Johnson, Owens and Metcalfe wrote to Brundage saying they wanted the American team to go. Another sprinter, Marty Glickman, approached it from a different angle, and he was a Jew. He insisted his perspective was more typical: he was an athlete not a politician and of course he wanted to go, no question. The Olympics had been his goal from the earliest days when he first understood his sprinting ability. Bigotry against Jews had been going on for a long time and was, he knew, going on all over the place including America.24
The whole question demanded a proper resolution by the Amateur Athletic Union, whose officers duly met at the Hotel Commodore, New York, to debate a resolution for a boycott. It became a battlefield fought over so fiercely that only hunger and exhaustion beat down those attending. They retired to dinner with a gentleman’s agreement that they would not continue until the following day.
Five hours after battle did resume – amid all manner of accusations of double-crossing, trickery and compromises – a vote was taken which Mahoney lost. He withdrew the resolution and, feeling his position as head of the American Athletic Union no longer tenable, resigned. Brundage was nominated as his replacement and unanimously elected. In his victory speech he set out again his fixed position: he would devote all his energies to getting the American team to Berlin.
As President of the American Olympic Committee as well, Brundage had moved into an immensely strong position. It was one he would occupy for the rest of his life.25
On 21 December Jewish doctors in Germany were forced to resign their posts in private hospitals.
The New Year began with news that advance ticket sales had reached 2 million Reichsmarks but it was the Olympic bell that grasped everyone’s attention. It was cast,
16.5 tons of molten steel being necessary. Following the cooling, polishing, chasing and tuning, all of which required several weeks, the Olympic Bell was finished. It was pitched in E of the minor octave, and the first overtone lying in the interval of the minor third of the main tone was pitched in G so that the total effect was a minor tone. The plainly audible overtones resulting from the strokes of the clapper combined with the mighty undertone to produce a rich, full sound.26
It had a diameter of 9.10 feet, a height of 8.78 feet and weighed 21,197 lb. Between 16 and 26 January it was transported from Bochum to Berlin and its slow but imperious progress created enormous interest. At Bielefeld it was ‘escorted into the town by a squadron of the National Socialist Motor Corps as well as runners. Members of the Municipal Administration and of the Reich Association for Physical Training made speeches of welcome, characterising the Bell as the herald of Olympic peace and honourable competition.’
At Brunswick ‘a festive reception was arranged on the Market Square, the band of the Air Force providing music and Municipal Councillor Mehlis delivering an address of welcome. The radio broadcasting stations in Western and Central Germany informed their hearers about the transportation of the Bell to Berlin, and the festivities and demonstrations which were held in various towns along the route. The sirens of the factories were blown and church bells pealed in greeting.’
On the way to Potsdam, the town on the outskirts of Berlin, a wooden bridge had to be reinforced. In Potsdam, ‘the band of the Labour Service, political organisations and thousands of people thronged the streets to greet the Olympic symbol, the police department having installed special lighting effects on the large town square’.
The bell inched into Berlin to an official reception. ‘Accompanied by large crowds of pedestrians and cyclists and joyfully greeted from all sides’, the procession moved past 1,600 members of the Hitler Youth while ‘45 youths from the Reich Association for Physical Training awaited the arrival with flags and pennants’. It progressed to the Brandenburg Gate and went down Unter den Linden to a square where it ‘was presented with fitting ceremony to the Organising Committee’.27 The bell stood as a symbol of the Games, together with the five rings, the oath and the flame. On it bystanders could read the great, historic Olympic call: ‘I summon the youth of the world’ which had been forged into it.
On 6 February, Hitler declared the Winter Games at Garmisch open. The picturesque Bavarian resort, dwarfed by the Alpspitz mountain at 2,628 metres with the Zugspitz further away rising 2,966 metres, lay clad in snow. Hitler, sitting in the grandstand with Goebbels beside him, leant down to receive notebooks, postcards and pieces of paper from those entreating him for his autograph. He smiled broadly.
These fourth Winter Games were very much the younger sibling. Alpine skiers made their debut, taking their place among the skaters, Nordic ski racers, curlers, two- and four-man bobsleigh teams, speed skaters and ice hockey teams. Therein lay a paradox.
Rudi Ball, regarded as Germany’s best ice hockey player, was a Jew who had fled the country as the anti-Semitism became a political reality. Officially invited back, he returned a month before to lead the team. That this happened without provoking much comment or affecting potential boycotts of Berlin can only be explained by the humble status of the Winter Games.
During the Garmisch events a lot of people in military uniform milled around and a lot of people gave a lot of Nazi salutes. Berlin would be just the same. At the Opening Ceremony, as the parade of nations entered the main stadium, most of the crowd gave the salute, as did many of the competitors. Germany’s Maxi Herber and Ernst Baier won the pairs skating and, at the medal ceremony, stood on the top rung of the podium, saluting ostentatiously.
Internal IOC politics reared its head, too. Commodore Lee Jahncke, an American member and one-time assistant secretary in the US Navy and by ancestry a German Protestant, held strong views against Berlin. He had been exchanging postal broadsides with Baillet-Latour and, when the IOC met at Garmisch, Baillet-Latour
after having spoken on the campaign being conducted in the United States against American participation … informed his colleagues about the intervention … of Mr Lee Jahncke, who by a public announcement, proved that he was opposed to the opinions unanimously held by Members of the International Olympic Committee. The President read the letter which he had written to the American Members, the letter of Mr Lee Jahncke and his own reply.
The Members, who objected strongly to the attitude of Mr Lee Jahncke in view of the fact that he had clearly infringed upon the Status of the International Olympic Committee in betraying the interests of the Committee and in failing to preserve a sense of decorum toward his colleagues, unanimously requested the President to make known to all Members the correspondence which had taken place between himself and Mr Lee Jahncke in order that a decision might be reached regarding the matter at the first Meeting in Berlin.28
In the restrained terminology of the time this represented strong stuff and before Berlin Jahncke became the only member in IOC history to be expelled. Brundage replaced him, consolidating his own power base.
At the meeting Lewald gave a progress report on Berlin and said the current estimation for officials and competitors was about ten thousand.
The timetable to Berlin and the Opening Ceremony there on 1 August ticked insistently now, each week bringing it closer.
On 13 February, Helene Mayer boarded the luxury liner SS Bremen in New York, bound for Germany and her family. She had not seen them for four years, and not been in the country since Hitler got hold of it.
The twin currents of sport and politics flowed into one another, as they had always been destined to do.
After Garmisch the official word went out to the German media that ‘no comments should be made regarding Mayer’s non-Aryan ancestry or her expectations for a gold medal at the Olympics’. Rudi Ball’s presence had not made much difference to the ice hockey team because Great Britain took the gold, Canada the silver and America the bronze, but Mayer might be more problematical.
In March the torches were distributed to the countries through which the relay runners would pass.
In Paris some leading French sports people met and passed a resolution requesting the French governme
nt not to provide funds for the team. A former minister presided and one speaker claimed the Nazis were both exploiting the Games for propaganda and using them to raise money for themselves.
The French cycling authority, La Commission Sportive de l’Union Vélocipédique de France, allocating resources for 1936, decreed that their professionals would compete for a total of 107,000 francs in prize money but their Olympic team would receive no funding.
In Sweden 6,000 people prepared to go as spectators while their Olympic Committee prepared to send a large team (150), but two teams of gymnasts, each 600 strong, were also going to take part in non-competitive displays and the Swedish Olympic Committee made negative noises about that. After strong words they disclaimed all responsibility for them. ‘They will receive no pecuniary support, will not be members of the Olympic team and may not stay in the Olympic village.’29
Thereby hangs a tale and one, no doubt, among many. Werner Schwieger, born in 1913 in the Wedding district of Berlin, would take part in these gymnastic displays. In 1927 he went to art college and was taught to paint in watercolours. He went twice a week on a sort of scholarship. He worked, however, as a foundry pattern maker, creating wooden and metal patterns for industrial machines.
From the age of twelve he had been a member of his local gymnastics club before moving on to the club for all Berlin, where he also did track and field sports. He also went to a class painting the animals in the Natural History Museum and after more than a year the teacher said, ‘You can come and take part in my nude painting class.’ Schwieger was delighted because not everybody received invitations and he had visions of beautiful models. When he arrived for the first time he saw the model was aged between forty-five and fifty and had hanging breasts. He took his easel into a corner of the room and began to paint. After half an hour the teacher inspected his work and found Schwieger had been diplomatic. ‘Good Lord, what did you paint there? You are supposed to paint the breasts and behind as they are.’
From their members, sports clubs chose those whom they thought to be the most suitable for the gymnastics events and sent their names forward to the organising body. At twenty-three, Schwieger and his discretion would be among them. From his club ‘there was only me. The clubs were asked to nominate their best sportsmen and they wanted to name my friend Edmund because he was better than me but for some reason he did not go. So I did.’ He’d take part in the torch run, too.30
In Stockholm trade unions were enraged that some Swedish sailors, distributing anti-Nazi leaflets in German sea ports, had been given five years’ hard labour. The unions formed a committee to force a boycott and the Social Democrats asked any of their members who were competitors not to go; if they did, they risked losing their union membership.
The New York Times noted that the process of taking down offensive posters, as at Garmisch, had begun in Berlin and added cryptically that perhaps the way to get proper treatment for Jews would be to hold the Olympics every year and in Germany. Hitler, the newspaper concluded, normally ignored what the world thought but was sensitive to it while he had the Games.
The Olympic Village was almost ready and we have many testaments to its scale, efficiency and mode of working. Suffice to say here that it comprised single-storey brick cottages for the teams, a welcome building, a building for meetings, a restaurant, a lake and sauna, swimming pool and training track, all harmoniously blended into the countryside.
Local lad Fritz Wandt recalls:
from 1 May to 15 June the Olympic Village was opened to the public for sightseeing. There were double-decker buses that came from Berlin according to a fixed schedule and during that time about 400,000 people visited, including me. There were guided tours of the Village, carried out by Ehrenjungs [boys of honour]. Some time before, 400 boys and 200 girls were chosen from track and field associations and were sent to a school to be trained. They all had to pass an exam and of the boys 170 remained, of the girls 70 or 80, I think. They were to look after the sportsmen in the Village throughout the Games, run errands and they also did the guided tours. They were all dressed in white.
The tours lasted about 90 minutes. It was very detailed. I can remember that the tour started at the entrance and then we went along to the Waldsee [forest lake], and I can remember that the boy who did the tour – he was seventeen or eighteen – told us there had always been a little murky pool there. When it was enlarged and all the old sand and mud taken out they found gnats and dragonflies and other insects, and all were registered meticulously. The excavated earth was used to raise the level of the upper and lower village green in the middle of the Village. At the far end of the lake there was a Finnish sauna that had not been planned initially, but when the Finns asked for one it was built there.
After 15 June it was closed except, of course, for the people who worked there, gardeners, telephone people and others who had to do the rest of the construction work.31
The bell had been taken to the stadium on a flat railway truck and, at 7 a.m. on 11 May, the laborious process of hoisting it into position got under way. This was a quiet and, for some reason, secret operation with only about a hundred people present. ‘In order to reduce the weight, the different parts of the Bell (bell, yoke, clapper) were elevated separately.’ An electrical 5-ton winch accomplished this and at 7.55 a.m. it reached the top of the tower. By 9 a.m. it rested in its place, the ‘successful completion’ relayed to the Reich Minister of the Interior.32
It didn’t do to fail in Hitler’s Germany.
Notes
1. William Shirer, Berlin Diary (London, Hamish Hamilton, 1941), p. 30.
2. IOC Bulletin, February 1935.
3. Danzig, at various times in it history German, was now a Free City on the Baltic between the German provinces of Pomerania and East Prussia and they had a corridor of Polish land between them, too. Hitler fully intended to bring Danzig back into the Reich.
4. Lewis H. Carlson and John J. Fogarty, Tales of Gold (Chicago, IL, Contemporary Books, 1987), p. 135.
5. Deborah E. Lipstadt, Beyond Belief (New York, The Free Press, 1986) p. 66.
6. New York Times, 2 August 1935; quoted in Lipstadt, Beyond Belief, p. 66.
7. Lipstadt, Beyond Belief, p. 66.
8. William Johnson, All That Glitters Is Not Gold (New York, Putnam, 1972); quoted in Lipstadt, Beyond Belief, p. 66.
9. Quoted in Milly Mogulof, Foiled (Oakland, CA, RDR Books, 2002), p. 98.
10. La Suisse «face aux Jeux Olympiques de Berlin 1936», 2004, éditions de l’Université de Fribourg, in www.lexpress.ch/loisirs/livres/2004/jo.htm (visited 14 April 2005).
11. Margaret Bergmann Lambert, By Leaps and Bounds (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington DC, 2005).
12. Quoted in Lipstadt, Beyond Belief, p. 66.
13. Even with all imaginable caveats this is an astonishingly naive speech. For the effects of legalised anti-Semitism – down to Jewish mothers unable to buy milk for their children in some places – see William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (London, Pan Books, 1971), p. 291.
14. Shirer, Berlin Diary, p. 68.
15. Lipstadt, Beyond Belief, p. 67.
16. Quoted ibid.
17. Based on Mogulof, Foiled, pp. 112–15.
18. www.shoreac.org/THE%20COLUMBIA%20COMET.htm (visited 3 August 2005). Incidentally, Johnson did not go to Berlin.
A torn hamstring kept him out of competition for almost all of 1936.
19. Mogulof, Foiled, p. 118.
20. Ibid., p. 118.
21. Ibid., p. 112.
22. Ibid., p. 126.
23. Fritz Wandt; interview with Birgit Kubisch.
24. Marty Glickman with Stan Isaacs, Fastest Kid on the Block (Syracuse, NY, Syracuse University Press, 1996), p. 13.
25. The resolution against going to Berlin:
Whereas, on Nov 20, 1933, the Amateur Athletic Union of the United States in annual meeting a
ssembled, adopted a resolution calling upon the American Olympic Association to notify the International Olympic Committee and the German Government that American athletes would not be certified to the Olympic Games of 1936 unless German-Jewish athletes were permitted and encouraged in fact, as well as in theory to train, prepare for and participate in these games; and
Whereas the German sports authorities thereupon renewed their pledges to observe the Olympic code and not to discriminate against German-Jewish athletes in the selection of the German team directly to the Amateur Athletic Union of the United States and subsequently to the president of the American Olympic Committee; and
Whereas acceptance of the invitation by the American Olympic Committee to participate in these Games was made conditional upon the keeping to these pledges; and
Whereas in spite of their pledges the German sports authorities in the two years that have since elapsed have not permitted or encouraged German-Jewish athletes to train, prepare for and participate in the Games, but on the contrary have denied them as a group solely because of their race, not only an equal opportunity with non-Jewish athletes but also a fair and adequate opportunity to train and compete for places on the German Olympic team; and
Whereas the German sports authorities have thus made race a test of eligibility for the German Olympic team; and
Whereas, in order to further the war which it is waging upon Christianity and the Christian churches and for the purpose of gaining complete control over the minds and souls as well as the bodies of German youth, the German Government has made it impossible for Catholic and
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