Hitler's Olympics (13 page)

At Cologne an official of the Organising Committee came on board and accompanied them to Berlin where a large crowd assembled to greet them. Diem welcomed them and the British national anthem was played – India was a British colony, of course. And the team encountered their first volleys of
Heil Hitler!
and the stiff-arm salutes. After a ceremony in the town hall they were driven out to the Village by bus. They became the eighth country to come in. Their house, 131, was called ‘Elbing’ and the name seems to have been chosen deliberately because the city had evidently made trains which were exported to India. The facilities, the cleanliness and their two stewards impressed them. One, Otto, knew India and could speak good English because he’d been a sailor but the other, Schmidt, was not so fluent.
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That was 13 July.

The German Olympic trials were held in Berlin (but not at the Olympic stadium) and produced some disappointing performances. Before previous Olympics the Germans competed a great deal but this time competition had been carefully rationed. By a bizarre twist this would impact directly on the American sprinters.

The
New York Times
considered that the German women’s team offered their country the best chances of medals, something the macho men of the Reich might find hard to live with and perhaps explains why, in the domestic media build-up, the women were given less publicity. If the Nazi creed led them into a moral maze over the Jews, their beliefs about the role of women led them into another.

A special edition of the illustrated magazine,
Berlin Illustrierte Zeitung
, had a spread entitled, ‘Promising German Sportsmen and Women.’ In a host of pictures and short biographies, the magazine only featured one woman, swimmer Martha Genenger. Similarly, another publication, the 128-page book,
Die Olympischen Spiele
, had just two pages on the women’s competition, an article written by track star Gisela Mauermayer assessing the German women’s chances in track and field.

In publications that did feature more about the women, by far the most attention was showered upon Mauermayer, who[m] journalists routinely portrayed as a shoo-in for the gold medal in the discus. In its pre-Olympic issue,
The Young Socialist
trumpeted, ‘who would beat her? She is known throughout the world for her discus throwing.’ Likewise, a journalist in
Der Angriff
proclaimed in mid-July, ‘This Gisela Mauermayer! Who can beat her?’
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Statuesque and graceful, Mauermayer represented the Nazi ideal of womanhood with her blonde hair but the talk of certain victory disconcerted her, and understandably so. ‘In every milk bar and at every kiosk, I must have heard that the gold medal was a sure thing for me.’ She found herself thinking that she
had
to win rather than her customary thought, that she
might
win
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– always a dangerous state of mind.

Others tipped to do well were hurdlers Doris Eckert and Anni Steuer, high-jumper Elfriede Kaun, javelin thrower Tilly Fleischer and the 4 × 100 relay team. The swimmers, however – ‘known as “Nixen” (mermaids or water nymphs)’ – did get media attention. One, Hanni Hölzner, appeared on the cover of
Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung
in her swimming costume with the caption ‘the fastest breaststroke swimmer in the world’.

[Coverage] suggested the idea of ‘Aryan supremacy’ in a number of ways when reporting on the women’s team. Most blatantly, the press drew attention to ‘Aryan’ physical characteristics when applicable. Publications took note of the sportswomen’s hair color, if it was light, when relaying information about the competition. They described Ruth Halbsgut and Tilly Fleischer, for example, as blond, and Anni Steuer as dark blond. In addition, publications indicated whether an athlete was of tall stature. Steuer and Fleischer happened to be given both the ‘tall’ and ‘blond’ designations.
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Gretel Bergmann was not invited to compete in the German Championships. Dora Ratjen won but was disqualified – the reason lost in the mists of time – and the next three girls, led by Kaun, did 1.54 metres. Since Bergmann had done 1.60 metres at Stuttgart she clearly merited a place in the Olympic team, something highlighted by the fact that in virtually every event the Germans fielded three competitors but in the women’s high jump only two.

Bergmann thinks she ‘only found out in the 1990s, when I got connection again with Elfriede Kaun. We met for the first time when I was in Germany in 2001, 2002 and they got her to come to Berlin and we met again. It was very emotional. I’m not a crying person but when I think of that meeting tears come to my eyes. I knew only two women had been picked but I didn’t know why. She told me that they were told “Bergmann is injured and we are keeping the place open in case she recovers.” They didn’t want to put anybody else on the team to show their manoeuvring.’
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A much greater highlight to absurdity was coming soon.

The media paid particular interest to the American women’s team, ‘mainly because journalists considered them to be the toughest competition. Showing them as such allowed the German press to make winning or losing against them seem more meaningful.’

[The media] perceived some of the American women, especially the swimmers and divers, as having ‘star-like’ qualities, which their readership may have found appealing. Before the Olympic trials in the United States, for example,
Der Angriff
ran a photograph and short piece on some of the swimmers titled, ‘Seven beautiful girls from the USA,’ in which the reporter commented that, ‘one only wishes that all of them will be at the Games.’ … Diver Dorothy Poynton Hill, for instance, appeared in German periodicals wearing various custom-made swimsuits and was described as the ‘lovely’ gold medallist from the 1932 Los Angeles Olympics and as ‘pure grace.’

Another American woman the German press singled out was the 1932 winner in the backstroke, Eleanor Holm Jarrett, dubbed ‘the Diva’ by reporters. Publications featured her as ‘the pretty swimmer,’ who was also an actress, singer, and the wife of a popular musical group leader.
Der Angriff
, for instance, devoted a full page to Jarrett – more space than they gave to any of the German women. Likewise, [the]
Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung
hailed her as America’s ‘surest mainstay’ for Olympic gold.
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Holm would lose no time in drawing a great deal more media attention to herself, just hours after the American team sailed from New York on 15 July.

Meanwhile, the US Football Association wrestled with the dilemma of whether to go or not and decided in favour, ‘despite the unpalatable political situation. However, heavy snowfall during the winter of 1935–36 wreaked havoc with attempts to raise money for team preparations and it was only three weeks before the Olympics that Joe Barriskill, the USFA secretary, transferred just under seven thousand dollars to the Olympic Committee to fund the team.’
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The American track and field team stayed at the Hotel Lincoln on Eighth Avenue (1,400 rooms from $2.50 up) before sailing. Many slept little the night before and the day of departure started early. Helen Stephens, the sprinter of awesome potential from Fulton, stayed up late talking to her room-mates, woke around 6 a.m. and ate breakfast quickly. One report uses the word ‘hysteria’ to capture the mood of excitement. They were already down in the lobby before the dawn shift of porters and clerks started work.

Some competitors carried instructions with them. Forrest ‘Spec’ (Freckles, shortened to Spec) Towns, 100 metre hurdler and son of a railroad man, was being coached by Weems Baskin at the University of Georgia, and Baskin told him to ignore whatever one of the Olympic team’s coaches, Lawson Robertson, said. ‘You know what you have to do’, Baskin concluded. ‘Do it.’
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They were to sail on the steamer SS
Manhattan
, a five-year-old ship whose funnels were appropriately red, white and blue, moored at the pier at the end of West 20th Street. It regularly plied the route to Hamburg via Cobh – the cove of Cork, a place with deep resonance for many Americans because thousands of Irish people emigrated from there – then on to Plymouth (another place of resonance because the Pilgrim Fathers had sailed from there to Massachusetts), Le Havre and up the North Sea coast.

The
Manhattan
departed at midday and shuttle buses from the Lincoln began to transport the American teams at 9 a.m., but in their eagerness the boxers took taxis and were the first aboard. From 9.30 a current of competitors flowed up the gangplank and some, to oblige the photographers, even did it twice. Autograph hunters had their favourites, mainly Eleanor Holm and Owens. The
Manhattan
had other, commercial passengers and the autograph hunters noted actresses Mary Astor and Helen Hayes boarding. When Owens appeared, looking dapper in his only suit, a dark-blue pinstripe, the photographers, reporters and autograph hunters swarmed.

Stephens had never travelled by ship before. When she arrived she saw one of her teachers in the crowd. The teacher gave her a small, cherry-red leather-bound travel diary and said she should record all the exciting events of the trip. Stephens promised she would. Then she went to Cabin 35 on Deck 6.
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Velma Dunn, a member of the diving team, ‘had never been out of America. I’m from California and I went to New York by train, about four days at that time. I don’t think I had been to New York. I had been to Chicago. It was a huge adventure.’
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The competitors had their bunks on the two decks below the waterline and Owens made his way to Room 87 on Deck D, in the hold of the ship.

Archie Williams, the 400 metres runner, found the black athletes were to room together because, as someone said to him, ‘Well, you guys want to be with your own kind.’ His cabin mate was James LuValle, who had been his hero but now represented a direct threat in the 400 metres. Williams thought that whoever had allocated the cabins simply did not realise that two rivals might indulge in ‘heavy psyching’, although, as he would claim, he himself was ‘too dumb’ to be subtly undermined.
⁴⁵

Williams, from California, studied at Berkeley for a degree in mechanical engineering, the first member of his family to go to college. Study had taken preference over preparing for the Olympics, not least because athletics was ‘an end in itself’ rather than opening the golden door to money. Wrong era. And when he arrived at Berkeley his counsellor queried the engineering degree because, even with it, no big company would be hiring a black man. Wrong era again.
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On board the
Manhattan

physically segregated by a sealed door were a few wives and parents who were making the trip, whose section divided male from female athletes. Regular passengers nearly filled the two upper decks to capacity. Among them were American Olympic officials and coaches, who traveled first class. To one of their own members, they seemed like ‘a bunch of junketeers taking the gravy that should have gone to the athletes.’ Unaccustomed to anything different, most athletes scarcely noticed the contrast.
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The sleeping arrangements did not suit Eleanor Holm, bunked with two young swimmers, at all. ‘I had been around – I was no baby,’ she said. Evidently she had tried to pay for her own passage across first class but Brundage forbade it. That didn’t suit her, either.

Betty Robinson, twenty-five, competed in the 1928 Games as a 100-metre sprinter, but injuries from a plane crash three years later meant she could not assume the crouch position for the start of the race, so she went to Berlin as part of the relay team. Kathlyn Kelly from Seneca, South Carolina, was 16 years and 309 days old when she qualified for the Olympic high jump, which still makes her the fifth youngest high-jumper to do so.

Twenty minutes before the ship sailed a vast white flag with the Olympic rings was hoisted to the top of a mast by five female competitors and visitors were asked to go ashore. One official had two bags with him, one for soiled clothing and the other clean. His wife, who disembarked, took the wrong one leaving him without so much as a razor.

Three tugs backed the
Manhattan
away into the Hudson. As she went the competitors stood behind the ship’s white railings and shouted ‘Ray! Ray! for the USA’ with, as a sort of echo, ‘A–M–E–R–I–C–A!’

As the United Press reported, the team sailed aboard the ‘gaily be-flagged
Manhattan
in a bedlam of bon-voyage cheers from more than 10,000 well-wishers and an ear-splitting din from the tied-down whistles of harbor craft’. Aeroplanes and small airships ‘soared and dipped’ and the whole spectacle became ‘a virtual tornado of massed joy’. After all the bitter wrangling over whether to go or not, only one anti-Olympic picket came and the placard he carried was an advertisement for a book he had written.

Owens would later say that as the shoreline receded and disappeared a simple thought held him: the next time he saw it he’d have won or lost, with all that those two possibilities implied.
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He gazed at the expanse of the Atlantic and wanted to get on his knees to thank God for this chance. But he didn’t. He wondered if he didn’t because of his team-mates around him, or because ‘there was a stranger inside of me now’.
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The
Manhattan
had 1,064 passengers, 688 in the Olympics entourage (344 competitors, the rest were officials, coaches, journalists and relatives) while most of the remaining 376 were going to the Games as spectators and supporters. A further forty-eight competitors completed the team, some – yachtsmen, equestrians and two baseball players – were already in Germany, and the ten canoeists were to follow a week later. Taken together, United States had never sent a larger team. It contained eighteen black athletes (sixteen men, two women), three times the number at the Los Angeles Games four years earlier.

The
Manhattan
churned on into the Atlantic and the passengers prepared to settle down to the rhythm of shipboad life, whatever that brought. For 400-metre relay sprinter Harold Smallwood it brought appendicitis and confinement to his quarters wearing an icepack. While Smallwood underwent surgery the ship slowed dramatically, making people think it was to keep it steady, but the captain explained over the PA that he was trying to avoid a school of whales.
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