Hitler's Olympics

by Christopher Hilton

  Two men worked long and hard to make the Games happen, Dr Theodor Lewald, the chairman of the German Organising Committee, and Dr Carl Diem, the secretary. Lewald had been a central figure in German Olympics for a generation. Who knew, or cared, that his grandmother on his father’s side was a Jew who’d converted to Christianity? Diem, only thirty, was ‘a fine athlete, a scholar, an historian, an enthusiast for classical Greece, an expert on sport and sporting history the world over’.1 He looked like an ascetic university professor.

  The war quickly locked into a savage, brooding stalemate between trenches on either side of no man’s land and, all else aside, that brought pressure within the IOC to take the Games elsewhere – America, perhaps, or a neutral European country. De Coubertin hesitated, feeling Germany would have to withdraw first but by 1915 the situation simplified itself – Berlin was now unthinkable. Meanwhile the IOC established its headquarters in Lausanne, physically safe from the buffetings of the twentieth century in neutral Switzerland.

  The movement needed a second reawakening, this time at Antwerp in 1920, but the ‘enemy’ countries – Germany, Austria, Bulgaria, Hungary and Turkey – were not invited. ‘Taking on the Games wasn’t easy for the organisers in a country that already faced an enormous rebuilding task. Visiting athletes slept on cots in schoolrooms, but for the most part they accepted the accommodation and many of them even praised the food.’2

  The movement grew. In 1924 the first Winter Games, at Chamonix in the French Alps, were added to the Games in Paris (Germany not invited again). De Coubertin, now in his sixties and decorated by a bushy white moustache, resigned as president after Paris and Count Henri de Baillet-Latour, a Belgian who had been a member since 1903, co-founded the Belgian Olympic Committee and helped organise the Antwerp Games, succeeded him. Baillet-Latour, hair receding and a wispy little moustache, looked like a doctor or a bank manager: a sympathetic face of character.

  The 1928 Winter Games were held at St Moritz, the Summer Games at Amsterdam. There a team from Germany found acceptance again and quite normally an eighteen-year-old fencer, Helene Mayer, was chosen. She came from Offenbach of middle-class parents. Who knew or cared that her father, a respected member of the community with a general practice, was a Jew? Who knew or cared that her mother was not Jewish? As a young girl she’d liked ballet, riding, swimming and skiing but fencing attracted her more and more, and Offenbach was the centre for it. In 1924, and still only fourteen, she finished second in the German championship and won it a year later. Mayer considered herself German and looked stereotypically so – blonde hair, blue eyes. At Amsterdam she took the gold medal and became rightly famous.

  The problem was that some people did know about her Jewish father and, however incomprehensible, they did care – manically:

  While the daily German newspapers wrote in glowing terms of the success of the ‘nice, blonde German girl,’ the Jewish papers emphasised the Jewish origin of an athlete eminently suited to making all the anti-Semitic cliches seem absurd. Besides reporting her athletic achievement, the press drew attention to one other event: She had waved a little black, white, and red flag. While conservative newspapers … praised this as an heroic deed, liberal and left-wing papers criticised it as being in poor taste, a pathetic demonstration and a disavowal of the nation’s colors. In … a Jewish paper the incident was dismissed as a mishap: the flag had been forced upon her by one of her fellow fencers. Helene Mayer was described as a ‘simple girl, completely averse to any political activity.’ … At any rate, although Helene Mayer was at the center of public attention, her Jewish heritage was totally ignored by the non-Jewish press.3

  Some of the great and good of the day were at Barcelona for the IOC meeting and the attendance reads like a glimpse of a vanished world: counts and generals, doctors and professors, senators and councillors. It is true that human competition – essentially combat – on the scale of the Olympics inevitably produced drama and controversy, but these people in charge of it governed, as they thought, by right because then such people governed everything else as well. They did it on their own terms, calmly, without hurry and with a maximum of decorum. They made their decisions and they enforced them. It was the way the world was before Hitler got hold of it, bringing with it so many enormous pressures. Those pressures would almost engulf Baillet-Latour, humiliate Lewald and torment General Charles Sherrill, a former sprinter himself, from the United States, beyond endurance.

  The Official Bulletin of the IOC did not reflect anything like this yet. It radiated precisely the calm and the decorum:

  The first point brought forward was the fixing of the venue of the XIth Olympic Games in 1936. [The Italians] General Montu and Count Bonacossa stated that Italy waived their claim for the 1936 Contest at Rome but at the same time begged to be given the Olympic Games later.

  Mr [Jules] de Muzsa [Hungary] asked that the Games of 1936 should be held at Berlin instead of Budapest but claimed a meeting at some future date.

  Dr Lewald and the Count of Vallellano [Spain] spoke in favour of Berlin and Barcelona.

  The meeting proceeded to vote.

  Owing to the very small number present at the 1931 Session, and in order to take into account the number of written votes already received, the Committee decided to wait until the answers of the many absent members reached Lausanne.

  The vote taken during the Session and those already received were sealed and deposited at Lausanne with the others.

  In order to expedite the decision it was agreed to ask for answers by telegram. The IOC were informed of an application from Canada for the XIIth Games in 1940.

  The voting was quickly accomplished, especially in those more leisurely times, because the Bulletin was able to report that Berlin received forty-three votes and Barcelona sixteen with eight abstentions. The Bulletin added that the ‘German Olympic Committee has decided to exercise the right of priority reserved to the Country holding the Olympic Games by Article 6 of the Charter and will organise the Winter Games 1936. The venue will be chosen later.’

  How could the great and good read the runes? How could anybody? William Shirer, an American correspondent in Berlin and later a celebrated author, wrote that ‘the depression which spread over the world like a great conflagration toward the end of 1929 gave Adolf Hitler his opportunity, and he made the most of it. Like most great revolutionaries he could thrive only in evil times, at first when the masses were unemployed, hungry and desperate, and later when they were intoxicated by war.’4 Who, however, could have predicted that into the 1930s? In 1931 his Nazi movement eyed power without any certainty that they would ever get it, but that October Paul von Hindenburg, a field marshal during the First World War and President since 1925, received Hitler. Within months Hitler would be debating whether to run for the presidency himself.

  The German Olympic Committee, led by Lewald and Diem, set to work in July and put a model of their stadium on public display. It was to be situated in the Grünewald, the wooded area to the west of the city, beside a racecourse. Lewald and Diem did it against a political background which had begun to move perceptibly away from normality and the language of reason: German banks closed their doors to prevent a run on the currency and only opened them again when Britain, America and France agreed on renewed credits.

  Two themes were running and would continue to run – sometimes parallel, sometimes veering towards each other, sometimes interlocking – until, in the late afternoon of 1 August 1936, they would be locked together forever. Helene Mayer, who concentrated on her fencing and won the European Championships, illustrated one theme perfectly: the self-contained, non-political world of sport. Adolf Hitler, who concentrated on winning Germany, was the other: politics red in tooth and claw.

  In November 1931, just eight months after the Games were awarded to Berlin, the Nazi Party won elections in the state of Hesse. Hitler’s hour was coming closer.

  A week after the 1932 Winter Games in Lake Placid, New York State, he decided to st
and against von Hindenburg for President. A patrician figure with a white, walrus moustache, von Hindenburg dismissed Hitler in a celebrated phrase as ‘that Bohemian corporal’ but received only 49 per cent of the votes (Hitler 30 per cent), forcing him into a humiliating run-off. He polled 53 per cent, Hitler up to 36. Von Hindenburg invited Franz von Papen, a relatively obscure member of the Catholic Centre Party, to become Chancellor and the incumbent, Heinrich Bruning, resigned. Von Papen formed a cabinet with no Nazis in it.

  While the second day of the Summer Games was being contested at Los Angeles, in Germany Hitler won 230 seats in the parliamentary elections for the Reichstag, just short of an overall majority.

  Two days later Mayer began her defence of the Olympic fencing gold. Described as ‘the beautiful blonde Valkrie of the swords’,5 she moved through her pool to the final stages winning all her bouts. She radiated a great calmness and a certain sophistication, attracted male fencers and habitually greeted everyone on the fencing floor as friends. When California State Governor James Rolph, wearing a white linen suit and a gardenia button hole, arrived and asked her how she was doing she contented herself with pointing to the scoreboard ….

  It went wrong in the final stages. She fought Mary Addams (Belgium) in her opening bout and they provided a stark sartorial contrast, Mayer in a white jacket and skirt, Addams in a black pleated skirt and white jacket. Mayer lost and afterwards sat motionless contemplating her defeat, her chin in her hand supported by an elbow on her knee. She ate an orange, thrust the peel under the chair where she sat. She fought Ena Bogen (Hungary) and lost a long, nervous, exhausting bout: 5 hits received to 4. She made her way back to the chair and shrugged her shoulders, perhaps discouraged or disconsolate.

  Her pivotal moment came against Ellen Preis (Austria), a great fencer in terms of skill and longevity – she would go on to compete at the Melbourne Games in 1956. Mayer led 4 hits received to 1 but Preis, determined, came back at her and won it 5–4. Preis had the gold, Mayer came fifth.

  Diem and Lewald, by now a patrician figure of receding hair and a tuft of white moustache (white moustaches almost obligatory in that vanished era), were in Los Angeles to watch, record and learn. Lewald acted as the official figure taking care of whatever that entailed while Diem, energetic, was everywhere, taking notes and photographs, drawing sketches, even asking the cooks what kind of food the athletes preferred. Lewald and Diem had been sent

  with the instuctions to gain all the experience possible with the end in view of organising their own XIth Olympic Games. The Secretary-General of the Reich Commission for Physical Training [Diem] was especially requested to pay attention to the presentation of the Games in Los Angeles in order to derive useful knowledge for the great task facing Germany.

  The Organising Committee for the Xth Olympic Games in Los Angeles had made its preparations in a most thorough manner and was able to provide Germany with well-ordered copies of all its printed matter and important documents as well as a comprehensive insight into the work carried out by the various departments, so that a complete survey of the American method of solving this huge task was possible.6

  The Games had grown and thirty-seven countries attended, bringing 1,408 athletes (but not including the great Finnish runner Parvo Nurmi, excluded from the marathon amid accusations of professionalism occasioned by over-large expenses on a tour of Germany). Photo finishes were introduced although, wonderfully, the lap counter miscalculated in the 3,000 metres steeplechase and the runners covered an extra lap. A man with a truly glorious name, Volmari Iso-Hollo, won, continuing a strong Finnish tradition and suggesting they would be strong in Berlin, too, but another Finn, Lauri Lehtinen, was thoroughly booed when he twice baulked an American towards the end of the 5,000 metres. And the Brazilian water polo team were disqualified after being thoroughly rude to the referee when they lost 7–3 to Germany.

  Purists within the Olympic movement disdain, or try to disdain, the nationalism of medals tables but after Los Angeles they held particular, arguably crucial, significance. The statistics demonstrate it.

  Gold

  Silver

  Bronze

  America

  41

  32

  30

  Italy

  12

  12

  12

  France

  10

  6

  4

  Germany (8th)

  4

  12

  5

  Any Games without America would be devalued to the point of meaninglessness, which is one way of saying the Germans had to have the Americans in Berlin but, as the Los Angeles Games closed, there was as yet no reason whatsoever why the Americans should not be in Berlin.

  Helene Mayer, who intended to join the German diplomatic service, visited Scripps College in California. The German Academic Exchange Service had offered her a two-year grant. She was formal in the German way and at her first meal bowed deeply to each dining table.7

  Two weeks after Los Angeles, von Hindenburg lectured Hitler about the activities of his storm troopers on the streets.

  In November the German Olympic Committee decided to form a special Organising Committee for the Games.

  Von Papen resigned because he couldn’t form a government. In Reichstag elections the Nazis shed 2 million votes although they remained the largest party.

  In December initial plans for an Olympic bell were drawn up.

  In January 1933 the Organising Committee met for the first time just days before von Hindenburg, confronting a breakdown of law and order as the storm troopers and communists fought daily street battles, appointed Hitler as Chancellor. His ‘immediate task’ was to ‘quickly eliminate’ anyone else holding some power and ‘make his party the exclusive master of the State and then with the power of an authoritarian government and its police carry out the Nazi revolution’.8

  Von Hindenburg remained head of state, of course, and accepted patronage of the Games because by tradition heads of state attend the Opening Ceremony and declare the Games open.

  The Reichstag caught fire in mysterious circumstances and Hitler moved instinctively to exploit the event, using it as a bludgeon to crush his opponents.

  At first he had shown no interest in the Games, dismissing them as ‘an invention of Jews and Freemasons’ and describing them as some sort of Judaistic theatre ‘which cannot possibly be put on in a Reich ruled by National Socialists’. Whether Hitler concluded this because of Lewald’s intimate connection with it – Lewald had a Jewish grandmother, of course – or whether he believed Jews and Freemasons controlled everything beyond Germany is not clear.

  Goebbels, however, understood intuitively the potential propaganda possibilities, internal and external, and put it to Hitler something like this: ‘We can make this the greatest advertisement for you and your Germany.’ Goebbels also understood that the Germans had the first organised global press relations triumph within their grasp. He grasped it.

  He made Hitler see the opportunity, too. Here was a pivotal moment because soon Hitler’s word would quite literally be law and if he wanted a Games in Germany’s new image he would get one. The normal constraints of personnel, budgets and logistics simply dissolved and, on Hitler’s order, the formidable organising ability of the German psyche applied itself to creating something extraordinary.

  The world would travel to what had been, such a short time before, a defeated, broken country – humiliated by the Treaty of Versailles imposed by the victors, ravaged by hyper-inflation so intense that people paid for their meals course by course as the currency devalued while they were eating – and would suddenly find themselves in a land of full employment, confident citizens and faces ruddy with health.

  From outside Germany Hitler looked a combination of demagogue and caricature, a fundamentalist of his own religion – which was how Charlie Chaplin would be able to portray him so effortlessly on film – but the staging of the Olympic Games bestowed on him and his governme
nt legitimacy in a way nothing else could. They might, even briefly, make him seem benevolent, and Germany, too. Hitler met Lewald and the Mayor of Berlin, Heinrich Sahm.

  [He] declared in response to Dr. Lewald’s remarks that he welcomed the allotting of the Games to Berlin and that he would do everything possible to ensure their successful presentation. The Games, he asserted, would contribute substantially towards furthering understanding among the nations of the world and would promote the development of sport among the German youth, this being in his opinion of vast importance to the welfare of the nation…. An official statement printed in the German press informed the nation of the attitude of their Chancellor towards the Berlin Games.

  The preparatory work could thus proceed on a firm foundation and it was carried forward with all alacrity in order that a complete plan might be submitted to the International Olympic Committee during its annual meeting at Vienna in 1933.

  On the occasion of his conference with the German Chancellor, Dr. Lewald also had an opportunity of speaking with the Reich Minister for Propaganda, Dr. Goebbels, concerning the extent of the project and requested the support of the Propaganda Ministry.9

  From this moment the twin themes – sport and politics – flowed towards 1 August 1936.

  A week later the Reichstag, meeting at an opera house, passed an Enabling Act allowing Hitler to rule by decree, a terrifying prospect for the half-million Jews living in Germany, 160,000 of them in Berlin where their community dated back to 1295. Violence by storm troopers against them was already endemic. The government ordered a boycott of all Jewish businesses.

  Lewald and Diem submitted their publicity plans to Goebbels and he gave consent for a special commission to handle their implementation. Meetings of the various German technical sporting commissions began.