Hitler's Olympics (32 page)

Williams, only twenty, never would be sure if he’d stayed in his lane but always would be sure he hadn’t been disqualified. He accepted the moment of victory with a particular philosophy: he had proved to himself that he could do something. When the American flag went up he regarded that philosophically, too, keeping his emotion under control. He thought of Brown and wondered what would have happened if that half stride at the end had been different. He fended off all suggestions that he was the best in the world by pointing out that all he had done was beat the opposition present. There might be, he added, somebody down in Abyssinia chasing or being chased by lions who could ‘kick my ass without even taking a deep breath’.
²⁹

The football moved into its second round, Italy beating Japan 8–0 and Norway beating Germany 2–0. Werner Schwieger remembers Hitler attending the match, the first time he had done so. ‘The German coach said, “Well, Norway are not that strong” and he left the best German players out. And the Germans lost. Everyone was annoyed that the coach had done this.’
³⁰

And that was the sixth day.

A cloudy Saturday with just a little wind as the first week neared its end. In the early afternoon rain fell and heavy thunder showers loomed.

Coach Robertson, a track coach at the University of Pennsylvania whom Glickman described as old, ill, grey and in need of a walking stick, called a meeting of the seven American sprinters at 9 a.m. in the Village. Controversy still surrounds that meeting even all these decades later.

Glickman, savouring the realisation of his life’s ambition when the 4 × 100 heats would begin in six hours, knew nothing of what Gould had written or that Gould’s copy appeared in the
New York Times
with Owens describing his own inclusion as ‘swell news’.

Glickman remembered the meeting took place in a small room with a couple of beds: he perched on the edge of one, Draper and Wykoff on the other, Stoller to Glickman’s left and coach Cromwell – a strong, no-nonsense figure from the University of Southern California – in an armchair. Owens sat opposite Glickman, 200-metre man Mack Robinson to Glickman’s right, Metcalfe beside Robinson. Robertson remained standing beside the door.
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What Robinson was doing there is not at all clear.

Robertson began to pace nervously.
³²
His face solemn, he said he understood the Germans were playing a devious game by concealing their best sprinters so that they would come from nowhere to win. That necessitated a change in the team which would now be Owens, Metcalfe, Draper and Wykoff. Draper, third in the Village ‘race’ two days before, was included because of his greater experience.

Glickman was out. Sam Stoller was out.

What was unstated was that Draper was a ‘product’ of Cromwell’s ‘ambitious programme’ at Southern California and Wykoff came from there, too.
³³

The small room fell silent.

Glickman, thunderstruck, blurted out that the Germans were no kind of a threat at all. Their best, Erich Borchmeyer, had finished a distant fifth in the men’s 100 metres. Glickman knew that all seven Americans could beat him, no question, and never mind any other Germans; and he insisted that
any
American combination would win by 15 metres. They could lose, Glickman concluded,
but only if they dropped the baton
. Robertson refused to budge, insisting that his information about the German tactics was sound, although he refused to divulge his source. Glickman remembered Owens pleading for him – Glickman – and Stoller to be reinstated. ‘Let Marty and Sam run. I’ve already won three gold medals. I’m tired. They haven’t had the chance to run. Let them. They deserve it.’

Cromwell jabbed a finger towards Owens and said ‘You’ll do as you’re told.’

Owens fell silent.

Glickman pointed out that he and Stoller were the only two Jews in the track team and to drop both would create great controversy at home.

‘We’ll take our chances,’ Cromwell responded.

They filed out of the room, not speaking. Glickman, only eighteen, felt anger and confusion although he never did discuss the matter with Stoller who, he felt, was ‘shattered’. They weren’t particularly close and in those days athletes did do what they were told. Glickman reflected that the original team had been perfecting the vital matter of passing the baton, which Owens and Metcalfe hadn’t practised at all. A mistake there could lead to defeat, namely,
that’s how they could be beaten
.

Glickman believed they were dropped because of anti-Semitism. He ‘suspected collusion between Dean Cromwell and … Brundage, both of whom were members of a pro-Nazi organisation, the America First Committee’.
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Glickman reasoned the move prevented causing Hitler the embarrassment of having Jews win gold.

The obverse must equally be true, that including two black men was hardly the route to Hitler’s affections either. A judgement can be risked, however: Hitler genuinely hated Jews to the point where the Nazis tried to exterminate them throughout Europe. He did not hate blacks; he merely thought they should still be in the jungle.

Did the American coaches – and Brundage – take Hitler’s sentiments on race, and on Jews in particular, into consideration? Why should they? Was any pressure from anywhere brought to bear on them, even by themselves? Did the coaches not consider the most obvious compromise – picking Owens and either Glickman or Stoller? Nobody knows. The people who could answer these questions are all dead now, some long dead.

From 10 a.m., and forming the backdrop to the day, the decathletes completed their event, climaxing with the 1,500 metres in darkness.

For the first 4 × 100 heat against Italy, South Africa, Finland and Japan the Americans lined up Owens, Metcalfe, Draper and Wykoff. It was sound tactically because Owens, going first, would only have to hand the baton over, not receive it – which of course he hadn’t practised doing. It did, however, put real pressure on Metcalfe, receiving from Owens and handing to Draper, because he hadn’t been practising either. Glickman watched from the area reserved for the athletes. Before the race the American press wanted to speak to him and he went to them, although he doesn’t record what he said. Eleanor Holm was there in her guise as journalist and Glickman met her husband.

The
New York Times
amplified Robertson’s claim that the Germans were holding back by adding that the Dutch were supposed to be doing the same thing. Both countries had evidently been recording times of 40.5 seconds. The reality was exactly 40.0 seconds in coming. Although the baton handling proved less than perfect that was the time the Americans did, equalling the world and Olympic records. Holland won their heat but in 41.3 and Germany theirs in 41.4, making nonsense of Robertson’s theory.

Helen Stephens spent the day hanging about before the women’s 4 × 100, her first relay. She’d run the anchor leg in Heat 1 which America won (47.1 seconds). Stephens recorded how, on this day of changeable weather, the crowd ‘roared’ and she completed the relay pulling away from the Canadian anchor, Holland third, Austria fourth. In Heat 2 the Germans faced Britain, Italy and Finland. Audrey Brown, running the third leg, remembered ‘Leni Riefenstahl was a bit of a nuisance. She removed me from my chosen position before the start because it was just by her [filming] “pit” on the last bend and I was blocking her view!’
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Germany won (46.4 seconds, beating the world and Olympic records) from Britain (47.5), Italy came third.

The Finns showed their stamina again in the 3,000 metres steeplechase, Volmari Iso-Hollo leading from Kaarlo Tuominen but Alfred Dompert of Germany made a spirited charge towards the end, inflaming the crowd to a great boiling passion. He caught and pushed Tuominen so hard that in the final straight he forced him up towards Iso-Hollo.

In the pool next to the stadium a seventeen-year-old Dutch girl, Hendrika Wilhelmina ‘Rie’ Mastenbroek, set off on a strenuous, almost inhuman, campaign towards the plateau created by Owens. Born in Rotterdam to parents who lived together for forty-six years but never married, she learnt to swim early and at eleven a leading Dutch coach noticed her. She began the campaign in 100 metres freestyle by winning her heat in a new Olympic record, dragging her great rival, the German Gisela Arendt, with her.
³⁶

In the stadium the 4 × 400 heats were tight and there wasn’t much to choose between America, Great Britain, Sweden, Germany and Canada.

In the gathering gloom, that left the 1,500 metres to decide the decathlon. As the stadium announcer said in several languages, Glenn Morris needed to run 4 minutes 32 seconds for overall victory. He’d never done anything approaching that before and 4 minutes 49 seconds was his usual time. A strong, rugged man, he felt plain tired. Lengthening stride, his body went forward in great plodding movements. Maurice Boulanger (Belgium), red running shorts so visible in the dark, overtook him along the back straight. Morris responded as best he could, plodding on. The last 44 metres tormented him and at the line his 4 minutes 33.2 seconds was too slow.

The announcer had been wrong.

Morris hadn’t needed to get below 4 minutes 32 seconds and at that moment, blanket draped around him against another cold night, he could justifiably claim to be the greatest athlete in the world.

Helen Stephens’s leg felt ‘tight’ but that didn’t stop her going dancing.

In the football Poland beat Great Britain 5–4 but the Peru
v
. Austria match descended into chaos. Peru went two goals down with 15 minutes left in a rough match handled by a weak referee. Peru equalised, taking the match into extra time and releasing dangerous emotions. Some reports say Peruvian supporters invaded the pitch, others that it was the Peruvian bench. Whoever they were they set about one of the Austrian players, Adolf Laudon, kicking him. In the ensuing bedlam Peru scored twice more to win 4–2.

If the Nazis were determined to wring every drop of respectability out of the Games, Goering intended to wring every drop of personal pomp and circumstance out of them, too. He was perfectly placed to do just that. He held positions in the national and Prussian governments and was a member of the Reichstag as well. This enabled him to throw three official parties. Following his dinner for the IOC, he now hosted a dinner for 2,000 in the State Opera House on Unter den Linden. It ‘rivalled Friedrich the Great’s victory celebrations held there in December 1742’. Goering picked red and white as the colours for the occasion. ‘Over 100 periwigged footmen in pink livery and knee-breeches lined the stairs, holding glass lanterns on long poles.’ Goering wore white. ‘Berlin had known nothing like it since the start of the First World War.’
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And that was the seventh day.

The weather changed, it was now cloudy but warm on the Sunday, the final day of the track and field events. Some 160,000 people arrived in Berlin by train, the highest number so far.

In Vienna the
Neue Freie Presse
carried extremely restrained coverage of the Austria
v
. Peru match. The report, two paragraphs long, said

The Austrian team had to play against Peru and after a hard struggle the match went into extra time.

The Austrians had the better of the beginning and by half time they had two goals. Everything changed after the interval until, later on, Laudon was injured and taken off. With ten men our team was forced onto the defensive. An own goal by the Austrian defenders made it possible for the Peruvians to get their first goal and very soon after that they scored a further goal through Fernandez. In the later stages Austria were back to eleven men but the Peruvians showed that they had more stamina and by two further goals they won eventually. There were 20,000 spectators.

The Austrians protested to the International Football Federation, who ruled the match had to be replayed in an empty stadium on the Monday. When news of this reached the Peruvian capital, Lima, big crowds gathered round newspaper offices to follow developments. Their Olympic Committee met the country’s President, Oscar Benavides, who ordered a complete withdrawal from Berlin.

Part of the crowd moved towards Benavides’s palace and on the way tore down an Olympic flag at a business premises which had a German manager who was also acting Austrian Consul. The police intervened and the crowd surged towards the main square, where another part of the crowd arrived, too. They bayed their anger for Benavides and he came out onto the balcony flanked by senior politicians and the military. Speeches were made and he said he had just had cables from Argentina, Chile, Uruguay and Mexico proclaiming solidarity. He appealed for the crowd to show the restraint and sportsmanship which had not been shown to Peru in Berlin.

The crowd, noisy and growing all the time, marched five blocks to another square singing the national anthem. There they heard more speeches and marched on the German Consulate. The windows were stoned before police arrived in trucks and broke the crowd up in to ‘noisy but otherwise harmless groups’.
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Helen Stephens spent the morning writing cards. Glickman decided to go to the stadium to watch the relays, whatever that might do to him.