Hitler's Olympics (37 page)

The Germans now decided to play rough. Going for Dhyan Chand, the German goalkeeper removed one of his teeth. Coming back after receiving first aid, the bare-footed Dhyan Chand instructed his team to go easy on goals. ‘We must teach them a lesson in ball control,’ he said. As the stunned crowd watched, the Indians repeatedly took the ball up to the German circle and then backpassed to dumbfound their opponents.
²¹

India won 8–1 and afterwards when Dhyan Chand told Hitler, who had watched the match, that he was a sepoy (ordinary soldier) in the army Hitler is said to have replied: ‘If you were a German, I would have made you at least a major general.’

There had been the water polo where the Hungarians retained their gold medal but the Austrians won the crowd by shouting ‘
Heil Hitler
’ when they jumped into the water, the salute being held in mid-air.

There had been the polo – Argentina won, beating Great Britain and Mexico. There had been basketball, that game of the gentle giants, now an official Olympic sport. America won (and would be undefeated until 1972 when the USSR took the gold).

All these events must have seemed very close, just yesterday or the day before, and yet very far away – gone forever – as the Closing Ceremony began at 9 p.m. that evening when the timed jumping in the equestrian event had finally been decided. And that decision caught the mood of the whole Games (although much earlier the cross-country course had proved horrific with three horses being killed and twenty failing to complete it). One of the German team, Lieutenant Konrad von Wangenheim, had fallen in the steeplechase the day before, breaking his collarbone. He remounted and finished the course. If he withdrew because of his injury Germany would lose the team medal so he arrived at the stadium with his arm in a sling. As each German rider entered the arena they gave the Nazi salute and Hitler returned it. Von Wangenheim reached the first fence but fell again and his horse came down on top of him. The horse got up and he did, too. He completed the course and Germany had the gold, giving a final flourish to the medal table.

Floodlights came on to illuminate the stadium, haunting spotlights rising to form an arch of light. The nations paraded by, speeches were made, thunderous music played.

The big scoreboard carried the legend
THE
LAST
SHOT
IS
FIRED
.

Shirer recorded that for this Closing Ceremony he had had to use his wits to ‘smuggle’ Mrs William Randolph Hearst, wife of the newspaper tycoon, and a couple of her friends into the ceremony. They’d arrived the night before with no tickets. Shirer persuaded the SS guards to let them have diplomats’ seats from where they could see Hitler.
²²

Shirer, who enjoyed the Games but found covering them a nuisance, was concerned that the Nazi propaganda had seduced foreign visitors, especially Americans and especially big businessmen. Shirer and a colleague, Ralph Barnes of the
Herald Tribune
, had been asked to meet some and discovered they had indeed formed favourable impressions. These businessmen met Goering who complained that the American reporters in Berlin were being unfair to the Nazis. Shirer asked the businessmen if Goering had discussed, for example, the Nazi suppression of the churches. Yes, they replied, and said that he had insisted there was no truth in what was being written. Shirer and his colleague reacted strongly to this but didn’t feel they were convincing the businessmen.

In the stadium, Baillet-Latour thanked Hitler and the Germans with ‘deepest gratitude’ and summoned the youth of the world to Tokyo in 1940.

The Olympic flame flickered and died, the arch of light dimmed and 100,000 stood in silence for a long minute.

Pat Norton caught the mood. ‘The Games finished and we thought, no more until 1940, Japan! The Closing Ceremony had a sad ring to it as the flags of all the nations were marched round the arena accompanied by the sound of rolling guns firing, followed by a choir singing “Song of the Flags.” It was saying goodbye to the friends we made at
Friesenhaus
that saddened us. Jeanette from the Argentine, who just waved “goodbye” and did not look back, our giggly little Japanese girls and South Americans. Somehow it didn’t seem right – we were very subdued realising we would never see them again.’
²³

And that was the fifteenth day.

It was over.

Notes

 
1
.
 
Stephanie Daniels and Anita Tedder,
‘A Proper Spectacle’ – Women Olympians 1900–1936
(Houghton Conquest, Beds., ZeNaNa Press, 2000), pp. 116–17.

 
2
.
 
Velma Dunn; interview with author.

 
3
.
 
William J. Baker,
Jesse Owens, An American Life
(New York, The Free Press, 1986), p. 112.

 
4
.
 
Christine Duerksen Sant, ‘“Genuine German Girls”: The Nazi Portrayal of its Sportswomen of the 1936 Berlin Olympics’, pp. 90–1. Unpublished doctoral thesis, Winston-Salem, Wake Forest University, 2000.

 
5
.
 
www.cishsydney2005.org/images/ST25-PAPER%20FOR%20ICHSC%20(SAKAUE).doc
-

 
6
.
 
Daniels and Tedder,
‘A Proper Spectacle’
, p. 121.

 
7
.
 
New York Times
, 12 August 1936.

 
8
.
 
Baker,
Jesse Owens
, p. 113.

 
9
.
 
Crown Prince Wilhelm (1882–1951) was the eldest of Kaiser Wilhelm II’s five sons. He fought in the First World War but afterwards went into exile in Holland. Promising to stay out of politics, he returned to Germany in 1923 and lived the rest of his life as a private citizen.

www.firstworldwar.com/bio/princewilhelm.ht
(visited 20 August 2005).

10
.
 
www.sport.nl/boek.php3?artid=2691
(visited 20 August 2005).

11
.
 
Baker,
Jesse Owens
, p. 116.

12
.
 
Anthony Read and David Fisher,
Berlin: The Biography of a City
(London, Hutchinson, 1994), p. 213.

13
.
 
Quoted in Giles MacDonogh,
Berlin
(London, Sinclair-Stevenson, 1997), p. 159.

14
.
 
Lewis H. Carlson and John J. Fogarty,
Tales of Gold
(Chicago, IL, Contemporary Books, 1987), p. 142.

15
.
 
New York Times
, 16 August 1936.

16
.
 
Velma Dunn; interview with author.

17
.
 
www.webenetics.com/hungary/olympic_1936.htm
(visited 18 April 2005).

18
.
 
www.athens2004.com/en/ParticipantBiography?noc=EGY&rsc=ARM070000
(visited 21 August 2005).

19
.
 
M.N. Masood,
The World’s Hockey Champions
(Dehli, Model Press, 1937).

20
.
 
sify.com/sports/hockey/fullstory.php?id=13392134 (visited 21 August 2005).

21
.
 
Ibid
.

22
.
 
William Shirer,
Berlin Diary
(London, Hamish Hamilton, 1941), p. 59.

23
.
 
Daniels and Tedder, ‘
A Proper Spectacle
’, p. 126.

The way I see it now as an old man, you only become a true Olympic champion when you add your credibility to the role of an idol, which you may acquire through winning Olympic medals. Berlin gave me the role of the idol; I have done my best to fill this role with my personal credibility. And thus there exists between Berlin and me an inseparable bond of reflection and feeling.

Jesse Owens, Berlin 2000 Olympic bid

T
hose 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