Berlin 1936

by Oliver Hilmes

  In Dresden, some 110 miles away from the Olympic Village, Victor Klemperer shakes his head in irritation. The morning papers revolt him. For weeks, the only topic has been the Olympic Games. The Nazified press in the Third Reich lies without compunction, but Klemperer finds the situation particularly awful in August 1936. Everywhere he looks, he reads about how peaceful and friendly things are in Berlin, about how the German people and their sport-loving Führer are one, and how marvelous life in Nazi Germany is. The Berlin Games are the greatest success story and the best Olympics the world has ever known, says the regime, praising itself. One newspaper reaches for the superlatives and gushes about an imminent “Hitler-inspired German Renaissance.”

  Language like this makes Klemperer see red. He was a respected professor of Romance languages who held a chair at Dresden’s Technical University from 1920 to 1935, when he was fired for being Jewish. Now without income, he often doesn’t know how to pay his bills. He has every reason to view what’s going on in Berlin with disgust. “The honor of a whole people depends on whether a single ethnic comrade can jump ten centimeters higher than anyone else,” he scoffs in his diary. Thinking back to Helene Mayer, who won a silver medal for Germany last week and performed the Hitler salute at the awards ceremony, he’s dumbfounded: “I don’t know which is more shameless: the fact that she competed as a German for the Third Reich or the fact that the Third Reich laid claim to her achievement.” Klemperer sums up the real tragedy of the champion fencer. It is precisely because of her Jewish background, not despite it, that Mayer is part of Nazi Germany’s Olympic team. Mayer, an athlete with no interest in politics, who just wants to compete in her sport, has become party to a nasty game whose dimensions she herself cannot comprehend. Her story is that of a boycotted boycott.

  Shortly after Hitler assumed power in 1933, protest movements formed in Britain and the United States began to press the Nazi regime about whether it would allow Jewish athletes from Germany to take part in the 1936 Olympics. Should that not be guaranteed, the protestors proposed, the international community must boycott the Games. The conflict was most unwelcome to the International Olympic Committee. Henri de Baillet-Latour absolved himself of any responsibility. No one was allowed to intervene in the internal affairs of another country, the count argued. If Germany didn’t want to put forward any Jewish athletes, that was Germany’s business. It was a facile argument, and Baillet-Latour underestimated public opinion in the United States, which refused to be mollified by clichés about national sovereignty. The IOC and its president had a lot to lose. The United States was the greatest sporting nation on earth. The Games would dramatically lose athletic and political importance if the Americans stayed at home. Moreover, an American boycott would have sent a powerful signal and perhaps would have led other countries to skip the Games as well.

  In the autumn of 1934, with public pressure increasing, the American Olympic Committee visited Berlin to check out the status of Jewish athletes in the Third Reich. The investigation was carried out by a lone man: Avery Brundage, a former decathlete who had made billions as a construction magnate and now served as the president of the AOC. Brundage stayed in the capital of the Third Reich for six days, inspecting construction on the Olympic Stadium and other facilities, visiting a number of museums and generally enjoying life. He had little time left over for meeting representatives of Jewish athletics. When they told him that Jews were no longer allowed to join German sports clubs, he replied, “In my club in Chicago Jews are not permitted either.” For Brundage, that was that. Upon returning to the United States, America’s most powerful athletics official reported, against all evidence, that German Jews were happy with their sporting status and recommended that his colleagues from the AOC accept Germany’s invitation to attend the 1936 Olympics. But the public outcry continued, so that in the summer of 1935, the IOC felt compelled to send a delegation of its own to Berlin.

  Charles Hitchcock Sherrill was already retired when he was asked to lead this sensitive diplomatic mission. The 68-year-old was a longtime member of the IOC and an experienced sports official, who was as uninterested in the situation of Jews in Germany as Avery Brundage was. His main qualification for this task was something completely different: a conspicuous personal fascination with Adolf Hitler. As long ago as June 1933, in a letter to the New York Times, Sherrill had praised the newly elected German chancellor as the strongest man in Europe. On 24 August 1935, when Sherrill was received by Hitler for an hour-long conversation, it was a dream come true. The retired army general seemed to feel he’d been called to something higher. Perhaps he saw himself as the new U.S. ambassador in Berlin. In any case, he wrote up a report on his meeting with Hitler and sent it to none other than Franklin D. Roosevelt. Sherrill raved about Hitler’s personal modesty, his impressive physical condition and his upstanding character. We can only imagine what Roosevelt thought about this missive. Be that as it may, Sherrill also had a copy of his report delivered via the German embassy in Washington to Goebbels’s Propaganda Ministry, just so no one in Berlin could have any doubts as to his warm feelings for the Nazi leader.

  In his conversation with Sherrill, Hitler made no concessions. Jews were not being discriminated against, he lied. They were merely being treated as separate from the German people and thus could not be members of the German Olympic team. Sherrill pressed the Führer on the issue. He was Germany’s friend, he said, and wanted only the best for the country. But if the Führer insisted on this position, the IOC would take the Games away from Berlin. Hitler snarled that, in that case, the Third Reich would stage a purely German Olympic Games, but that was just a bluff. In reality, Hitler had a vested interest in the Americans taking part in “his” Games. Sherrill knew that too, and proposed a diplomatic escape route. The regime should call upon the Jewish sports federations in Germany to nominate a representative for the German team. Sherrill only made his suggestion obliquely, but the idea of “token Jews” was born. Hitler promised to review the idea and, as a sign of his regard, invited Sherrill to be a guest of honor at that year’s Nuremberg Party Rally. Sherrill gratefully accepted.

  During his four-day stay in that city later in 1935 the former general had further talks with Reich Sports Leader von Tschammer und Osten, who warmed more and more to Sherrill’s idea. Of course Jewish athletes would be accepted into the German team, so ran the new line of the regime, as long as they would “measure up to the Olympic standard.” By the time Sherrill departed Nuremberg, one candidate seemed to have been chosen: Helene Mayer. On 21 September 1935, Tschammer und Osten invited her to join the German team. Sherrill advised the Reich sports leader to send his invitation via registered mail. That way, whether the athlete accepted the invitation or not, Tschammer und Osten could show that he respected the IOC’s principles.

  Back in the United States, Sherrill gave the regime in Berlin the expected clean bill of health, saying that the treatment of Jews in Germany was as little his business as the “lynching of Negroes in the American South” was. He even directed a veiled threat toward Jews in the United States. In a communiqué to Berlin, the German news agency quoted Sherrill as saying: “In the United States we have half a million U.S. athletes preparing for the Olympics and a trip to Germany. If these athletes suddenly see that around 5 million Jews out of an American population of 120 million try, and even succeed, in robbing them of a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, we’ll surely experience anti-Semitic difficulties that will last for many years.” In other words, Sherrill implied, Jews should beware of spoiling the party. No doubt, Sherrill’s views made him quite popular in Berlin.

  And Helene Mayer? She was under pressure from all sides not to accept the German invitation. The fact that she did in the end was, she said, down to homesickness and wanting to see her family. In her answer to Tschammer und Osten, she stressed that it was important for her to compete for Germany as a German citizen. As a “half-Jew,” Mayer was a more acceptable alternative than Gretel Bergmann, whose name had also bee
n mentioned in conjunction with the German team. The high jumper was in excellent form, well up to the Olympic standard, but two weeks before the Games, Tschammer und Osten informed her that her performances weren’t good enough. Bergmann’s real problem was that she’s a “full Jew.”

  Including Helene Mayer in the German team took the wind out of the sails of the international movement to boycott the Olympics. The American team accepted the invitation to go to Germany, and now nothing could prevent the XI Olympic Games from taking place. Would things have been different if Mayer had declined the Nazis’ invitation? The United States and other countries might possibly have refused to travel to Berlin. Perhaps Hitler’s Games would have never happened at all.

  In any case, that’s what George S. Messersmith, America’s ambassador to Austria, thinks. He doesn’t trust the Nazis as far as he could throw one, and in his dispatches to Washington he tirelessly warns against the German regime. In mid-November 1935, he wrote to Secretary of State Cordell Hull: “There are many wise and well-informed observers in Europe who believe that the holding or the non-holding of the Olympic Games in Berlin in 1936 will play an important part in determining political developments in Europe. I believe that this view of the importance of the Olympic Games being held in Berlin is not exaggerated…I believe that our dignity and prestige and our adherence to the ideals of fair-play and the non-political character of sport make it necessary and imperative that the American Olympic Committee revise its attitude and make it clear what the real position is in Germany.” But no one heeded Messersmith’s words.

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  In exile in London, the writer and former star journalist for the liberal Berliner Tageblatt newspaper Alfred Kerr writes his poem “Nazi Olympics”:

  A racist storm of outrage

  Runs through the brown-shirt hordes

  Three Negroes took center stage

  And set the world records.

  The Nazis came up short

  (Olympic laughter—snort!)

  The keeper of the racial faith

  Holds his hands before his face.

  Three Negroes—what a disgrace.

  What will “mein Führer” say?

  Silent the German fencers and their swords

  (Olympic laughter—snort!)

  The Führer groans: “These Olympic Games

  (so much has gotten outside)

  Are, just like the French state,

  Thoroughly Jew- and Negrified.”

  The Führer sighs: God, He who’s just in deed and word

  (Olympic laughter—snort!).

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  Hermann Göring is the last of the Renaissance men—at least in his own estimation. It’s not clear precisely what he means when he uses the phrase, although if we equate that period in human history with brutality, excess boastfulness, gluttony, greed and corruption, then, yes, Göring is indeed the last Renaissance man. And that self-conferred appellation is only one of his titles. The others include Prussian Interior Minister, Prussian State Premier, Deputy Reich Representative in Prussia, President of the Prussian State Council, President of the Reichstag, Reich Forestry Minister, Reich Hunting Minister, Reich Aviation Minister, Reich Commissioner for Air Travel, President of the Reich Aerial Defense Association, Colonel General, Supreme Commander of the Luftwaffe and many, many more. For every one of his offices, Göring draws a separate salary, and for each of his functions he has a special uniform designed by himself. Sometimes he appears attired entirely in white, sometimes in light blue, sometimes in a reddish-brown doublet with baggy sleeves, green boots and a spear in his hand. In private, he prefers kimonos of violet silk that flatteringly conceal his considerable bulk. Göring loves accessories. He wears gemstone rings and golden daggers and swords. Meetings with tailors, hairdressers, jewelers, perfumiers and art dealers are all part of the Renaissance man’s regular duties.

  Tonight, Göring is throwing a gigantic Olympics party in the garden of the Reich Aviation Ministry, playing the lord of the manor in the massive square building on the corner of Leipziger Strasse and Wilhelmstrasse, which was only recently finished after a record construction time of eighteen months. Money is no object here, and international visitors are once again being pampered. Along with the diplomatic corps and foreign government officials, the guest list includes members of the national and international Olympic committees, ministers from the German regime, representatives of the NSDAP and the Wehrmacht, artists, athletes and aristocrats from home and abroad.

  Heralds and fanfare-playing musicians clad in medieval garb announce the opening of the festivities. Ballet artists from the State Opera perform a dance, then the master of the house opens up the previously sealed-off rear portion of the garden, revealing the miniature reconstruction of a village, replete with a hotel, a post office, a bakery, a shooting range, a mill, a Rhine river steamboat sailing by the famous Drachenfels cliff, fairground stands and a carousel. The French ambassador, François-Poncet, can’t believe his eyes when the portly Göring—clad in a white fantasy uniform and wearing diamond rings—climbs upon a little white horse and rides the merry-go-round. How repulsive!

  Of course, such extravagance comes at a price. The food alone, which has been ordered from Horcher’s, costs a small fortune. The American ambassador, William E. Dodd, estimates the total cost of the evening at around 40,000 reichsmarks (100,000 dollars), but that’s probably an underestimate. Göring is pulling out all the stops to live up to his larger-than-life reputation. “Max Reinhardt could not have done it better,” a bowled-over Chips Channon notes in his diary. “ ‘There’s never been anything like this since the days of Louis Quatorze.’ ‘Not since Nero,’ I retorted, but actually it was more like the Fetes of Claudius, but with the cruelty left out.” The only one who’s at pains not to be impressed is Goebbels. “Göring’s garden party,” the propaganda minister notes in his diary. “A lot of people. Somewhat stiff and cold. I conversed with the German female runners who were so unlucky on Sunday. Otherwise only there for a short time.” Goebbels’s big day is still ahead.

  EXCERPT FROM THE DAILY INSTRUCTIONS OF THE REICH PRESS CONFERENCE: “With regard to Saturday’s football final between Austria and Italy, the Italians should be made more the focus than previously.”

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  When Eleanor Holm Jarrett boarded the USS Manhattan in New York and set sail with over 300 other male and female athletes on 15 July 1936, she was one of the heroines of American sport. In seven years of competition, the swimmer is undefeated. Now she was taking part in her third Olympics, after Amsterdam in 1928 and Los Angeles in 1932. That alone could be a record. Everything Jarrett touches seems to turn to gold, even in show business, where she also wins over the public’s hearts and their dollars. She takes the stage with her husband, the bandleader Art Jarrett, and wearing a white bathing suit, a Stetson and high heels sings the song “I’m an Old Cowhand from the Rio Grande.” But by the time the week’s passage was over and Jarrett set foot on German soil in Hamburg, her sports career was history, and her reputation ruined. So what happened out at sea?

  During the Atlantic crossing Jarrett regularly had a drink or two too many, spent her nights playing cards with journalists, smoked and generally ignored onboard decorum. During the night before the ship was due to land in Germany, she went particularly wild. After another drinking session, she was too disoriented to find her own cabin and stumbled into the quarters of the female team’s chaperone. Jarrett slurred her words and joked that she was training with the help of some champagne and a few cigarettes, but the governess didn’t find it funny. When Jarrett tried to get into bed with her, she called the team doctor, who diagnosed acute alcohol abuse. She only took a few sips of champagne, Jarrett said in her defense, but Avery Brundage had had enough. Jarrett had gone too far, the AOC president declared, and threw her off the U.S. Olympic team.

  But if Brundage hoped that he’d got shot of the capricious swimmer, he wa
s wrong. Jarrett’s dishonorable discharge from the team put her on the front pages of the tabloids, and the sports star became a glamour girl. Americans love such dramatic twists of fate. Before she even left Hamburg, Jarrett received a $5,000 offer to cover the Olympics for a press agency. She agreed and immediately felt she was in her element. The newly made journalist resided at a luxury Berlin hotel and got a press pass, granting her free access to all the sports events and major festivities in the city. She also got to meet Hitler. “Hitler was fascinated by what happened to me,” she will recall many years later. “He told me the Americans were not very bright to dismiss me, a sure gold-medal winner. Especially for something like drinking champagne…Hitler also told me that if I had been a German, any punishment like that would have come after the Olympics, not before.” Was she drunk, Hitler wanted to know? “Of course not,” Jarrett replied.

  When Göring learns that Eleanor Holm Jarrett is in attendance at his garden party, he has the young woman summoned over and chats to her extensively. He senses a chance to put one over on the Americans. He’d like to award her a medal, Göring says in his pompous stage voice, whereupon he takes a silver swastika—one of the many pins and medals he habitually wears in public—from his lapel and pins it to Jarrett’s collar. “I had such fun!” she will later remember. “I enjoyed the parties, the ‘Heil Hitlers!,’ the uniforms, the flags…Göring was fun. He had a good personality. So did the one with the club foot.”

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  Unlike Jarrett, Thomas Wolfe isn’t invited to Göring’s garden party, and even if he were, he probably wouldn’t go. His conversation with Mildred Harnack in the Taverne has given him food for thought. Again and again he asks himself: has he deceived himself about the Germans? Wolfe can’t confirm any of the ugly information Mildred whispered in his ear that night. He’s never witnessed anyone being arrested, mistreated or murdered, and he’s only ever heard the words “concentration camps” from Mildred’s own mouth. Since arriving in Berlin, Wolfe has never seen any public evidence of the tyranny she described. But what if Germany is putting on a show to fool him and the other Olympic visitors? What if the Games are just a gigantic piece of propaganda? And what if the Germans Wolfe meets every day are just extras in an exceedingly horrible play? Well then, he and all the other visitors from around the world are being fooled. Wolfe shies away from pursuing these thoughts to their logical conclusion. From that moment on, he avoids Nazis and their pompous daily festivities. As if to convince himself that some Germans aren’t part of the Olympic hocus-pocus, Wolfe spends tonight at Mother Maenz’s place.