Hitler's Olympics

by Christopher Hilton

  Jesse Owens, Berlin 2000 Olympic bid

  Those August days, before the great gathering dispersed and dreamed of Tokyo – the next celebration of a peaceful world at play – some of the American athletes went into Berlin to have a drink, Cornelius Johnson among them. According to Archie Williams, the 400 metres gold medal winner in Berlin, ‘ol’ Corny was doing pretty good’. which must be affectionate shorthand for had had a beer or two. They got into a taxi and when they arrived at wherever they were going – presumably somewhere to catch a bus back to the station to catch a train back to the Village – had to pass the hat round to raise the fare. Ol’ Corny was nobody’s fool. Ol’ Corny slept right through.1

  These young men, whose average age Williams estimated at twenty-one or twenty-two, could look forward to Tokyo and the Games after that, 1944, wherever they would be. They could not know Hitler nursed an urge to appropriate the Olympic movement, as so much else. Speer designed a stadium to accommodate 400,000 and Hitler came to Speer’s offices to examine a large, precise model of it.2 Conversation moved to the Olympics and Speer pointed out, as he had done before, that his track and field area did not conform to Olympic measurements. Hitler, voice unaltered and by definition matter-of-fact, explained that after Tokyo every Games would be in Germany, and they would decide the measurements. To those who wield it, this is what power means. The building schedule projected completion of the stadium in time for the Nazi Party Rally planned for 1945.

  What makes Hitler so bewildering a subject is that when not planning to seize the world, and seize the Olympic movement along the way, he could be utterly charming. The German pin-up javelin thrower Tilly Fleischer remembered, ‘I was his table companion with Leni Riefenstahl at the closing banquet and he was very natural, knew a lot about sport and at the meal he ate Mixpikals [cold vegetables] and drank only water.’3

  Rie Mastenbroek went back to Rotterdam by train where a huge crowd turned out to greet her, but there was a darker side. Her coach tried to adopt her and they fell out, her career over.

  The Australian team left on 17 August, travelling to London. There they were given afternoon tea at Australia House, went to the Cenotaph and placed a wreath to commemorate Australia’s war dead. They had done the same in Berlin.

  The day after, following a banquet in Berlin where Von und zu Gilsa was praised for his work in ensuring the success of the Games, Wolfgang Fürstner returned to his barracks and, using his service pistol, shot himself. Since he was an officer, the German Army insisted on ‘a funeral with full military honours’.4 This must have enraged the Nazis, who wanted the whole thing hushed up, because foreign correspondents found out and wrote about it. Soon enough the walls of the Village became a canvas scrawled with obscenities about Fürstner the Jew.

  The Village itself became the Olympia-Lazarett Döberitz, a military hospital, and the Heeres-Infanterieschule, a Wehrmacht training centre.

  Owens and Snyder left London for New York. By then Owens had $200 in his hand because his former employer in Cleveland and the black owner of a barber’s shop had heard of his financial plight and sent him an international bankers’ draft. They put in $100 each.5 Owens had been receiving all manner of commercial offers and one can only wonder what impact they had on him, a man who had never known money, when they all turned out to be worthless.

  The Canadian team went to London and, reportedly, at their hotel other residents ‘began raising a fuss because they were uncomfortable with the thought of staying in the same hotel as a black man’, in the words of Phil Edwards. The team moved elsewhere. One of the women fencers, Cathleen Hughes-Hallett, said, ‘If this hotel is too good for him, it’s too good for me.’6

  The main body of the American team left Hamburg on the President Roosevelt.

  Velma Dunn Ploessel ‘went to the University of Southern California. I enrolled immediately. Some of the athletes went on little tours up to Scandinavia and so on but I went right to college. I was a physical education major and at the end of the first week of classes the head of the physical education department called me into her office and said “I hope you are not going to continue competing because it is so unladylike.” So you can see things have changed a little bit. I mean, what I was doing is one of the most ladylike things a woman can do.’

  The Australian team sailed for home two days after the Americans.

  The American athletes chosen for the tour to Scandinavia arrived at Oslo airport and saw a huge sign

  WELCOME JESSE OWENS

  In vain did they explain, then insist, that Owens wasn’t coming and at one point Archie Williams signed himself ‘Owens’ to smooth over a difficult moment. In the athletics meeting Towns found the track fast, made a tremendous start to the 110-metre hurdles and led by the first hurdle. As he crossed the line he glanced back and saw the next hurdler still at the final hurdle. He heard a lot of talking but that, of course, was in Norwegian. Eventually someone told him in English that he had broken the world record and for a moment he imagined a time of 14.0 seconds, 0.2 quicker than Berlin. In fact, he had done an astonishing 13.7, so astonishing it stood for fourteen years and no Olympian beat it until Melbourne, 1956.

  Meanwhile, Williams & Co. persuaded someone to ring the team hotel and explain to Towns that there had been a terrible mistake – instead of ten hurdles, only nine had been put up so his record didn’t count. So shaken was Towns by the news that he remained in a state of shock until the next day, when the truth emerged. He’d got ten out of ten; there was no mistake.7

  The final contingent of the American team sailed from Hamburg on 26 August on the Manhattan.

  Glickman had been busy and it seems that he did not feel tired at all. Following the White City meeting he journeyed to Scotland where he took part in a relay and a faintly outrageous 100-yard handicap. He had to start so far back he stood on the grass beyond the track. From there even he could not win. He went to a meeting in Hamburg where he beat Draper and Borchmeyer, went to a triangular meeting in Paris against France and Japan, and beat Wykoff.8

  Because his father and mother were working, when the Manhattan docked in New York Glickman caught the subway from the pier to his home in Brooklyn. He’d cover that in three words: no big deal.

  Soon after, a ticker-tape parade in New York welcomed the Olympic heroes, Owens in the leading car with the mayor, LaGuardia. It was, Glickman would insist, a happy day nicely rounded off because they all went to a nightclub.

  ‘When I came home,’ John Woodruff recalls, ‘they gave a parade for me in my hometown celebrating my victory.’9 Yet even the tremendous achievements of the black athletes did not alter the general climate of discrimination. Much later, Woodruff was due to run at a meeting in Dallas and the athletes went by train, of course, but officials said ‘that we black athletes couldn’t eat in the dining car. Well, we got together and told them that, if we couldn’t eat in the dining car with the rest of the people, we were not going. They lifted that requirement.’ When they reached Dallas they couldn’t stay in a regular hotel but instead ‘had to go to the local black YMCA’.

  Glickman and Owens drifted apart. It happens. They had their lives to lead. Glickman did know, of course, that Owens was still subjected to racial indignities. He had to sit in the back of buses and could not get into Midtown hotels in New York, although the Paramount let him in provided he used the freight elevator to go to his room. Glickman was distressed to see Owens, now professional, running exhibitions – sometimes against horses. Glickman did know about Owens’s ‘sexual activities’ because whenever he met him Owens always had a date or headed off on one.

  Avery Brundage gave an extensive Official Report based around what he claimed were ‘so many misleading stories and malicious reports’. He began by explaining that the selection of a large group of human beings in haste and regardless of any factor other than competitive ability is bound to throw up problems with some of them. A day after the Manhattan sailed for Germany everyone had been assembled and reminded
of their responsibilities, especially since the world would be watching them. Some, however, strayed. One of those indulged in ‘continued excessive drinking and insubordination, despite repeated warnings’ and as a consequence the Olympic Committee decided unanimously to dismiss them. (Brundage did not say her for whatever reason. Everybody must have known perfectly well it was Eleanor Holm.) To prevent this distracting the other competitors, a veil of silence had been drawn over the affair by all the team officials and no more than a basic statement released. Brundage explained that ‘the Committee’s action was misinterpreted and became the signal for a torrent of criticism’.

  Brundage then cleared up the mystery of the two boxers who were also dismissed when the team arrived, although this was glossed over as homesickness. That had been ‘invented to protect the boxers who, while collecting souvenirs, had appropriated several expensive cameras’. The police became involved and the Committee had done well to get the boxers out of Germany.

  Brundage then turned to the 4 × 400 relay and said vehemently that an ‘erroneous’ report suggested Glickman and Stoller – again Brundage did not name them – were not selected for religious reasons. ‘This report was absurd.’ The sprinters, Brundage suggested, only went to Berlin as substitutes since the four selected finished first, second, third and fourth in the Randall’s Island trials. That they broke the world record in Berlin vindicated the policy completely.10

  The nine Chinese wushu demonstrators toured Denmark, Sweden, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Austria and Italy where ‘they were highly acclaimed for their performances with bare hands or such ancient weapons as swords, cudgels and spears. Some of the performers later became well-known wushu masters, professors or leaders of national organisations.’

  The thirty-nine Chinese observers, many physical education teachers, toured Europe too, looking at sports facilities, sports management and methods of training, knowledge they used when they got home. The Chinese team, of course, ‘failed to collect a single medal. All were eliminated in the preliminaries except Fu Baolu in the pole vault, holder of the then national record of 4.015 metres, whose best performance fell below 4 metres at the Berlin Olympics, and who joined the air force soon after his return home and was killed during the War of Resistance against Japan. The Chinese made an even poorer showing in other events, finishing the marathon race, for instance, one hour behind the winner. “We were a far cry from many countries in the results and athletic abilities,” wrote the Chinese Delegation in its report. “We were ridiculed as having brought back nothing but a duck’s egg.”’11

  The Indian hockey team went on a post-Olympic tour and got back to Bombay on 29 September. In Germany they’d generated so much enthusiasm they needed chaperones at the railway stations to prevent the crowds overwhelming them. Now on the Ballard Pier they saw a welcoming committee of only two people. As the team came ashore plump raindrops fell – like tears, someone thought.

  Many did turn their gaze towards Tokyo in 1940, but the twin themes flowed again. The month before the Berlin Olympics, Japan and Germany had opened negotiations towards an Anti-Comintern Pact, the Comintern an international organisation working for a communist ascendancy. The two countries signed the agreement in November 1936.

  The Pact was an important contribution to the Second World War, as was Mussolini’s declaration of the emergence of the Rome–Berlin axis three weeks earlier. The Berlin Olympics, then, may have provided a springboard for this diplomatic process. In fact, Tokyo might not have become the host city of the next Olympics had not Japan secured support from Italy and Germany. Rome was Tokyo’s strongest rival but Mussolini agreed to Japan’s request that Rome withdraw in February 1935.

  Germany supported Tokyo at the general meeting of the IOC in Berlin in July 1936, which disappointed the Finnish consul. Six months previously, Hiroshi Oshima, Japan’s ambassador to Italy, had attempted to conclude negotiations on the Anti-Comintern Pact. At this time, he had also spoken to the chairman of the Olympic Organisation Committee in Berlin about the possibility that Tokyo might hold the 1940 games.12

  It begs a question. Because the domestic coverage of the Games produced ‘national frenzy’ in Japan, did they cement political relations with Nazi Germany? Generally, ‘the Japanese media often focused on Hitler and reported on the success of the Games. The Olympics were seen as a particularly wonderful festival for Japan, the next host country. However, most Japanese media did not directly praise Nazism itself, nor did they portray Nazi Germany as Japan’s best friend. Germany was simply a great host country of the Olympics.’13 The natural focus, just like in every other country, remained firmly on their own competitors.

  It begs a further question. If the Berlin Olympics were deliberately orchestrated as a paean of praise for the Nazi regime, did participation have a similar effect in Japan?

  We can say with a fair degree of certainty that the Olympics worked to integrate Japanese people into the Imperial system through nationalistic symbols and ceremonies, such as the national flag, national anthem, financial aid from the Emperor himself to the Japanese Olympic Team, and the Team’s worshipping at the Imperial Palace and Shinto Shrines.

  On the other hand, the Olympics played an exactly opposite role in Korea under Japanese occupation. Both Korean marathon runners who won medals … were hailed as national heroes in Korea. [Sohn’s] contribution surely encouraged Korean national pride and excited hostility toward Japan.14

  Once the 1936 Olympics had ended, and the great gathering dispersed, the Nazis could give free rein to their racial and gender obsessions without any thought for treading on Olympic sensibilities. One German writer, Richard Ungewitter, composed a long report advancing the argument that competitive sport was no place for a woman. He dispatched this to, among others, von Tschammer und Osten, von Schirac, Minister of the Interior Frick and Rudolf Hess as well as ‘several doctors, and racial hygienists’.

  Ungewitter expressed alarm that the women’s athletic achievements were too close to the men’s, charging it was ‘unnatural’ and threatened motherhood. Comparing world records in several events, he wrote, ‘Discus: Men 50.48, women 47.63 m … 100m: Men Negro 10.4, Women 11.5 sec … Freestyle swim: Men 1:05:9, Women 1:06:6 min.’ He declared that black men had surpassed too many records set by ‘Aryans’ and proposed that in future competitions blacks be banned.15

  He went further, maintaining that ‘women’s voices grew deeper, breasts became flatter, pelvises became narrower, and stomach muscles became tighter from strenuous athletic training. He touted these changes as proof that masculine traits developed in women who participated in intense athletics. Furthermore, Ungewitter charged that these physical changes made childbirth more difficult.’16 However, one contributor to the publication Die Frau responded by pointing out that women were not trying to compete with men but with other women and that the two sexes divided naturally, complementing each other.17

  Women have competed in the Olympics ever since.

  The fencer Helene Mayer returned to the United States and became an American citizen. In 1937 she won the World Championships in Paris, defeating Elek-Schacherer.

  Gretel Bergmann knew, in those ominous August days, that she had ‘to get away from all this. There was a big Jewish population in Laupheim and everybody felt sorry for me blah blah blah. So I went away for two weeks – under an assumed name, of course, because Jews couldn’t go into any hotels. There I decided I have to get out.’ She left Germany in May 1937 for America and she didn’t look back.

  ‘Here I am, come to the land of the free and these poor people [the blacks] were so discriminated against it was unbelievable. We made it our business to really fight that. Jesse Owens experienced it. Can you believe that? We met the 800 metre winner Woodruff a couple of times and he kept telling us he went to the University of Pittsburgh – they weren’t allowed in any restaurants even after he won the medal. His professor was being nasty to him because he missed a couple of weeks of school – but that was because he won a
medal for America! I mean, you can’t believe it.’18

  Bergmann won the US high jump and shot-put in 1937, the high jump again in 1938. She helped get a fellow Jewish athlete Bruno Lambert – a sprinter, although not evidently top class – out of Germany and they married and so she became Margaret Lambert (Gretel is a nickname). She brought in money by working at a women’s weight-loss salon in Manhattan, and swears she worked so hard as a masseuse she lost more weight than the customers.

  Pierre de Coubertin remained a controversial figure. It seems he tried to orchestrate a Nobel Peace Prize for himself in 1928 and 1929, getting Theodor Lewald to support the attempt as well as the German minister of foreign affairs, Gustav Stresemann. A further campaign followed towards the end of 1935, launched by a member of the French government who sought support from Mussolini’s finance minister, a Japanese senator and the German press. The boycott campaigns from November 1933 certainly harmed the attempt and the Nobel Prize went instead to Carl von Ossietzky, a German journalist subsequently sent to a concentration camp because of his opposition to Hitler.

  It’s hardly surprising that the Axis newspapers celebrated de Coubertin in September 1937 when he died. La Stampa, the Turin paper, described him as ‘the authentic founder of the modern Olympics, with lofty spirit, a man of action’.

  The Corriere della Sera pointed out that he had recorded a message to those who were going to run with the flame from Greece to Berlin: ‘No nation, no class, no profession is excluded.’

  De Coubertin responded to a magazine article in L’Auto on 4 September 1936 which denounced the Games as ‘disfigured’ and spoke of the ‘farce of the Olympic oath’. He said, ‘What, the Games disfigured, the Olympic idea sacrificed to propaganda? It’s entirely false! The great [grandoise] success of the Games in Berlin has magnificently served the Olympic ideal. Don’t people come and talk to me about a Games accessible to women … and adolescents. For them there is a second kind of sport, physical education which will make them healthy. But for the Games, my Games, I want to hear a long cry of passion. At Berlin people thrilled to an idea which we must not judge but which excited the passion which I constantly seek. In another way, the Germans organised the technical side with all the care you could wish and you cannot reproach them at all for disloyalty to sport. In such circumstances, how do you want me to repudiate the Games?’