Berlin 1936

by Oliver Hilmes

  After telling both teams’ captains that he expects a fair match, the Norwegian referee, Thoralf Kristiansen, punctually blows the opening whistle. After the 90 minutes the score is 2–2, meaning extra time. It’s a festival of the unprecedented. After Kristiansen disallows three goals in the first half, Peruvian fans storm the pitch and attack an Austrian player in the second. The referee later testifies that one of the pitch invaders had a revolver in his hands, and the British newspaper the Daily Sketch will write that the roughly 1,000 Peruvians carried “iron bars, knives and even a pistol.” The stadium descends into anarchy. Kristiansen is completely at a loss—he’s never experienced anything like this. Before he can restore order and suspend the match, the Peruvians score two more goals. The scoreboard reads 4–2, but the Austrians immediately lodge a protest. And they succeed. Football’s world governing body, FIFA, which has organized the Olympic tournament, nullifies the result and orders a replay at which spectators are banned. Tu felix Austria, as the old saying goes—Austria, it’s your lucky day!

  And the Peruvians? They smell a conspiracy. Nazi Germany has pressured FIFA to cheat Peru’s national team, which includes five black players, of victory. The whole story of the pitch invasion, they say, is just a cock and bull story. “An embarrassing incident with Peru,” notes Goebbels in his diary. “But Germany is completely innocent.” IOC President Henri de Baillet-Latour also dismisses the Peruvian allegations as nonsense. Responsibility for the decision to replay the match rests entirely with FIFA, he declares in an interview. Germany isn’t even a member of that body.

  The Peruvians boycott the replay, ending their participation in the Olympics, and leave Berlin. They’re joined in a show of solidarity by Colombia, whose team of five athletes has yet to win a single event. Austria move on uncontested into the football semifinals, and the 1936 Olympics have their first scandal.

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  Der Angriff, the daily newspaper of the NSDAP in Berlin, publishes its thoughts on a new Olympic event: “Basketball is on the Olympic Games program for the first time and is still something of a ‘dark art’ for many of us here in Germany. That’s a shame, because this sport is not only good physical exercise. It’s full of competitive ups and downs and always offers enough possibilities to captivate not just the players but spectators too.”

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  Eduard Duisberg, the artistic director of the Scala, Berlin’s famous variety theater, is clearly a very practical fellow. The city is crawling with Americans, he thinks, so let’s offer them some American entertainment. Under the rather grandiose title “Marvelous World,” Duisberg is presenting a large-scale, deliberately international revue for the Olympic month of August. Along with the always popular Scala girls, a group of twenty-four scantily clad female dancers, the bill features a conspicuous number of American artists: the dancer Mathea Merryfield from California (“America’s prettiest chorus girl”); the diminutive mime artist Fred Sanborn, who also plays a mean xylophone; the Four Trojans, a quartet of acrobats performing dizzying tricks at dizzying heights; and Jack and George Dormonde, two slapstick artists on unicycles. The dancer Dinah Grace—despite the sound of her name—is not an American. Her real name is Käthe Gerda Johanna Ilse Schmidt and she’s an officer’s daughter from Berlin.

  Twice a day, at 5:15 and 8:45 p.m., the actors and cabaret artists Georg Alexander, Anita Spada and Trude Hesterberg introduce the show. As expected, the Berlin press is full of praise—the Nazis want to show that Germany is also a world leader in variety theater. A reporter for the Berliner Lokal-Anzeiger probably unintentionally displays some political humor when he gives his article about the current Scala season a headline that could apply to the entire Olympic Games: “Marvelous World of Illusions.”

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  Beer and weapons. If you were to ask Clara and Paul von Gontard how they came by their enormous personal fortune, they would have to say “beer and weapons.” People don’t ask multimillionaires like the Gontards such trivial questions, of course, but the fact remains that they’re among the richest people in Germany. Clara is the daughter of brewing magnate Adolphus Busch from the German-American beer dynasty Anheuser-Busch. Adding to those family millions, she married Paul von Gontard, who has been the director of the German Weapons and Munitions Works for over twenty-five years and sits on the boards of a number of leading German companies. Wherever there are military conflicts in the first third of the twentieth century, Baron von Gontard profits. To keep business simple, he doesn’t discriminate between customers, selling his wares to anyone with the means to buy them. Thus, Gontard is always on the winning side. Commissions—7 percent of net profit—keep rolling in.

  Clara and Paul’s 26-year-old daughter Lillyclaire is the 1930s equivalent of an “It girl.” When Miss Lillyclaire married the merchant Werner Schieber in December 1930, the tabloids celebrated the event as that year’s dream wedding. The only critical note came from the journalist Carl von Ossietzky, who wrote that Gontard “gave his daughter a wedding that cost a rumored 40,000 marks (100,000 dollars) and featured the sort of ostentatious luxury favored by people with bad taste after they study swank magazines.” But despite the spectacular wedding, the marriage didn’t last long, and her father seems to have handpicked Lillyclaire’s next husband: the strapping Nazi and successful entrepreneur Bernhard Berghaus, who has excellent connections with both the regime and Himmler’s SS. Berghaus owns a number of metalworking companies, and in the summer of 1936 he founds the Berlin-Lübeck Machine Factory, which will play a leading role in the rearmament of the Third Reich. In Lübeck, the firm manufactures the standard rifle of the German army, the Karabiner 98k, earning untold sums of money. Berghaus is just the sort of fellow Paul von Gontard originally envisioned his daughter marrying: wealthy, ambitious and completely unscrupulous in business. That wedding took place in 1935.

  If there’s any such thing as Third Reich high society, it’s the Gontards. The family regularly hosts elegant receptions in their pompous villa on Bendlerstrasse in the Tiergarten district. But during the Olympics, Clara and her daughter can most often be seen in the Ciro Bar. Along with the Quartier Latin and the Sherbini Bar, this small establishment on Rankestrasse is one of the most fashionable nightspots in Berlin, frequented by film stars, diplomats, politicians and businesspeople. Many of the patrons come for the excellent jazz music. The pianist of the Ciro Bar’s house band recalls: “We had a certain amount of license because we attracted an international crowd, and they wanted the same repertoire as they heard abroad. We had trouble keeping up with the latest trends. We had a couple of patrons from embassies who would sing or whistle tunes currently popular in America, Britain or elsewhere. We’d then write them down, arrange and play them. The audience was always enthusiastic. They were amazed that we were so up to date.”

  The bar consists of two connected rooms. The bar area proper is done up in the arabesque style that is all the rage in the mid-1930s. There are Egyptian hieroglyphics on the walls, and the ceiling is a golden dome. The restaurant section is located down a couple of steps and decorated in terracotta. There Clara von Gontard and Lillyclaire Berghaus always sit at the same table, drinking nothing but soda water. They don’t order anything to eat either, although the food is excellent. The turtle soup à la Ciro, refined with dry sherry and a few drops of cognac, is a must for gourmands, and there are visitors who make their way to Rankestrasse just to try it. But not Clara and Lillyclaire. They stick to water. Having millions in the bank but drinking only sparkling water in an expensive restaurant—can it get any more understated?

  Whenever Clara visits the Ciro Bar, Ahmed is never far away. Ahmed is the bar’s owner and Clara’s lover—or at least he used to be. Ahmed Mustafa Dissouki is his full name: Ahmed is his first name, Mustafa his family name, and Dissouki the name of his grandfather. That’s the way people are named in his native Egypt, but in Berlin everybody knows him as just Ahmed. Thirty years of age, he’s
a fine figure of a man: tall, with dark curly hair and an abundance of charm. Like Leon Henri Dajou and Mustafa El Sherbini, Ahmed began his career in Berlin as a dance partner offering his services to wealthy ladies in the cosmopolitan Femina Bar. One of them was Clara von Gontard, who fell head over heels for him. In January 1932, using Clara’s money, Ahmed opened the Ciro Bar and a bit later a summer restaurant in the outlying Kladow district of the city overlooking the River Havel. Both establishments were successes from the moment the first bottles of champagne were uncorked. The only dark spot on Clara’s horizon is the fact that Hedda Adlon is financing the Quartier Latin for her favorite gigolo Leon Henri Dajou. Mrs. Adlon and Mrs. von Gontard are mortal enemies, constantly seeking to outdo one another with splendid parties, luxury automobiles, elegant evening dresses and other trappings of being married to millionaires.

  The Nazis initially have nothing against the goings-on in the Ciro Bar. On the contrary, they’re happy they have such a cosmopolitan bar to show to their international guests during the Olympics. But that will soon change.

  DAILY REPORT OF THE STATE POLICE OFFICE, BERLIN: “Around 7 p.m. on 8 August 1936 at the field hockey stadium, an unknown person smashed a bottle filled with a liquid chemical (pyridine) in the south stands. The smell caused vomiting and coughing. Investigations into the identity of the perpetrator have yielded no results.”

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  Glenn Morris takes a blanket and spreads it out on the grass playing surface of the Olympic Stadium. Then he wraps himself in a second blanket and lies down on the first one. Finally, he covers his head with a towel. Morris lies completely still. If you didn’t see the towel moving slightly up and down over his mouth, you might think he’d stopped breathing. Perhaps he’s asleep. If he’s not, perhaps he’s thinking about his girlfriend Charlotte, whom he met at college in Colorado. The two are planning to get married next year. The 24-year-old Morris is a decathlete, and in between events he lies on the grass like a mummy, sleeping or dreaming of his fiancée, and gathering his strength for the next discipline. That’s what he did yesterday, on the first day of the decathlon competition, and that’s what he’s doing today. Competing, then resting. And it’s hard to argue with Morris’s routine. With six events completed, the last one being the 110-meter high hurdles, he’s leading the competition. If things continue like that, he’ll win the gold medal.

  Sometime during the afternoon, after three further events, the German decathlete Erwin Huber goes over to him, bends down, taps him on the shoulder and asks if he can introduce Leni Riefenstahl. Riefenstahl has insisted on meeting Morris: perhaps he’d feel like posing for a few photos for her. Morris takes the towel from his head, frees himself from the blanket and stands up. “How are you?” he asks, almost bashfully, shaking Riefenstahl’s hand. “It was an unbelievable moment of the sort I’d never experienced,” Riefenstahl will later recall. “I tried to suppress the feelings bubbling up within me and forget what had happened.” She’s completely blown away by Morris’ perfectly toned body, his handsome face and his soulful eyes. As if struck by lightning, she stammers a couple of polite words, but then the start of the next and final discipline is announced. The 1,500-meter race begins at 5:30 p.m. Morris records a time of 4 minutes, 33 seconds, for which he’s awarded 595 points. That brings his total to 7,900 points, good enough not just for the gold medal but also for a new world record. Silver goes to Morris’s compatriot Bob Clark, and another American, Jack Parker, takes bronze.

  “Attention, attention!” the stadium announcer barks out. “Cérémonie olympique protocolaire…Medal winners’ ceremony.” The three Americans mount the podium, and the “Star-Spangled Banner” plays. Morris, Clark and Parker salute, bringing their right hands to their temples. Riefenstahl wants to capture this moment on film, but her cameraman looks at the exposure reader and waves his hands. The sun is setting, and it’s too dark to take good footage. Instead of looking through her camera lens, Riefenstahl follows what’s going on a few yards away from the playing field. She only has eyes for Morris. After the ceremony, the two approach one another. She congratulates him on his victory, but Morris isn’t interested in small talk. “He took me in his arms,” Riefenstahl will remember, “ripped open my blouse and kissed me on the breast in the middle of the stadium in front of 100,000 spectators.”

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  If diplomacy is the art of keeping your cards close to your chest, then Sir Eric Phipps is a very skilled diplomat. In her memoir My Years in Germany, Martha Dodd will write that his face would have remained completely impassive if someone had come up to him and said, “Your grandmother has just been murdered.” “As if the words had never made it to his ears,” Dodd continues, “he would have said with the somewhat clipped, soft voice of an Englishman with a potato in his mouth: ‘You don’t say. Very interesting.’ ” Phipps is almost immune to humor, and for the past three years he’s been Britain’s ambassador to Germany. Together with his brother-in-law Robert Vansittart, he’s one of the Third Reich’s biggest detractors among the British diplomatic ranks. But tonight he is once again concealing his antipathy behind a mask of professional British politeness. The British embassy on Wilhelmstrasse is hosting a gala dinner in honor of the German regime, followed by a party for over 1,000 invited guests. “It’s all so tiresome,” Goebbels complains to his diary. “First a small meal, then a gigantic reception. A thousand people, a thousand bits of chatter.”

  Henry “Chips” Channon, who’s also been invited to the party, doesn’t enjoy the evening either, which has to do with the fact that Robert and Sarita Vansittart are there. “The Vansittarts are notoriously pro-French,” he writes in his diary, “and I hope their Berlin visit will go some way to neutralize their prejudice.” Chips, who never misses out on a Berlin party and keeps a meticulous record of social events, has nothing good to say about Sir Eric’s festivities, writing: “The Embassy reception was boring, crowded and inelegant.”

  Adolf Hitler visits the Olympic Stadium every day. But he doesn’t always like what he sees from his VIP box. Credit 9

  Sunday, 9 August 1936

  REICH WEATHER SERVICE FORECAST FOR BERLIN: A high pressure system moves in, but skies are still cloudy. Warmer weather during the day, slight circling breeze, isolated thunderstorms. Highs of 23°C.

  Peter Joachim Fröhlich is 13 years old and a smart lad. He attends the Goetheschule on Münstersche Strasse in the Wilmersdorf district, a progressive school that places great emphasis on modern languages and the natural sciences. Ten-year-olds begin learning French, and two years later have the option of taking either English or Latin. Peter’s parents want him to learn English, but on the advice of his headmaster, Dr. Quandt, he chooses Latin. Peter is a good student, but his true passion is sport. He’s a fanatical supporter of the local football club, Hertha Berlin, which in his eyes is the best team in the world. When he goes to the stadium, he chants the club chants and sings the club songs along with all the other fans. So it’s no surprise that all Peter has been able to think about for weeks is the Olympics. His father, Moritz, shares his love of sport. The tickets to the Olympic Stadium, which Moritz acquired some time ago on a business trip to Budapest, are displayed like trophies on a sideboard in the family living room. Whenever Peter walks past, he thinks about the upcoming Games, imagining himself sitting next to his father in the stadium and cheering on the athletes.

  Moritz Fröhlich earns his living as a salesman and is a supporter of the Social Democratic Party; Peter’s mother works in her sister’s haberdashery. The family used to be Germans. But since Hitler came to power, they’re Jews. “You can become a Jew in three ways,” Peter will write years later in a book. “By birth, by conversion and by government decree. At birth, my Jewishness was pretty marginal, but after 30 January 1933, I found myself forced into the third category.” Jewishness is a foreign concept to the Fröhlichs. The parents stopped going to the synagogue a long time ago and describe themselves as committed at
heists. “Jewish identity” or “Jewish consciousness” means nothing to them. They refuse to be baptised or to convert to Christianity because that would be tantamount to “swapping one superstition for another.” Despite his youth, Peter Joachim Fröhlich, who had no bar mitzvah and enjoys going to watch Hertha Berlin on Jewish high holy days, feels he’s being forced to play a role that’s alien to him. But by September 1935 at the latest, with the promulgation of the Nuremberg Laws, which legally define who’s Jewish and enact a whole range of anti-Semitic measures, the Fröhlichs begin to realize that, sooner or later, they will have to leave their homeland. During the Olympic Games, it’s as though things have returned to normal for a short time. For sixteen days, the Nazis suspend publication of Der Stürmer, the weekly organ of anti-Semitic hatred, and take down the issues displayed in public spaces, which Peter normally has to walk by on his way to school.

  Because their tickets come from a Budapest allocation, in the Olympic Stadium Peter and Moritz Fröhlich find themselves sitting in the middle of a group of enthusiastic Hungarian fans. Their section is across from the Führer’s box, so that Peter can’t help but see what’s going on there. He’d like to avert his eyes, but that’s impossible. So these are the men, he thinks, who have taken it upon themselves to destroy the lives of so many people? Peter finds the sight of Hitler repulsive and thinks the portly Göring, festooned with medals and pomp, simply looks ridiculous. Goebbels reminds him of an evil dwarf from a fairy tale his mother used to read to him when he was little. Looking at Germany’s highest dignitaries, he remembers the popular joke that people used to tell each other surreptitiously: “What does a real Aryan look like? He’s blond like Hitler, tall like Goebbels and thin like Göring.”