The entire route is lined with gigantic swastikas and Olympic flags and is guarded by 40,000 SA men. Behind the paramilitaries are hundreds of thousands of curious onlookers hoping to get a glimpse of the event planned on the itinerary for 3:18 p.m.: “Führer departs for the Olympic Stadium.”
Somewhere in the crowd is a 35-year-old American named Thomas Clayton Wolfe. Tom, as friends call him, is from Asheville, North Carolina, and has only just arrived in Berlin. At 6′ 6″ tall and weighing 265 pounds, he is hard to overlook. He might be taken for a shot-putter. But Wolfe is a writer, and a fairly famous one at that, whose first novel, Look Homeward, Angel, appeared in German translation in 1932. The book was a major success for his publisher Ernst Rowohlt. The critics were enthusiastic about the young author from the New World, and within the space of a few years the book sold 10,000 copies.
Wolfe first traveled to Germany in late 1926, spending two weeks in Stuttgart and Munich. Since then, he’s returned nearly every year. In 1935 he visited Berlin for the first time, confiding to his notebooks: “I had an experience that cannot happen to me often now. It was my experience again to enter for the first time one of the great capital cities of the world. This time the city was—Berlin.” The following weeks in the capital of the Third Reich were ones of total intoxication: “A wild, fantastic, incredible whirl of parties, teas, dinners, all-night drinking bouts, newspaper interviews, radio proposals, photographers, etc….” With Wolfe and Berlin it was love at first sight. The writer initially seemed to care little that Berlin was the epicenter of a brutal dictatorship that persecuted, imprisoned and murdered its political enemies. Although his views would later change, the American author praised the Germans as the “cleanest, kindest, warmest-hearted, and most honorable people I’ve met in Europe.”
Wolfe left Berlin in mid-June 1935, determined to return as soon as possible. Now he’s back. Rowohlt has just published the German translation of his novel Of Time and the River, and publicity needs to be done. The fact that the Olympic Games are taking place in Berlin was another good reason for the American author and sports fan to make the boat trip across the Atlantic.
As he did the year before, Tom takes a room in the Hotel am Zoo. It’s not considered one of Berlin’s best addresses, but it does have its advantages. Wolfe prefers its easygoing comfort to the fussiness of the Adlon, the Bristol or the Eden. He especially likes the fact that Hotel am Zoo is on Kurfürstendamm. What is there to do at the Brandenburg Gate? Kurfürstendamm is where the real Berlin is. Tom always feels that it’s a magical moment when he leaves his hotel, looks left and sees the golden tower clock of the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church. Every time he’s seized by Berlin’s special magic, and he realizes that he’s fallen under the city’s spell. Kurfürstendamm is crammed with cafés, restaurants and bars, and for Tom, the boulevard is one great coffeehouse: “The crowds sauntered underneath the trees on the Kurfürstendamm, the terraces of the cafés were jammed with people, and always, through the golden sparkle of the days, there was a sound of music in the air.” Wolfe wouldn’t want to be anywhere else in Berlin.
Right now, though, he’s standing like many others along the Via Triumphalis, waiting. “The Leader came by slowly in a shining car,” Wolfe will remember, “a little dark man with a comic-opera mustache, erect and standing, moveless and unsmiling, with his hand upraised, palm outward, not in Nazi-wise salute, but straight up, in a gesture of blessing such as the Buddha or Messiahs use.”
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At precisely 1 p.m. the gates of the Olympic Stadium open. The roughly 100,000 spectators from all over the world have been instructed to get to their seats by 3:30. An 804-foot-long Zeppelin, the Hindenburg, one of the biggest airships ever built, is circling above the stadium. Down below, inside the arena, the Olympic Symphony Orchestra is entertaining people with a concert. Along with Franz Lizst’s magnificent Les Préludes, the program features the prelude to Wagner’s Meistersinger—there’s no avoiding Hitler’s favorite composer in the Third Reich. The great clock on the tower of the stadium’s Marathon Gate reads 3:53. Trumpets and trombones positioned high up in the arena suddenly break out into a fanfare. Seven minutes later, at exactly 4 p.m., Adolf Hitler enters the stadium and descends the Marathon Gate’s massive steps. He is accompanied by members of the International and German National Olympic Committees. The fanfares die down, and the orchestra strikes up Wagner’s “Homage March.” The event’s organizers grit their teeth and put up with this piece of music, one of Wagner’s most vapid, written in honor of the Bavarian king Ludwig II. The title of the piece is more important than the music. The point is to show reverence for Hitler, who is striding through the arena to his box seat like a Roman emperor. The Führer has to pause briefly when Carl Diem’s five-year-old daughter steps in front of him, proffering a bouquet of flowers. “Heil, my Führer,” the girl is reported to have said. Both her father and Hitler himself act pleasantly surprised, as if they were caught off guard by this hardly spontaneous little interruption.
Once Hitler has reached his box seat, the orchestra begins to play the “double anthem” introduced by the Nazis, consisting of the first verses of both the German national anthem and the “Horst Wessel Song,” the hymn to a street brawler who was considered one of the Nazi movement’s first martyrs. The flags of the nations competing at the Olympics are raised, and the Olympic bell rings out from across the Maifeld, the large sports field next to the stadium. With that, the Olympic nations march into the stadium, led by Greece and concluding with Germany. The British athletes are given a rather cool reception—“very embarrassing,” Goebbels will note in his diary—but the French, who extend their right arms in salute, are greeted with veritable ovations. French representatives will later claim that their athletes were performing the Olympic salute, and not the Nazi greeting, but the two are scarcely distinguishable. The people in the stadium, at any rate, think the French are executing a Hitlergruss.
Henri de Baillet-Latour has taken his seat to Hitler’s right. On the Führer’s left is an older gentleman whom Goebbels would probably consider a typical flea-circus director: Theodor Lewald, president of the German Olympic Organizing Committee. Together with the secretary general Diem, the 75-year-old lawyer and sports official is the driving force behind the eleventh Olympic Games. Without Lewald and Diem, there would be no event in Berlin. His Excellency, as Lewald is respectfully referred to, is allowing himself to be used by the Nazis. Lewald is what the anti-Semites call a “half Jew.” In these Olympic Games, he serves as a token, a symbolic figure intended to demonstrate to the global public that the regime is not meddling with the sporting competition. In truth, Lewald’s days are numbered. But before he resigns his post, as he has already agreed to do under duress, His Excellency will be allowed to fulfill his duties.
Shortly after 5 p.m. Lewald steps up to the microphone to begin a speech that lasts fifteen minutes. He has chosen his opening words with great care. He could have started with “My dear Reich Chancellor,” which would have been in line with protocol. He could have welcomed Henri de Baillet-Latour and the other major Olympic officials and greeted the ambassadors in attendance. Such an opening would have conformed to diplomatic niceties. But Lewald has decided to go for a briefer salutation. “My Führer” is all he says.
Hitler speaks next. Baillet-Latour has instructed him carefully on how to inaugurate the event. According to Olympic protocol, the head of state of the host nation is to say: “I declare open the Games in Berlin to celebrate the eleventh Olympiad of the modern era.” The Führer is said to have replied: “Count, I will try to learn this sentence by heart.” But Hitler’s Austrian grammar gets in the way. What he says is “I declare the Games in Berlin to celebrate the eleventh Olympiad of the modern era as being opened.” These are the only words he will publicly utter during the event.
The Olympic flag is raised, artillery guns fire a salute and some 20,000 white doves are released into the heavens above Berlin. Richard Strau
ss is sitting on a chair next to the orchestra, his legs crossed, looking bored. Someone whispers in his ear, telling him the time has come. At 5:16 p.m., Strauss gets up, climbs onto his conductor’s platform and signals to the brass players up on the Marathon Gate. A brief fanfare echoes through the arena before the entire orchestra joins in. The Olympic Symphony Orchestra consists of the Berlin Philharmonic and the Berlin State Orchestra. The choir has been put together from various ensembles and numbers 3,000 male and female singers. Joseph Goebbels is a great admirer of Strauss’s “Olympic Hymn.” “It is truly wonderful,” he gushed after one of the rehearsals. “That fellow really can compose.” Hitler, too, is satisfied with Strauss, telling one of his assistants to summon the composer to be congratulated after the ceremony. “Handshake with Hitler,” Pauline Strauss will note in her diary.
Spectators get no respite. As Strauss is still climbing down from his platform, the torch bearer charged with taking the Olympic flame the final miles from the Lustgarten to the stadium arrives through the Eastern Gate, runs across the oval track to the Marathon Gate and ignites a giant bowl of fire. Then Spyridon Louis, the gold medalist in the marathon at the first modern-day Games in Athens in 1896, presents Hitler with a symbolic olive branch from Olympia in Greece. At the end of the ceremony, the athletes—represented by the German weightlifter Rudolf Ismayr—take the Olympic oath. After reciting the vow, he waves a swastika flag instead of the Olympic one. Baillet-Latour is appalled at this violation of protocol. But what can he do?
The opening ceremony is almost over. Before Hitler leaves the stadium at 6:16 p.m., the musicians perform the “Hallelujah Chorus” from Georg Friedrich Händel’s Messiah—the final item on the program. As the choir sings “And he shall reign for ever and ever, king of kings and lord of lords for ever, hallelujah, hallelujah,” the Polish ambassador to Germany, Józef Lipski, discreetly taps Baillet-Latour on the shoulder. “We have to be on our guard against a people with such a talent for organization,” Lipski whispers in the count’s ear. “They could mobilize their entire nation just as smoothly for war.”
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Austria’s ambassador to Germany, Stephan Tauschitz, also files an unsettling report about the Olympic opening ceremony to the state secretary for foreign affairs in Vienna, writing: “A former Austrian officer residing in Berlin, who came to be seated amidst spectators from Austria in the Olympic Stadium, told me that in Germany he had rarely seen people as fanatical as these Austrians. The calls of ‘Heil Hitler!’ and ‘Sieg heil!’ from the Austrians, particularly the female ones, were a series of hoarse cries that could not have been any more fervent…An elderly visitor from Vienna who was seated not far from our source said that he had been unable to see Hitler because when the Führer entered the stadium his eyes were filled with tears.”
DAILY REPORT OF THE STATE POLICE OFFICE, BERLIN: “The tailor Walter Harf, born 1 December 1890, of Lützowstrasse 45, is accused of remarking to his wife on the occasion of the Olympic opening ceremony: ‘Now they’ll have to assassinate the Führer like the king of England.’ Harf’s arrest has been ordered if reliable witnesses can be found for this accusation.”
The Quartier Latin is a meeting place for the beautiful and the wealthy. Leon Henri Dajou is always on hand to welcome his elegant guests. Credit 2
Sunday, 2 August 1936
REICH WEATHER SERVICE FORECAST FOR BERLIN: Mostly cloudy, with occasional light rain. No change in temperature, with slight breezes. Highs of 19°C.
Toni Kellner is a suspicious woman. When she comes home to her one-room flat at Tegeler Weg 9 in Berlin’s Charlottenburg district, she immediately locks the door behind her and fastens the chain. Since April, Johanna Christen has lived in the flat across from Kellner, but in all those months she’s hardly ever seen her neighbor. Once she heard noises in the building stairwell and looked through the peephole in her door. She saw an amply proportioned woman in a long coat who wore an old-fashioned hat. After a few seconds the woman disappeared again behind her locked door.
Toni Kellner seldom has visitors. Every once in a while, her 30-year-old daughter Käthe comes by. She will later describe her mother as a warmhearted but pedantic person. Käthe will testify that Toni was a person of small daily rituals. When she got up in the morning, the first thing she did was tear yesterday’s page from the calendar on her washstand. Another occasional visitor is Anna Schmidt, the widow of a man Kellner used to work with. Schmidt will later say that Kellner agreed on a special signal with her few personal acquaintances. She only opens her flat door if a visitor knocks three times with the brass lid of the letter box. Why is Toni Kellner so secretive? What is she afraid of?
Toni Kellner is a transvestite. Born in June 1873 as Emil Kellner, she felt early on that she was trapped in the wrong body. Emil became a policeman, married out of sheer desperation and wore his wife’s clothing when she was out of the house. The marriage fell apart, and Emil quit the police force. Relieved of a great burden, he applied for a so-called transvestite certificate allowing him to put on women’s clothing, and the Prussian Ministry of Justice gave him a new, gender-neutral first name. Emil became Toni Kellner, and the former police officer was now a woman with a secret. From then on she had her outfits tailored and worked as a private detective. In the transvestite scene, Toni was known as “Big Polly.” Presumably these were Toni’s happiest years. Weimar Berlin was home to a flourishing subculture of bars, clubs and meeting places for those who lived outside the prevailing sexual norms. All that changed when Hitler came to power. In the Third Reich, transvestites are generally suspected of being homosexuals. In 1935 the Nazis strengthened the notorious, antigay paragraph 175 of the Reich legal code and established a Reich Center for the Prevention of Homosexuality and Abortion. In the eyes of the National Socialist guardians of German morals, transvestites are perverts. Only those who can prove their heterosexuality are given extensions of the transvestite certificates issued in the Weimar Republic. It’s no wonder that Toni Kellner is afraid—afraid of her neighbors, the Hitler Youths playing in the street and the SA men who regularly march down Tegeler Weg.
For a while now, Kellner has felt unwell. It’s her heart. And the asthma. At least that’s what she surmises. She doesn’t dare consult a doctor. On the last day of her life, Toni is wearing a blouse, panties and knee-high laced boots. Suddenly she feels nauseous and collapses backward on her bed. Blood drips from her mouth: an artery has burst.
No one misses her. It takes fourteen days for a neighbor to complain about the stink coming from Kellner’s flat. At first the police are unable to open the door since, as was her wont, she locked it in several places. They call the fire brigade. When the firemen enter Toni’s flat via the kitchen window, the calendar on her washstand reads 2 August 1936.
DAILY REPORT OF THE STATE POLICE OFFICE, BERLIN: “By order of SS Group Leader Heydrich, the Olympic Police Command Staff is to make four copies of their daily reports as an ongoing service to the Gestapo, which will distribute them. It was determined that Captain Göres from the uniformed police corps will collect the daily reports in question. Captain Göres refused to submit four copies of the daily reports, saying that this was technically impossible. For this reason, there can be no distribution of the daily reports as ordered.”
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It is from his archenemy Alfred Rosenberg, of all people, that Joseph Goebbels learns about his wife’s affair. “During the night, Magda admitted that the thing with Lüdecke was true,” Goebbels notes in his diary. “I’m very depressed about this. She lied to me constantly. Huge loss of trust. It’s all so terrible. You can’t get through life without compromises. That’s the terrible thing!” Magda Goebbels’s affair happened three years ago, but for political reasons the matter is very unpleasant for her husband. In Kurt Georg Lüdecke, his wife could have hardly chosen a more embarrassing partner for her amorous adventure. Lüdecke was a windbag from the early days of the Nazi Party, a dandy, gigolo and s
windler, whom Hitler repeatedly used for delicate special missions. In the United States, where Lüdecke lived for several years, he tried to get Henry Ford to donate money to the perpetually cash-strapped party. In Rome he wooed Benito Mussolini. Lüdecke constantly ran foul of the law by seducing rich women and trying to blackmail them afterward. When Hitler came to power, Lüdecke sought to get what he saw as his piece of the pie, but he was arrested instead. A man like him makes a lot of enemies. In 1934, Lüdecke emigrated permanently to the United States and began to write a tell-all book about Hitler. Now Goebbels is nervous. He can’t bear to think of what will happen if this swindler also makes his affair with Magda known to the public.
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Erna and Willi Rakel are simple people. She earns her money as a factory worker, while her husband is a glassblower. The Rakels live at Wendenschlossstrasse 212 in the Köpenick district. It’s a simple residential building with sixteen tenants. Quarters are cramped; the back courtyard is narrow and dark. The toilets are on the staircase between floors. Erna and Willi share theirs with the Mehls (he a pipe-layer, she a housewife), a seamstress named Rabe and the widow Lehmann. Wendenschlossstrasse is Berlin at its most unspectacular, worlds away from the chic cafés, bars and shops of Kurfürstendamm. Indeed, all of Köpernick is salt of the earth. At Wendenschlossstrasse 202, Luise Burtchen runs a small laundrette, the neighboring house contains a warehouse for a linoleum factory, and at number 218 is a nitrite plant. After work, the men meet up for a beer at Bernhard Woicke’s pub.
Berlin 1936 Page 2