the Berlin Olympics in 1936 but there was also a young girl and she became the Empress of Berlin …’.

  The Berlin Wall fell on 9 November 1989 and Germany, reunited at last after Hitler’s war, competed as one team at Barcelona in 1992. Franco was long gone and the Spanish Civil War receding into memory. The Soviet Union no longer existed.

  Germany got 33 gold medals.

  M.N. Masood, a member of the 1936 Indian hockey team, went on to become the first Asian appointed as a UNESCO Mission Chief (Indonesia, 1952–7), and India’s ambassador to Saudi Arabia (1961–4). He died in 1991.

  Glickman had become a well-known broadcaster on the New York Knicks and football Giants. He’d kept in touch with Sam Stoller. They had dinner together in New York in 1947 but they hadn’t talked about the Olympics because, as Glickman reflected, what more was there to say between them? Then they lost touch but in 1983 a New York Times reporter rang Glickman to say he had tracked down an address in Fort Lauderdale for Stoller – Glickman heard he had died some time before but went there nevertheless, hoping he was wrong. A woman, presumably Stoller’s widow, spoke on the intercom from an apartment and told Glickman she was not prepared to discuss Stoller or the Olympics.32 Glickman died in December 1992.

  Archie Williams got his degree in mechanical engineering and although his running career ended with a leg injury he became a commercial pilot, flying for the US Air Force during the Second World War. He also held degrees in aeronautical engineering. He taught mathematics and computing at high school level in California. He died in 1993.

  Helen Stephens went through her career, which ended soon after the Games, unbeaten. She played baseball and softball at a professional level and, between 1938 and 1952, ran her own basketball team. She died in St Louis in 1994.

  Dave Albritton was ‘one of the first high-jumpers to use the straddle technique’. Like Owens he was born in Danville, Alabama and went to the same technical school. He held the world record with Cornelius Johnson. He won national outdoor competitions from 1936 to 1950 and then entered politics, serving in the Ohio House of Representatives. He died in 1994.33

  Don Lash, the distance runner, won twelve national titles by 1940 including seven consecutive cross-countries. The war swept away any chance of an Olympic medal. He joined the Indiana State Police and became an FBI agent, later an estate agent. He died in 1994.34

  Gisela Mauermayer’s career ended in 1942. She taught sport in Munich until the end of the war but because, at eighteen, she had joined the NSDAP (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, the Nazi Party) she couldn’t continue teaching. She studied biology and from 1954 to 1975 was chief librarian at the Munich zoological collection.

  Because she had been friendly before the Games, Gretel Bergmann decided to get in touch with her. ‘There was an article in the paper about her. I got her address and I wrote her. I said, “Did you know that I was Jewish because you were always so nice to me?” she said, “Of course we knew you were Jewish but it didn’t make any difference to us because you were an athlete like we were athletes.”’ Mauermayer died in 1995.35

  Gretel Bergmann’s husband Bruno fought with the US Army in the war. They had sons in 1947 and 1951. In 1980 she was inducted into the Jewish Hall of Fame. The German Athletic Association saluted her, too. She was caught in a great moral dilemma and resolved it in this way: ‘It would be unfair to transfer that hatred to those who had absolutely nothing to do with the events of the Hitler time.’ She would say this often.36 ‘I don’t think you can hold the next generation responsible. I got a lot of lip from the American Jewish people. I made a speech and I said that. I keep telling them. I must say that the town of Laupheim has conducted itself beautifully.’

  In 1996 the German Olympic Committee invited Bergmann to be a guest of honour at the Atlanta Games.

  The envelope from Frankfurt was franked Der Präsident, Nationales Olympisches Komitee für Deutschland and delivered to a ‘two-storey brick house’ in Queens, New York. The letter, in English, read: ‘It is my honor and pleasure to inform you that the National Olympic Committee for Germany has decided to invite you to be our guest of honor during the Olympic Centennial Games in Atlanta. This is on the grounds of our relations over the last year, and the discussion we had in New York. As you were not in a position to accept our invitation to Germany for reasons we understand and honor, we feel that this invitation might be an equivalence.’37

  Again she ‘decided that I could not blame this generation for what their fathers and grandfathers did. I mean, if my father killed somebody, I should not be held responsible.’

  When she arrived at Atlanta airport – a tall, white-haired woman in a blue blouse and slacks – two girls approached and asked for her autograph. She could hardly believe they knew who she was. They did. She asked them if they’d heard of Hitler and when they said yes she said If one ever surfaces in America kick him in the pants.

  ‘We feel that Mrs Lambert was not treated adequately at the time of the Berlin Olympics,’ Walter Troger, President of the German Olympic Committee, explained. ‘She was an Olympic candidate who did not get a fair chance. We wanted to do something for her. We felt she deserved it.’

  Over the years she received several invitations to visit Germany, but wouldn’t go. In 1937 she had promised herself she would never return and it became a matter of principle. This led a German television company to wonder if accepting the German invitation to Atlanta and refusing to go back did not represent a contradiction. She explained again how she had resolved the dilemma. ‘The German Olympic Committee was making an attempt at making amends, and I thought I can’t hold the sins of the fathers and grandfathers against the new generation. After all, many of them hate what Hitler and the Nazis did, too. So as long as the Olympics are in my country now, I’ll meet them halfway. If that’s considered a contradiction by anyone, well then, I can’t help it and I make no apologies.’

  In 1999 Bergmann faced a further dilemma when she was invited back to Germany to receive a shower of honours, including a sports centre named after her. Now she reasoned that the present and future generations would be curious to know who she was, and the only way to let them find out would be for her to tell them what had happened in those distant August days and why. It was so long since she had spoken German that she needed an interpreter.38

  ‘I felt it was important to remember, and so I agreed to return to the place I swore I’d never go again. But I had stopped speaking German and didn’t even try when I was there. It seemed that there was a new and completely different atmosphere in Germany. I’m sure there’s still anti-Semitism in Germany, but there’s anti-Semitism in America, too.’

  She had some specific memories of that trip. ‘We were in one of the best hotels in Frankfurt. My son was with me and we went in the elevator and there were two swastikas scratched into the elevator. I went to complain and nobody gave me any satisfaction. I wrote to them and still nobody gave me any satisfaction. Then I wrote to Walter Tröger, the head of the German Olympic Committee, who got to be very friendly. I told him about it and he did something. I got a letter of apology from the hotel. I
was so upset: some kids did it and they’d let it go. When they wrote to me they said they’d tried to get the swastikas out but they couldn’t so finally they put a plaque over them.

  ‘I was so comfortable in Laupheim because all those people who made life so miserable for us are all down under the ground.’39

  And a final glimpse of the sanity which eventually emerged from the madness. Gretel Bergmann was sent a colour photograph from Laupheim. It was of the entrance to the town’s track; over the entrance the sign read:

  GRETEL-BERGMANN-STADION

  In 1933, she recalled, ‘I was nineteen, the Nazis came and I was forbidden to enter that track even to watch.40 The height I jumped just before the Games was the same height as the gold medal at the Games ….’

  Marathon winner Sohn went to the 1947 Boston Marathon as a coach and remained active within athletics, helping Seoul with the bid for the 1988 Olympics and acting as chairman of the Olympics Organising Committee. He died in November 2002.

  In 1936 Judith Deutsch was the leading Austrian swimmer but as a Jew she decided not to go to Berlin and ‘a land which so shamefully persecutes my people’. She emigrated to what was then Palestine. Her records were erased and the Austrians banned her from competing for life. In 1995 she was finally invited to Vienna for a ceremony reinstating them but wouldn’t go because, she said, she’d had to wait far too long. Undeterred, the Austrians flew to Israel and held the ceremony there. In 2003 a reunion was organised in Vienna. Judith’s sister went with some contemporary swimmers but reportedly Judith was by now too frail for such a journey.

  In old age Rie Mastenbroek lived in a small Dutch town where she kept a wheelchair handy, the legacy of a car accident in 1968. She died in November 2003.

  Leni Riefenstahl never joined the Nazi Party and subsequently claimed naivety about their motives. She’d been an actress and could have skiied in the German cross-country team at Garmisch in 1936 but chose to make the film instead. After the war she became a photographer. She died in 2003, aged 101.