Hitler's Olympics

by Christopher Hilton

  Eleanor Holm did not, as one might imagine, fade into obscurity. Once her swimming career ended she made a film in 1938 with another Olympic athlete, Glenn Morris. He played Tarzan to her Jane in Tarzan’s Revenge. She stayed briefly in films, divorced Art Jarrett and married an impresario. She married a third time and died in Miami, at ninety, in 2004.41

  Tilly Fleischer, who was given a car by her home town of Frankfurt, in honour of her Olympic achievements, ran several leather businesses after the war. In the autumn of 1988 her oak tree for winning in 1936 finally died. She planted another one immediately at the Frankfurt Stadium. Fleischer died in the summer of 2005.

  Fritz Schilgen, who had padded into the stadium and lit the flame, died near Frankfurt in September 2005, aged ninety-nine.

  Doris Runzheimer who, under her maiden name of Eckert, finished sixth in the 80 metres hurdles, died at the end of October 2005.

  The University of Southern California received two oak trees, one from Ken Carpenter and the other from the 4 x 100 relay team. They provided two of its members and, anyway, Owens already had three trees of his own. Carpenter’s still stands (in 2005), but the relay tree came down – the victim of root rot – in the summer of 2002. A mature oak has been rededicated.

  I’m indebted to the research of Jerry Papazian, Past President, USC Alumni Association, which appears on the FrankWykoff2.com website, for the known locations of other trees (2005): Owens’s at his high school in Cleveland, Ohio and at Ohio State University (the fate of the third, at his mother’s home, also in Cleveland, is not known); Cornelius Johnson’s ‘in the backyard of a home on Hobart Street in Korea town’; Forest Towns’s on the University of Georgia Campus.42

  On his return, John Woodruff’s sapling was cleared in Washington, DC for unwanted bugs and planted at his home town of Connellsville, Pennsylvania, in the grounds of the Carnegie Library. Later, Connellsville had a new stadium and the tree went there. A plaque told people about it.

  Velma Dunn Ploessel’s single chance, like so many others, came and went in Berlin. Of course Tokyo never happened, nor were any Games held in 1944 and ‘very few people could make that long transition from 1936 to the next Games in 1948. I got married in 1943. I have a boy and a girl, both teachers, and I have three grandsons from my son. They are all college graduates. My son was a swimmer at college and my grandsons are all swimmers or water polo players and I think some kind of sport is the thing to do. Have I still got the silver medal? I sure have!

  ‘I’m eighty-seven, I just took my drivers’ test again [October 2005] and I’ve got a licence for five more years but I really don’t expect to drive that much longer.’43

  Louis Zamperini led an astonishing life, or rather lives, but reflected ruefully that he had shaken hands with ‘the worst tyrant the world has ever known’. He remembered Hitler as ‘like a dangerous comedian’. He served as a bomber pilot in the Pacific during the Second World War, spent forty-seven days on a life-raft in shark-infested waters and was taken prisoner by the Japanese. Believed dead, his parents collected his life insurance and when he turned up the US government would not take it back. He found religion and went back to Japan preaching forgiveness. There’s even talk of a Hollywood film.44

  When the war started, Werner Schwieger was not conscripted but continued his job in a foundry until 1940 when he joined the Luftwaffe as an instructor. He returned to the foundry and worked there until he was called up by the army in September 1944. In January 1945 he was fighting the Americans in Alsace but the retreat took him to Bavaria where in May he was taken prisoner. Transferred to the French military he became a prisoner working on French farms. On his release in November 1947 he returned to Berlin and started studying at the teachers’ training college. He eventually became a vocational teacher.

  He still reminisces a lot and he still (2005) has the medal which every participant got. ‘There is a bell on it. There used to be a swastika beneath the bell but I scratched it out.’ Asked whether the 1936 Olympics were exciting, he answers emphatically: ‘Oh, yes.’

  John Woodruff of the tumultuous 800 metres graduated in sociology and fought as a second lieutenant from 1941. Later he saw action in Korea then worked at the New York City Children’s Aid Society, became a teacher, worked with the New York police athletics league, and served as a parole officer. A 5-kilometre Run and Walk is held each year in Connellsville in his memory.45 At time of writing he is resident in a senior living community in Arizona and, although slightly deaf, his memory is sharp. He can relive the 800 metres, the ebb and flow of it, how he found himself trapped.

  ‘I still think about it, oh yes. It was the type of race I did not intend to run. If I’d have tried to break out of the “box”, with my stride I would have fouled somebody and I would have been disqualified. So the only thing that I could do in order to try and win the race was to stop without incident, go into the third lane and let the other athletes precede me. And then I ran around all of them, and that’s why I came in at 1 minute 52.9: it was a very slow race. 800 metres? Going round the outside I must have covered nearly a kilometre ….’

  In 2005 he was ninety. ‘I was ninety on July 5. I still keep interested in things.’ He sounds a man without any form of bitterness and when I ask him about the discrimination of the time he says: ‘Well, I can envision why something like that happened, because there was a lot of discrimination everywhere.’

  And now the seventh decade since those August days has come.

  Fritz Wandt, the autograph hunter who became a farmer, was called up into the army in 1942. He fought in France and Italy, where he received wounds severe enough to keep him in hospital for a year. He was sent to the front and wounded again so that as Hitler’s war moved through its final convulsions, and the Soviets advanced, he found himself in a castle-cum-hospital at Rostock. The Soviets moved through on 1 May but left him and the staff unmolested. One of the doctors said that anyone who thought they were fit enough could go. So he went. His parents still had the farm near the Village.

  The farm became part of a collective in East Germany. Wandt was happy and liked the people and later he experienced all the mixed emotions of his fellow East Germans when the Wall came down.

  The interview was carried out by my intrepid Berlin helper, Birgit Kubisch, on a November evening. When she reached Dyrotz, where Wandt lives, he stood in the street wearing a brown hat but no jacket, waiting. Inside the farmhouse there was steaming coffee and stollen, the traditional German Christmas cake, already laid out on the kitchen table. They sat and he started talking in a warm Berlin accent.

  After I visited the Village in 1936 on the guided tour I never went again afterwards. It was a military training centre, with guards in front. Why should we have gone there? In 1998, however, the Historia Elstal Association was founded. [Döberitz the name of the original barracks; Elstal the name of the place where the Village was situated; Dyrotz a nearby hamlet]. Since I have always been interested in history in general and local history and geography in particular, and since the Olympic Village was part of this, I registered as a member of the Association. The Association employed a historian – at that time, after 1990, you would still get public funds for such things – and she dealt very thoroughly with all the stories of this community. I have met a lot of very interesting people – television, student journalists – and it’s fun when people thank you and say they liked it. Normally they come to the Olympic Village for guided tours. Sometimes television or radio stations make appointments to visit us and take recordings for their programmes. We normally meet at the Olympic Village, because they want to see it, of course, and then we do the interviews there. The last guided tour this year was at the end of November.

  He still has his autograph book and its sixty signatures. ‘Here is a Finn … he was often world champion … Volmaro Iso-Hollo. Here is Robert Clark … second in the decathlon … and this looks like Willy Johnson … must be an American as well. H. Uhland? Well those names, you know, it’s difficult
to read them. And this is the name of someone I’m told is still alive … an Egyptian. I can even remember that one. There were several of us German boys standing there and one of them tried to teach this Egyptian the German letters. There were five shops in the reception building – a photographer’s shop, a stationer’s, a sportsgoods shop, I think a fruit and vegetable shop and one selling sweets. This Egyptian took the boy who had taught him the letters to the photographer’s shop and bought him some present. Some wrote the sports they were in, like boxing. An American wrote “1,500-metre-runner”… here is an Indian … the captain of their hockey team … Dhyan Chand.’46

  On another winter morning, moving towards the seventh decade, the mist of dawn lingers, shrouding each shape in a gentle, timeless embrace so that somehow they are all still there; yet, of course, they cannot still be there.

  The athletes’ achievements live on, but that most malign of shadows is just that….

  Imagine a huge area of flat parkland decorated by carefully planted trees. Imagine, at strategic points across this parkland, the structures of heavy stone which still harmonise with the distant city of heavy stone.

  The stadium, now with a roof for the 2006 World Football Cup, remains genuinely breathtaking in its symmetry and scale, the walls – like freshly cleaned granite – curving in an endless cliff face. The trekkers on 1 August 1936 had exactly the same reaction when they were confronted with it and the knowledge that Hitler really was coming.

  Temporary fencing guards it as teams of construction workers in hard hats continue the renovations and alterations: there’s an air of quiet, controlled activity, more work in progress than building site.

  The bell tower is so tall it looms above the mist but weeds grow in the tiers of stone seats beside it. The Platz where the motorcade drew up retains its original configuration but the gates through which Hitler entered have long since gone.

  The bell, cracked and with a shell hole in it, has been taken to the House of German Sport half a mile the other side of the stadium where it stands beside some steps. The House is three-sided with a grassy area in the middle – and, inevitably, heroic statues on plinths – with the Cupola Hall at one end. Renovation is going on here, too, making it hard to recapture the living dramas of the fencing.

  The Friesenhaus, where the women stayed, is joined to it and is also made of heavy stone. Here Hertha BSC, the football club that uses the Olympic stadium for its home matches, has offices. The entrance and reception are decked out with pennants and pictures of the players. What were once ground-floor bedrooms are now offices with their mandatory computer screens.

  The entrance to the hockey stadium, off the Olympia Platz, is padlocked. The Platz, broad and level and leading to the stadium, still has the columns of tall, white poles which bore the flags of so many nations. This November day the Platz’s central reservation is being used as a training ground for motor-cyclists and their instructors. It’s big enough to accommodate them easily.

  These shapes and spaces in the mist retain a studious grandeur; they have classical proportions and they still fulfil their original, cumulative purpose: to take your breath away. The stadium continues to have this impact regardless of the fact that the world has grown accustomed to immense stadiums so that now this is only one among many. It’s difficult to say quite why the impact remains: perhaps it has to do with the perfect proportions; perhaps the imposing stonework; perhaps the knowledge that in August 1936 the world of sport had seen nothing to equal it; perhaps because here a poor black American sharecropper’s son brought the potential of the human body to an astonishing, immortal climax. Or perhaps because with hindsight we know what cataclysmic events came afterwards. Or maybe because Hitler built it and strode into it at a time when he truly stood at the centre of the world.

  Well, all of those things.

  Just off the Olympic Platz a narrow path, trees and bushes to one side, stretches away to the railway station. Camouflaged by the growth of the bushes it’s easy to miss the old, white sign HERREN and round a corner the old, blue sign DAMEN: two of the public toilets just as they were – closed these many decades and now daubed with graffiti, bringing them into the modern era. Curious.

  Here on the narrow path you feel close to 1936 in a way you cannot anywhere else. Here is the human dimension.

  This winter’s day you can follow the route from the stadium out to the Olympic Village, the same route the buses took as they transported the competitors to and fro on the old Hamburg road. Once you are clear of Charlottenburg you go to Staaken and after Staaken there’s a necklace of snug, solid hamlets strung along the highway. Because they fell into the Soviet Zone time passed them by: main streets of cobblestones and sharp cambers, modest houses, hardly a shop anywhere, men on old bicycles, tractors leaving their tyre prints in drying mud. If any competitors in 1936 gazed from the buses this is what they must have seen, and sentimental Westerners, returning when the Wall came down, said Yes, this is the Germany I remember from my childhood.

  Once upon a time the ‘original landscape … with its elevations, pine, oak and birch trees, the picturesque valley of an old watercourse and the meadow-like open fields … provided the most favourable conditions imaginable for its planning, and the wooded hills surrounding the small valley offered natural confines.’47 The Soviet Army built ranks of prefabricated four-storey apartments in the open fields between the cottages and lived in them until, in 1991–2, the soldiers were withdrawn to Volgograd as Germany reunited. They took everything they could (well, it did belong to them), leaving only the empty shells of the apartment blocks to the ravages of time.

  When you pull off the highway you’re in woodland and, suddenly, an estate of orange-painted apartment blocks comes into view – they were the barracks temporarily vacated to accommodate the sportsmen who couldn’t be housed in the Village. Behind them there’s a perimeter fence and more woodland. Through it you can see grey shapes among the trees, the apartments and cottages of the Village.

  Everything is where it was and nothing is the same as it was. This is ghostland, nature reclaiming what was taken from it – weeds grow between the joints of the concrete blocks which made, and make, the roadways, undergrowth creeps towards the cottages in one final advance. All the windows are boarded up as if they are blind now. The pathways, once so neat, still wend their way through the trees, linking cottage to cottage, but they’re bruised and broken.

  Nothing stirs, nothing moves.

  Something is moving in the background, however, as well as the good work of the Historia Elstal Association. The Deutsche Kreditbank AG has set up a foundation which now owns the Village – it must have been interesting to ascertain who owned it before, since it passed from Nazi Germany to Soviet then East German control (where private property was abolished), never mind the Soviet Army who requisitioned it.

  Barbara Eisenhuth of the Bank explains, ‘We are going to install a museum of Olympic history and sport. We want to show this area to as many people as possible and we are organising some events in 2006. We hope many tourists will come to the Village.’ But even if extensive renovation is carried out every tourist will need imagination.

  The 3,000 young men from fifty-one countries who walked these very paths under these very trees, now grown so tall, and gazed through these same windows, who played in those clearings and trained on that very track, made this secluded, pastoral and wooded meeting point somewhere, in the history of human sporting endeavour, precious.

  In the Village any of the 3,000 could approach anyone else and spend as long as they liked with them. ‘We did not talk on these occasions. We used the most primitive method of signs and gestures. These were quite sufficient for us to carry on our simple, healthy conversations.’48

  Now, empty and silent, it is a private place; anyone who goes there is alone with his thoughts, with images and echoes from the seven decades past.

  It ought to be timeless, but not for any of those reasons.

  Here, whe
n it could not have been more public, the youth of the world prepared to board the shuttle buses – pug-nosed Wehrmacht buses, commandeered for the purpose. Those buses pulled up just over there and went via the necklace of hamlets, on past Staaken and then all those long since departed competitors confronted, in peaceful combat, their destinies: the few – like Jesse Owens – to be touched by greatness, the majority to return on those same buses as anonymous as when they had left those few hours before; and would be anonymous forever, their unique moment gone, the great darkness of war drawing ever closer.

  This place knew Hitler on one of those June days before August – in uniform of course, striding along inspecting, his entourage in tow, also in uniform, of course. Here, on another of those June days, Goebbels would come, looking shifty in raincoat and homburg hat and wondering, no doubt, how best the Village might be exploited. It knew the tide of refugees Hitler’s war brought to it and the eventual brutal division of Germany into two independent countries created by arbitrary boundaries which – fantastically (and only officially) – hated each other, this side of Staaken and that side. It knew occupation by Hitler’s ‘sub-humans’ from the east. It saw the breathless embrace of reunification when the Wall fell and then the retreat to Volgograd as the 1990s dawned and the last of the Soviet military vehicles lumbered away. It knew, finally, precious privacy.

  Today the Village stands as a memory of all those things, but it also stands for something to set against all those things, too: that people from every corner of the world and every background – race, creed, colour, religion – really could, and really can, meet and compete at the most intense level, and nobody dies.