South Africa: grilled steaks and fowl; menu in general similar to that of the English.
Switzerland: it was difficult in the beginning to prepare a menu suitable to all the members of the Swiss team, different groups preferring Italian, French and German dishes. As soon as all the kitchens were in operation however, special wishes could be gratified without difficulty.
U.S.A.: beefsteaks as well as lamb and veal daily for lunch and dinner; no form of fried meat except fowl; underdone steaks before competition; for breakfast, eggs with ham, bacon, oatmeal or hominy and orange juice; large quantities of fresh and stewed fruit; no kippered herrings; vegetables and baked potatoes with principal meals; sweet dishes including custards and ice cream.
6. Canada at the XI Olympiad 1936 Germany.
7. Werner Schwieger; interview with Birgit Kubisch.
8. Canada at the XI Olympiad 1936 Germany.
9. Ibid.
10. Esther Myers; interview by Matthew Walker of I, Witness to History, Wichita, Kansas for this book.
11. www.wichita.edu/dt/shockermag/show/dept.asp?_s=138&_d=11 – (visited 10 October 2005).
12. The XIth Olympic Games, Berlin, 1936 Official Report.
13. Canada at the XI Olympiad 1936 Germany.
14. Ibid.
15. Velma Dunn; interview with author.
16. Canada at the XI Olympiad 1936 Germany.
17. Stephanie Daniels and Anita Tedder, ‘A Proper Spectacle’ – Women Olympians 1900–1936 (Houghton Conquest, Beds., ZeNaNa Press, 2000), p. 109.
18. Ibid.
19. Esther Myers; interview by Walker of I, Witness to History for this book.
20. ‘A Proper Spectacle’, p. 109.
21. Canada at the XI Olympiad 1936 Germany.
22. Ibid.
23. Ibid.
24. Ibid.
25. www.athletics.mcgill.ca/varsity_sports_player_profile.ch2?athlete_id=959 - 39K (visited 19 October 2005).
26. Official US Olympic report.
27. Marty Glickman and Stan Isaacs, The Fastest Kid on the Block (Syracuse, NY, Syracuse University Press, 1996).
28. www.olympicwomen.co.uk/Berline.htm (visited 22 September 2005).
29. Velma Dunn; interview with author.
30. The New York Times (3 August 1936) reported that there was a ‘foolish controversy’ over whether the Americans gave the salute or lowered their flag. This may have been fuelled by the singular fact that the Americans in the crowd whistled – which to an American means venting approval and enthusiasm, but to a European signals derision.
The paper added that the talk of the town since the Opening Ceremony had been who did and who did not give the salute. The Germans were delighted because they thought – ‘erroneously’ – that the French did. The paper sought to clarify the situation. The Nazi salute involved throwing the right arm forward, the Olympic involved lifting the arm sideways to shoulder height. However, it added, to people on the move telling the difference is not easy.
31. This reconstruction of the parade is of necessity speculative in places. We know what some teams did (and did not do). Of others there is no record. The Official Berlin Report naturally stayed away from that in its text but did carry photographs of the teams passing by and, presumably, their photographers took pictures of any giving the Nazi salute. From that, I have deduced that the photographs showing no salute reflect the fact that those depicted did not give one. The Riefenstahl film is grainy, incomplete and taken from a distance.
The reader may regard this as arcane, but nothing about Hitler in the 1930s was that, and here, in microcosm, were how so many of the family of nations were trying to cope with him, standing there in his box looking down on them, and his Germany.
Incidentally, Russia – to become an Olympic powerhouse as the USSR after Hitler’s war – competed in the 1912 Games, but after the October Revolution the Communists regarded them as bourgeois and stayed away until Helsinki, 1952. No doubt the absence was partly due to the pathological fear of Soviet citizens being exposed to contact with foreigners, especially from the West. Even in Finland they had their own Olympic village, near the Russian border, and chaperones kept foreign contacts to an absolute minimum where they could not be completely avoided.
32. www.cishsydney2005.org/images/ST25-PAPER%20FOR%20ICHSC%20(SAKAUE).doc -
33. The Times, London, 1 August 1936.
34. www.tvhistory.tv/1936%20German%20Olympics%20TV%20Program.htm (visited 25 October 2005).
35. Paul Yogi Mayer, Jews and the Olympic Games (London, Vallentine Mitchell, 2005), p. 103.
36. The Official Report on the Games is, as we have seen, an astonishingly comprehensive and detailed record but – to use the word astonishing again – there are errors in the relay run statistics. I am indebted to a friend, Reg Plummer, for casting his knowing eye over them. To be pedantic (and why not, just this once?): the total for 24 July is out by 3 kilometres; a distance on 25 July needs to be increased by 10 kilometres to match the time allocated for its completion; 26 July is out by 0.2 of a kilometre; 29–30 July figures are out by 9 kilometres. I have, however, left the original totals alone for authenticity and simplicity – both valuable commodities when examining Hitler’s Reich.
Chapter 7
THE FÜHRER AND THE RUNNER
Do you really think that I will allow myself to be photographed shaking hands with a Negro?
Hitler to Baldur von Schirach
Cloud covered Berlin on that humid Sunday morning of 2 August as the thousands trekked towards the stadium, the gymnast Werner Schwieger among them. The sun tried to break through but never quite managed it.
A track and field competition is quite unlike anything else in sport because so many different events are contested, sometimes simultaneously. An Olympics is even more different because other sports are going on, inevitably scattered over a wide area, as well as the track and field. In the case of Berlin, that made the enormous results board at one end of the stadium invaluable.
Schwieger intended to savour as much as he could, coming every day. He travelled on the S-Bahn to the Reich Sports Field station. His competitor’s badge permitted free travel and entry to the various events, including the stadium, and he decided to take the week off work and studied the programme so he would know what was on each day. ‘I even smuggled in a workmate who had no pass. He was from my company and I managed to get him in. Section E [Block E] was especially reserved for participants so everyone who had an Olympic pass was allowed to sit there.’1
This Sunday, the fencers began their probing, reflexive art form; the modern pentathlon – the event that made perhaps the greatest demands on the athlete – the wrestling and the weight-lifting began, too, although the yachting at Kiel did not get under way until the Monday, a flame being taken there in an extension to the relay run.
In scale and variety this profusion can be slightly disconcerting, somewhat overwhelming, but centre stage, the heart, is always the Olympic stadium, that loop of track for the runners, that level infield enclosed within it for the throwers and jumpers. Almost every event is so simple that spectators barely need to know the rules, a simplicity that makes all the drama instantly accessible to every spectator. It generates a special sense of anticipation and those who trekked in, coming from the Reich Sports Field station and walking towards the stadium so large it seemed to fill the horizon, must have felt that. They were familiar with the full variety of what they were to witness from the morning’s newspapers and the incessant radio coverage.
10.30 a.m.
100 metres round 1
high jump eliminators
11 a.m.
shot-put eliminators
3 p.m.
100 metres round 2
high jump semi-finals
women’s javelin eliminators, final
4 p.m.
800 metres round 1
5.30 p.m.
10,000 metres fin
al
high jump final
shot-put semi-finals, final
Velma Dunn could get a taste of this diversity because ‘in fact our badge let us into the Olympic stadium every day when we were not practising or competing. We sat within fifteen, twenty feet of Hitler every day. He used the same Heil Hitler! that all of them did.’2
Neither Dunn nor the trekkers could have known that, almost immediately, the central story of the whole Games would unfold before them in the shape of the strong, lean frame of the athlete son of the poor Alabama sharecropper. (The other sports will be examined later but with exceptions – the fencing, swimming and the football – because amazing things happened in all three. The football match between Austria and Peru shattered the harmony of the Games and led to a mob stoning the Germany Embassy in Lima.)
As the trek to the stadium got under way, twelve telephone information desks came under siege in what would be a daily occurrence. Thousands of requests flowed in for information as well as for tickets.
When the first main number was dialled, the call went over one of the 20 exchange lines to one of the 12 information desks. The person dialling was automatically connected with an information operator who was disengaged at the moment. When all desks were busy, a special control light burned above each of the 12 desks. This warned the operators to deal quickly with the conversations in order to take the waiting calls. When an operator had finished giving information, the call light went out and by pressing a key the desk was made free for a new call.3
Like so much else, the efficiency of the information system acted as a microcosm of the whole Games, with every eventuality anticipated, explored, covered, rehearsed.
If one of the operators could not give information in a required foreign language, she pressed a key. This turned on lights on all the other desks, indicating the desired language. At the same time, the call was disconnected from the desk of the first operator and was automatically held. The first operator who had received the call was now free to answer other inquiries. Any other operator could take over the waiting call by pressing a key. When this happened, the lights on all the desks went out. In difficult cases, the operator could obtain further information through calling other offices in the building.4
The Summer Games had not been broadcast on the radio before, and transmitting the Winter Games showed what demands
would be likely be made on the resources of the broadcasting system – artistic, technical, and economic. The squeezing of the sporting and artistic events into the sixteen days of the Olympiad made it essential to work out a broadcasting scheme capable of transmitting the most exact Olympic programme ever drawn up. Only by this minute division was it possible to broadcast directly to the listeners of the world all the final contests of the Olympic Games in spite of the fact that the different groups of events were sometimes taking place simultaneously.5
Sometimes between fifteen and twenty German commentators, extensively trained for months by covering national and international sports events, sat poised and ready to speak in order that coverage could be switched between sports. They worked from a centre dubbed the ‘40-Countries Exchange’ – broadcasting to forty countries – and during the Games 3,000 transmissions came from it. The switchboard alone extended a distance of 21 metres.
The broadcasters had a lot to talk about. The 100 metres, like so many other Olympic events, operated on escalating stages of sudden death: initially twelve heats, the fastest two sprinters in each going forward to four second-round heats in mid-afternoon; the fastest three from each of these going to the semi-finals the next day with, an hour and a half after that, the six fastest competing in the final. Like every other individual Olympic event, it produced only one survivor, the one with the gold medal.
While the sprinters prepared, the high-jumpers limbered up. The positioning of the actual jump, near the stands, helped shield the jumpers from a wind recorded at 1.6 metres per second. The high jump worked to an even more brutal formula: in the initial round anyone who did not reach 1.85 metres faced immediate elimination.
The Olympic organisers had addressed the problem of timing, so crucial in track events but particularly the sprinting. Each day stopwatches, bought in Switzerland and ‘of the same Omega quality that had been used at the Games of 1928 and 1932’, were handed out to officials for ‘all the contests in which timing by the hand is prescribed’. A watchmaker from the factory and a technical institute checked them daily for accuracy.6 A timing camera, on a 40-foot tower to cover the full width of the track, provided back-up. It recorded the positions at the finishing line by taking a hundred photographs a second and slow-motion film could be used for reference in cases of disagreement.
A sensitive contact is attached to the pistol and through the starting shot an impulse of current is released, setting the time-recording mechanism in action. This mechanism is coupled with the slow-motion camera at the finishing line. The camera taking the photos remains out of action until the runners are approaching the finish. The camera then takes the photographs at the finish and records the time which has elapsed from the beginning of the contest. In order to deliver the photos in the shortest possible time to enable the judges to arrive at a decision, a special quick-development film was manufactured permitting cinematographic photographs to be thrown on the screen in the judges’ lodge ten to twelve minutes after the runners had passed the finishing line.7
In Berlin, very suddenly and very deliberately, the full force of current technological innovation replaced everything that had gone before. Many competitors, awestruck by the fact and scale of these advances, sensed that nothing would be the same again because there could be no going back.
Owens ran in the twelfth heat although the crowd, naturally, watched for Erich Borchmeyer, a versatile sprinter from Stuttgart who had been to Los Angeles, in the eighth as well. Cyril Holmes (inevitably known as C.B.) from Bolton, Lancashire was versatile, too, because he played rugby for England. In Berlin he is reputed to have worn shoes so light they were designed to last only a single race. He once said ‘the faster a sprinter moves his arms, the faster his legs will move’. How fast would he move in heat eleven? Not fast enough. He would come second.
Inevitably the fact that Owens went last meant each of the first eleven heats became a ratchet heightening the anticipation of the 100,000 in the stadium notch by notch. They would all know what Owens had to do.
First heat: Lennart Strandberg (Sweden)
10.7 seconds
Second heat: Chris Berger (Holland)
10.8 seconds
Third heat: Wijnand van Beveren (Holland)
10.8 seconds
Fourth heat: Gyula Gyenes (Hungary)
10.7 seconds
Fifth heat: McPhee (Canada)
10.8 seconds
Sixth heat: Martinus Theunissen (South Africa)
10.7 seconds
Seventh heat: Metcalfe (USA)
10.8 seconds
Eighth heat: Borchmeyer (Germany)
10.7 seconds
Ninth heat: Wykoff (USA)
10.6 seconds
Tenth heat: Martinus ‘Tinnus’ Osendarp (Holland)
10.5 seconds
Eleventh heat: Paul Haenni (Switzerland)
10.7 seconds
The Olympic record, 10.3 seconds set by Eddie Tolan (USA) in the Los Angeles Games, had comfortably survived this first round of assaults. The sprinters for the twelfth heat came out and, as all the others had done, dug small holes to give their feet purchase as they burst forward from the gun. Owens was inevitably of his time: a running vest, shorts, running shoes and no socks, strong but in no sense muscle-bound. He had short hair and the easy, loose movements of a natural athlete as he took up the starting position. A Japanese, a Brazilian, a Belgian and a Maltese took up their positions, too. A millisecond after the gun fired he moved in his compulsive, clockwork lope, the legs pumping faster and faster and faster. The others melted back from him.
10.3 se
conds – the record equalled.
He beat the Japanese Sasaki by seven-tenths of a second – an eternity in the world of tenths.
In the background nine high-jumpers went out with the bar at 1 metre 70, including the Briton Stanley West who, in his second jump, ‘employed the “Western roll” and strained himself badly. He had to be carried off.’8 A further nine went at 1 metre 80.
The shot-putters were out, facing their own brutal elimination if they did not reach the statutory 14.5 metres.
Events, names, times and distances came at speed and with bewildering profusion, the authentic Olympic experience.
The high-jumpers locked into their semi-finals, wind from the west increasing in strength.
The women’s javelin began, into the wind.
Helen Stephens came across Stella Walsh in the treatment centre. They gazed at each other but did not speak.
The anticipation heightened at the second round of the men’s 100 metres: four heats of six runners and the fastest three in each going forward to the semi-finals. Owens went in the second heat.
The first:
Strandberg
10.5 seconds
Osendarp
10.6 seconds
Wykoff
10.6 seconds
A light shower lowered the temperature as the runners in the second heat prepared. Owens moved around the area behind the starting line, hitching his shorts up – an unconscious, instinctive gesture. Hands on hips, he took a couple of deep breaths and rocked his torso, keeping it in constant motion. He looked around but his body language suggested he wasn’t seeing anything.
Hitler's Olympics Page 19
