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Hitler Page 72

by Volker Ullrich


  Because Hitler had rejected the proviso that the Nuremberg Laws should only apply to “full Jews,” instructions on how the laws were to be enforced needed to answer the question of who was in fact affected. A bitter, extended quarrel arose between the Interior Ministry and representatives of the NSDAP. Whereas Wilhelm Stuckart and Bernhard Lösener felt that only people with more than two Jewish grandparents should be considered Jewish, party representatives led by the Reich Doctors’ leader, Gerhard Wagner, insisted that the definition be expanded to included “quarter-Jews,” defined as people with one Jewish grandparent.223 Hitler initially avoided making a decision. Goebbels noted on 1 October: “Jewish question still not decided. We’ve debated for a long while, but the Führer is still unsure.”224 The argument continued throughout October and was increasingly focused round the status of “half-Jews,” defined as people with two Jewish grandparents. At the last minute, Hitler cancelled a high-level meeting on 5 November intended to resolve the issue.225 But there came a point when further delays were impossible. “The Führer wants a decision now,” Goebbels noted on 7 November. “A compromise has to be reached anyway, and an absolutely satisfactory solution is impossible.”226

  The First Ordinance on the Reich Citizenship Law of 14 November ended the tug of war. The Interior Ministry had largely got its way on the question of who was to be defined as Jewish, as the ordinance stipulated: “A Jew is someone descended from at least three Jewish grandparents in the racial sense.” “Half-Jews” were only to be treated as Jews if they were members of the Jewish religious community or married to a Jewish spouse.227 Goebbels noted: “A compromise but the best one available. Quarter-Jews to us. Half-Jews only in exceptional cases. In God’s name, let’s have some peace. Announce it skilfully and discreetly in the press. Not too much hullaballoo.”228 The propaganda minister’s reticence was understandable. The ordinance revealed the utter absurdity of trying to classify the population according to racist criteria. For example, “half-Jews” were defined as people who had “two Jewish grandparents in the racial sense.” But since there was no way to determine legally the characteristics of the Jewish “race,” religion had to be enlisted. The ordinance stated: “A grandparent is automatically considered fully Jewish if he or she belonged to the Jewish religious community.” It would have been difficult to make the grotesque senselessness of Nazi racial legislation any more apparent.229

  In the wake of the Nuremberg Laws, the petty, everyday war against Jews continued. But with the Olympics approaching, the Nazi regime had no interest in a repeat of the pogrom-like violence of the summer of 1935. A few days before the start of the Winter Olympics in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Hess ordered the removal of all “signs with extremist content” so as to avoid “making a bad impression on foreign tourists.”230 The German press was instructed on 27 January 1936 not to report on “violent confrontations with Jews”: “Such things should be scrupulously avoided, right on down to the local sections of newspapers, in order not to provide foreign propaganda with material it can use against the Winter Games.”231

  When Wilhelm Gustloff, the leader of the Swiss branch of the NSDAP, was shot dead in Davos by a Jewish medical student two days before the start of the Games, the Nazi leadership’s reaction was muted. Goebbels’s spontaneous reaction was: “The Jews will pay for this. We’ll take major actions against this.”232 But Hitler restrained his propaganda minister. As would not be the case with Kristallnacht in November 1938, this time the regime made no attempt to use the assassination as an excuse to mobilise “popular anger” against the Jewish minority.233 At Gustloff’s funeral in the northern German city of Schwerin on 12 February, Hitler did launch some sharply worded attacks, however, claiming that the Davos killing was evidence of a “guiding hand” and the “hateful power of our Jewish enemies.” He added: “We understand and register this declaration of war!”234

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  The International Olympic Committee had awarded Berlin the 1936 Summer Games in 1931, but a year later, when the Nazis became the strongest party in Germany, the IOC began to have reservations. Via an intermediary, the Belgian IOC president, Henri de Baillet-Latour, enquired at the Brown House how the National Socialists intended to stage the Games should they come to power. Hitler answered that he was looking forward to the Games with “great interest.”235 On 16 March 1933, the newly appointed chancellor received the president of the German National Olympic Committee, Theodor Lewald, and promised him support for the preparation of the Games “in every respect.”236 Hitler refused the offer of an honorary post with the committee, but he did take over symbolic patronage for the event after Hindenburg’s death in November 1934.237 In the meantime, the IOC had also awarded the Winter Games to Garmisch-Partenkirchen.

  From the very beginning, Hitler recognised the opportunities that came with hosting the Olympics. They offered a unique chance to present the world with images of a reinvigorated but peaceful and cosmopolitan Germany. He and Goebbels saw absolutely eye to eye on this. The latter’s ministry formed a “propaganda committee for the Olympic Games” in January 1934 to coordinate large-scale publicity campaigns in Germany and abroad. “The 1936 Olympics are going to be huge,” Goebbels promised. “We’re really going to beat the drum!”238 The regime spared neither effort nor money to squeeze every last drop of prestige from the Games. On 5 October 1933, Hitler made an initial inspection of the site for the “Reich Sports Field” on Berlin’s western fringe to get a picture of the location and the progress made in the preparations. He brusquely cancelled the plans of sports functionaries to expand the existing stadium, ordering the construction of a new, modern arena with a capacity of 100,000 spectators. It was a “Reich task,” Hitler declared in notes taken by Lewald: “If you’ve invited the whole world as your guest, something grandiose and beautiful must be created…a few million more here or there make no difference.”239 The gigantic site was to be transformed into the largest sporting complex in the world, with numerous additional sites for competitions, an open-air stage, a “House of German Sports” and military marching grounds. The architect Werner March, who had constructed the models for Germany’s application to the IOC, was commissioned to plan the entire project.240

  Hitler enthusiastically followed construction progress, suggesting changes and occasionally criticising the design of the stadium, with which he was never completely satisfied.241 It is pure legend, however, that he was so angry about March’s plans that he threatened to cancel the Olympics, as Albert Speer later contended in his memoirs and as Joachim Fest naively passed on.242 Speer, who was only at the beginning of his career as Hitler’s favourite architect in 1933 and 1934, was likely disappointed by someone else being commissioned to build the Olympic Stadium.

  A more serious threat to the 1936 Olympics was the international movement calling for a boycott that had formed shortly after Hitler had assumed power. The early anti-Semitic excesses of the Nazi regime occasioned outrage—particularly in the United States. By April 1933, the New York Times was already reporting that the Games could be cancelled because of the German government’s campaign against the Jews.243 The president of the American Olympic Committee, Avery Brundage, floated the idea of transferring the Games to Rome or Tokyo, or cancelling them altogether. The IOC was satisfied, however, when the German side declared that it would adhere to Olympic rules and Jewish Germans would not be excluded from any of the competitions. In June 1934, the German Olympic Committee nominated twenty-one Jewish athletes for the Olympic training camp, but in the end, only two token individuals—“half-Jews” under Nazi racial classification—were included in Germany’s Olympic team: the ice hockey player Rudi Ball, who plied his trade in Italy, and fencer Helene Mayer, who won gold for Germany in 1928 and had lived in California since 1932. She would win the silver medal in Berlin.244

  A cancellation of the Games or a boycott by a great sporting nation like the United States would have meant a significant loss of prestige, and Hitler was at pains to take the wind
out of his critics’ sails.245 He was assisted in this by Theodor Lewald who, despite being regularly assailed in the Nazi press for his Jewish background, did everything in his power to reassure the foreign public and the IOC about the National Socialists’ intentions. In the summer of 1934, when Brundage travelled to Germany to get a picture of the situation of Jewish athletes, his host adroitly threw dust in his eyes. Upon returning to the US, Brundage became a steadfast advocate of United States participation in both the Winter and Summer Games.246 Nonetheless, the anti-Semitic violence of the summer of 1935 and the Nuremberg Laws rekindled the debate about the Games in the United States. Advocates of a boycott seemed to gain the upper hand in the country’s largest athletics association, the Amateur Athletic Union, with AAU President Jeremiah Mahoney telling Lewald in October 1935 that participation in the Games would amount to a tacit acknowledgement of “everything the swastika symbolised.”247 But Avery Brundage and his supporters managed to secure a slight majority at the AAU convention that December. Germany’s sports functionaries and the leaders of the regime breathed a sigh of relief.248

  Only two months later, on 6 February 1936, Hitler opened the Winter Games in the Garmisch-Partenkirchen ice hockey stadium in front of 60,000 spectators and more than 1,000 athletes from 28 countries. “Endless applause from the audience,” noted Goebbels. “Almost all foreign athletes performed the Hitler salute when they marched past the Führer.”249 But the propaganda minister as well as most German people present mistook the traditional Olympic raised-right-arm salute for the Nazi “German greeting.”250 All in all the Nazi leadership was satisfied with the ten-day event, at which the Norwegian figure-skating gold medallist Sonja Henie had captured the hearts of the crowds. The test run for Berlin had been a success, and there had been no unwelcome incidents. “On the whole the Nazis have done a wonderful propaganda job,” William Shirer admitted. “They’ve greatly impressed most of the visiting foreigners with the lavish but smooth way in which they’ve run the games and with their kind manners, which to us who came from Berlin of course seemed staged.”251

  After Garmisch-Partenkirchen, not even the remilitarisation of the Rhineland, which so blatantly belied Hitler’s pretence of peacefulness, could endanger the Berlin Games. On the contrary, the ineffectual response of the Western allies to yet another German violation of international agreements weakened the position of those who favoured a boycott. Even France, the country that should have felt most threatened by the remilitarisation, never seriously considered withholding its athletes from the competition. The new Popular Front government under socialist premier Léon Blum approved the funds for the French Olympic team. The policy of appeasement also won out within the Olympic movement.

  The Reich capital got a thorough makeover. “Berlin is being transformed into a true festival city,” Goebbels noted on 24 July, a week before the start of the Games. “But there’s still a lot to do.” On 30 July, after a drive around the city to inspect things, he was satisfied: “Berlin is now ready. It is gleaming in its lightest vestments.”252 Banners and other symbols of the regime were everywhere, on public squares, office buildings and private houses. Signs refusing entry to Jews had been removed, and discriminatory labels on park benches painted over.253 For two weeks, Der Stürmer was nowhere to be found at newspaper kiosks, and Der Angriff reminded its readers to be solicitous towards foreign visitors: “We must be more charming than the Parisians, easier-going than the Viennese, livelier than the Romans, more cosmopolitan than Londoners and more practical than New Yorkers.”254 An Olympic tourist guide presented Berlin as a vibrant world metropolis and as the headquarters of a confident nationalist government: “[Wilhelmstrasse] is home to the workplace of a man whom every visitor to Berlin would give his eye-teeth to see: Adolf Hitler.”255

  If it was raining slightly in Berlin on 1 August, the opening day of the eleventh Olympic Summer Games, it did nothing to dampen the “festival fever.”256 At 1 p.m., Hitler received the members of the International and German National Olympic Committees, thanking them for their work and declaring that the German Reich had “gladly and happily” taken on responsibility for hosting the competition in a form “befitting the great idea and traditions of the Olympic Games.”257 Undermining this sentiment was the fact that Hitler, after travelling the 15-kilometre stretch to the Reich Sports Field in an open car that afternoon, first stopped at the Bell Tower to inspect an honour guard of the army, navy and air force and then proceeded with Werner von Blomberg to the Langemarckhalle to commemorate Germany’s fallen soldiers in the First World War. Only after that, at 4 p.m., did he lead a delegation of the IOC and the German National Olympic Committee into the Olympic Stadium, where he strode, frenetically cheered by 80,000 spectators, to his “Führer box.” The strict choreography of the ceremony was interrupted for a moment, when a small girl—the 5-year-old daughter of the general secretary of the German National Olympic Committee—ran up to Hitler, curtsied and gave him a bouquet of flowers. The scene was apparently unplanned, but Hitler, who gladly had his picture taken with children, must have liked it.258

  After that the forty-nine participating nations paraded into the stadium. (The Soviet Union boycotted the event, and the country’s civil war kept Spain out of the Games.) The French were greeted with particular applause when they walked past the Führer’s box with arms raised, which the crowd again misinterpreted as the German greeting. By contrast, the British team declined to salute and was given a cool reception, which even Goebbels described as “somewhat embarrassing.”259 When all the teams had arrived in the oval arena, Hitler declared the Games open for competition. The Olympic flag was raised, thousands of doves flew towards the heavens which had cleared by now, and cannons fired a twenty-one-gun salute. An Olympic hymn especially composed by Richard Strauss was played. Then the final torchbearer ran into the stadium and lit the Olympic fire. Rudolf Ismayr, a gold-medal-winning weightlifter at the 1932 Games in Los Angeles, recited the Olympic oath, although he took hold of the swastika banner, not the five-ringed Olympic flag—the merging of Nazi elements into Olympic ritual could hardly have been more obvious.260

  The entire opening ceremony was designed to focus on Hitler. Fanfares announced his arrival, and his way to the VIP box was musically accompanied by Wagner’s “Homage March.” The enthusiasm that greeted Hitler in the stadium was not lost on the foreign athletes. One female Olympian from Britain felt that it was as if God himself had descended from heaven.261 That evening, the people of Berlin showered their leader with tempestuous ovations when he returned to Wilhelmstrasse. “Often on the balcony,” noted Goebbels. “The masses were out of their heads. It was very moving. Girls were brought up and wept before the Führer. A beautiful and a great day. A victory for the German cause.”262

  Hitler attended almost every day of competition, and those who observed him up close were taken aback by his behaviour. The sporting spirit was alien to the leader of the Third Reich. If German athletes were beaten, his countenance immediately darkened. But if a German sportsman won, reported Martha Dodd, his enthusiasm knew no limits, and he would leap up from his seat with childish glee.263 It is a legend, however, that he refused to shake hands with the black American sprinter Jesse Owens, who won four gold medals and became the star of the Games. After Hitler had congratulated the Finnish and German medal winners on the first day of competition in his box, Henri de Baillet-Latour pointed out that such a gesture violated the Olympic protocol, whereupon Hitler did not congratulate any of the winners.264 Nevertheless, numerous sources show that Hitler and the other leading Nazis were not at all pleased about the multiple triumphs of a black American since they convincingly gave the lie to the doctrine of the superiority of the “white race.” After the events of 4 August, Goebbels noted: “We Germans won one gold medal, and the Americans three, two of them by a Negro. That’s a scandal. White people should be ashamed. But what does that matter over there in that country without culture.”265 When Baldur von Schirach suggested it would make
an excellent impression abroad if Hitler were to receive Owens in the Chancellery, the dictator was outraged. “Do you truly believe that I will allow myself to be photographed shaking hands with a Negro?” Hitler yelled in Schirach’s face.266

  Hans Frank remembered Hitler being “passionately interested” in the Games and “always full of feverish suspense at who would win what medal.”267 In the end, Germany topped the medals table ahead of the United States with 33 gold, 26 silver and 30 bronze—an outcome Goebbels praised as being “the result of reawakened ambition.” He added: “This Olympics is a very big breakthrough…we can once more be proud of Germany…The leading sports nation in the world. That is magnificent.”268

  Germany impressed the world not just with sporting successes, but also, as had been the case in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, with its perfect organisation and an accompanying programme that showcased the regime’s best side to foreign visitors. In retrospect, Hitler’s interpreter Paul Schmidt called the sixteen-day event an “apotheosis for Hitler and the Third Reich.” In numerous conversations with foreigners, Schmidt observed that they encountered Hitler with “the highest interest—to say nothing of great admiration.”269 André François-Poncet made a similar observation:

 

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