Hitler's Olympics (20 page)

The Hall and the large visitors’ restaurant at the end of the wing afforded facilities for meetings between the team members and their friends who were not permitted to enter the Village. Permission for friends or those on business to enter could only be secured from a team leader, and women visitors could not get in at all. Entrance passes had to bear the name of the visitors, the team member to be visited, and the house he lived in. Then the visitor was conducted to the address and back to the gate by a member of the Honorary Youth Service.

About 170 university youths had been in special training for almost two years for this service. They were of wealthy parents, and assisted free of charge. In their attractive white uniforms they were on hand at every scene of activity in the Olympic Village to render assistance wherever needed. They were familiar with the scenes of competitions and places of interest in the city, and acted as messengers or guides. Best of all they talked the different languages of the nations represented, and one who talked English was always sent with a Canadian…. A similar corps of university girls, also dressed in white, performed a similar service for the girls’ teams of all the nations.

The village, occupying 325 acres, was constructed by the National Army. Within the grounds were built 161 cottages, of permanent brick construction and stuccoed. Every cottage bore the name of a well-known German city. Canada occupied four. Manson … had his headquarters office in House ‘Glatz.’ The other three cottages the team occupied were ‘Beuthen,’ ‘Breslau’ and ‘Oppeln.’ The streets were named after the German provinces. Each cottage accommodated about 25 to 35 men. The rooms were double, each containing two single beds.
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The Canadians were also impressed by a host of other arrangements. For example, that ‘each nation had its own separate entrance to its own private dining room’ and once there you could eat as much as you wanted; the ‘special refreshment room, the “bastion”, located on a knoll’ and ‘affording a magnificent view of the entire Village’; and although the Organising Committee had ‘requested the participants not to take or use radio sets or gramophones in the Village, Berlin artists came out to entertain. There were also selected films’. The Canadians were grateful that each competitor was issued with an identity card, allowing free travel on all Berlin transport.

A journalist working for the French daily
Le Figaro
summarised all this beautifully. When you entered the Village, he wrote, you had the immediate impression of being on holiday.

Fritz Wandt says the Village was fenced in.

I have read somewhere that there were about 130 policemen guarding the place, among them twelve on horses, and four or eight detectives in plain clothes. There was a lot of security there. The Olympic Village was run like a hotel. There was a reception desk just like in a hotel. Every team had to declare how many sportsmen had arrived, and for every sportsman 6 Reichsmark had to be paid per day by the Olympic Committees of their respective countries as a contribution to the expenses it was [incurring].

I guess other boys started to collect autographs so I got myself a little book, too, and at that time we would use pencils. Maybe at that time you wouldn’t really know the importance of it, you just wanted sportsmens’ autographs. I walked. There was a tunnel at the entrance under the road and mostly we stood near there, that’s where we were allowed to be. Sometimes I went there with friends, not after school but weekends. You would show them the book and say you would like to have an autograph. They knew what you meant and most of them would do it – in fact, I cannot remember anyone who refused. There was always something going on, always someone coming out and giving autographs.
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Leaving the Yugoslav town of Kragujevac there were now 1,543 runners to go and, at midnight, five days to the Opening Ceremony.

By 9.20 a.m. the flame had reached Belgrade where a fountain had been transformed into a high altar from which it burned while a ceremony was enacted around it.

In Yugoslavia some kilometre stretches were covered by peasants in the long-tongued shoes traditional to the area and when the flame passed through villages of the German minority (descendants of Swabians) the cheering was particularly enthusiastic. At one point, however, the flame went out after a couple of minutes and the runner covered the kilometre by car.

Holm, hired by an American news syndicate for the duration, filed her first story.

In Warsaw, Stella Walsh equalled two world records – the 50 and 100 metres – in her final competitive appearance before the Games. Word got back to Berlin because Stephens wrote she’d heard Walsh had done 11.6 seconds in the 100 metres.

In Berlin training was washed out by the rain, although the 4 × 100 United States team of Glickman, Stoller, Metcalfe and Wykoff did manage some runs. Intriguingly, the
New York Times
pondered whether in fact they would be the team….

Word had it that when Leni Riefenstahl went to Greece to film the beginning of the torch run she saw a handsome young Greek and said he looked like a god. She promised to make him a film star and flew him back to Berlin in her plane. There was, she insisted, nothing else in it.

The Estonian team arrived at the Village, where a diplomatic incident with the Americans and the Germans had been resolved. The Germans were accustomed to giving the stiff-arm Nazi salute as a reflex action and did so every time they saw an American. The Americans had no idea how to respond and certainly weren’t going to reply with Nazi salutes. In the true traditions of diplomacy a compromise was reached, with the Germans giving a more military kind of salute.

The flame reached the Yugoslav town of Backa Topla, home of the royal family. On top of a nearby mountain, where the royal mausoleum stood, thirteen-year-old King Peter welcomed the flame.

Torch and runner left ten minutes before midnight; 1,258 runners to go and, at midnight, four days to the Opening Ceremony.

The flame reached the Hungarian frontier at 6 a.m. The horizontal barrier was raised and the ‘broad band of the Hungarian asphalt highway stretched undeviatingly ahead, cutting through the endless plain. To the right and left lay the interminable fields of corn and sunflowers above which the straw roofs of the peasant homes and high rigging of the wells projected.’
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The flags of the two countries were crossed in friendship and a local mayor lit the first Hungarian torch from the last Yugoslav torch. The tempo increased, not just because of the improved road surface but because of a need to gain time to allow for ceremonies at two towns, Szeged and Kecskemét, on the route to Budapest. In the second of these, famed for its fruit, the ceremony was held in the scenic market square where the Olympic rings had been fashioned out of apricots. A big crowd gathered in traditional costume.

Huge crowds met it at 8.30 p.m. at Budapest. Gypsies serenaded the runners with music and a gypsy chieftain performed during the ceremony while the flame burned at the tomb of the unknown soldier.

The
New York Times
reported rumours of both pro- and anti-German demonstrations when the flame reached Vienna: the Nazis demonstrating their antipathy for one of the runners, Vice Chancellor Prince Starhemberg, who was also in charge of home defence – hence the hostility. The Nazis had no wish for Austria to defend herself but felt she should be incorporated into the Reich. Other rumours spoke of the German national anthem
Deutschland über Alles
and the Nazis’
Horst Wessel
song being allowed.
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For three years both had been expressly banned.

The Belgian and New Zealand teams arrived at the Village. The main body of the Finnish team came in, too, and watched the Americans training. They saw shot-putter Torrance but he was in poor form and ‘when he stepped out of the ring he had a steam bath in an attempt to boil the kinks out of his muscles’.
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Holm went to a swimming pool in Berlin to practise, even though she had no chance of reinstatement. She paid to get in, something she’d never done in her life before. The German team recognised her and came across. She gave them tips on technique.

The Japanese attracted attention. Wayne and another diver went to watch them practising and locked eyes on to a Japanese diver who ‘augured’ (corkscrewed) his dives beautifully and consistently. Days later they watched him again, every dive as perfect as the one before. Then he’d surface, grinning. They decided to apply a little reverse psychology, got changed – didn’t even take towels – and dived as perfectly as he had; they wandered round whistling casually between dives while he watched them.
Anything you can do
….

The Japanese attracted attention in another way. Pat Norton, the Australian swimmer, remembered:

the Japanese uniforms were grey in colour and made the girls look drab, but when we met them at a concert one night we saw the ugly duckling turn into a swan! They came dressed in beautiful kimonos complete with obis [Japanese sashes] round their waist. What a difference dress can make – they looked delightful.

One day we were at the training pool when the Japanese male swimmers arrived to train. They immediately began to undress at the poolside which made us three modest Australian girls let out a yelp and dive for cover! We were only just getting used to men wearing topless costumes. When this was explained to the Japanese trainers they undressed in the rooms provided. They wore a costume with a cord through the legs tied at the back – they were beautifully built and did not cause any offence. We continued to happily share our times together.

Topless costumes caused a lot of talk in our newspapers back home, in fact our coach Harry was chosen in 1935 to model how men would look in the waist to thigh costume. One lady wrote in to the
Sunday Sun
and said if they all looked like Harry why there’s no problem!
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Stephens practised the discus. On the track, her coach wanted her to modify her running style but that concerned her, and at night she applied ice packs to her injured, still troublesome left shin.
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The American male athletes trained every day at the Village. Coach Snyder, who commuted from a Berlin hotel, arrived to supervise the preparations of Owens and high-jumper Albritton. Snyder found that one of the other coaches had tried to change Owens’s arm action and the way he positioned himself for the start. Snyder quickly put a stop to that.

Snyder had several concerns. On the voyage over he learnt that Owens had taken three pairs of spikes to Randall’s Island, two new and one old, and lost the new pairs. Now Owens faced the Games with only the old pair. Would they stand up to the 100 metres, 200 and long jump? He was using a German pair as back-up and didn’t like them. Snyder ‘urged’ the American Olympic Committee to order a new pair from England but, as the Games approached, they hadn’t arrived. Snyder found a sports shop in Berlin and bought a pair with his own money. That led to a further concern because not enough time remained to break them in properly and Snyder feared they could give Owens blisters. Owens remarked laconically that if they hurt he’d jump further.

Snyder was also unhappy that a mass of photographers and autograph hunters milled about during the practice sessions, all seemingly drawn to Owens. He said ‘it seemed to me that Jesse spent most of his time in Berlin smiling at the birdie, with a dozen or so foreign athletes clustered around him or hanging on him, so that they might have a souvenir to take back home’. Synder wanted both athletes, Owens and Albritton, to concentrate on their preparations and tried to have the intruders banished. How far Snyder succeeded is not clear, but each day when he commuted back to Berlin in late afternoon people
were
drawn to Owens.

Women slipped notes under his door at night, often with marriage proposals. Several times Jesse was awakened in the early morning by people shoving autograph books through his open window. One night he closed the window even though the room was too stuffy to sleep soundly, but awoke to early morning sounds of clicking camera shutters as people took pictures through the windowpane. When Jesse stepped outside the Olympic Village, he was immediately recognized, lionized. Once he and Dave Albritton went out for a night to Shebini’s Bar in Berlin to hear a black trombonist. There Albritton drank his first champagne, which tasted to him like ginger ale. According to his recollections, neither he nor Owens had difficulty finding dance partners. Men came up asking them to dance with their wives.
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The adulation reached such a pitch that, Glickman claimed, the only way Owens could get in and out of the stadium without being mobbed was by using the tunnel.

Max Schmeling, one eye still swollen from his victory over Louis, came to visit the Village. Naturally he and Owens fell into conversation but, much later, Owens reflected that ‘he and his black team-mates were incensed at the proud manner in which Nazis paraded Schmeling around the Village’. It may be that, inwardly riled, Owens and some of the other black athletes intended to atone for the defeat of Joe Louis.
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The Stephens affair with Ruth the waitress grew more intense, with Ruth offering her culinary delicacies which she left in her room.
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But girls met boys as well. The German boyfriends of two of them evidently caused a scene trying to get into the Friesenhaus.

In Berlin, services during the Games by the Evangelical churches were banned, and printed advertisements for daily services at a church in the district of Schoneburg seized.

The flame left Budapest at ten that evening and would be out in the Hungarian countryside at midnight. That was four days to the Opening Ceremony, 1,009 runners to go.

By that Tuesday night, as it left Budapest, 2,058 runners had borne the flame. On the Wednesday, with four days to the Opening Ceremony and on the way from Budapest to the Austrian frontier, the route passed through the Hungarian mining district, the runners moving ‘past high mining shafts and through workers’ settlements in order to bring an Olympic greeting to the miners’.
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At the frontier, officials could not control a huge crowd as the flame passed to the first Austrian runner, Dr Theodore Schmidt, President of the Austrian Olympic Committee. A great cheer went up and some gave the Nazi salute. Schmidt struggled through the crowd and padded off.