Hitler's Olympics (7 page)

The IOC met in Oslo and Baillet-Latour, anxious to reassure all concerned, said Dr Diem had methodically

carried out the preparatory work that has enabled him to present you with the complete programme much earlier than his predecessors have been able to do.

He has profited from the experiences of Amsterdam and Los Angeles and you can be assured he has set up a perfect organisation…. . Athletes are training enthusiastically on land, in water, on ice, on the snowy slopes of mountains, and even in the air. Painters, sculptors, engravers, musicians, men of letters and poets are working equally to bring to the fete of physical strength a contribution of the arts and of letters imbued with the athletic ideal. Regional Games have permitted the new countries to cherish the hope of sending their representatives to mingle with those of older countries….

God grant that the XIth Olympiad may be the dawn of an era of peace marked by an ‘entente cordiale’ between the youth of all nations working together to assure in the future the prosperity and happiness of their homes.
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Hitler moved into Saarbrücken, symbolically as well as physically repossessing the town on a wet day when, surrounded by military officers, he strode forward smiling to take a review of the troops. He had made himself room for manoeuvre: fomenting a breakdown of government in Austria to bring it into the Reich, reclaiming the German minorities in Czechoslovakia for the Reich, provoking trouble round the Danzig corridor in Poland.
³
Rational people could not believe they were being carried towards another war and instinctively recoiled into something approaching denial.

This is the conflicted position in which Baillet-Latour found himself. He never did find a way out of it. Yet the various national Olympic Committees, unable to live in ethical isolation however hard they aspired to it, had to reflect the growing unease in their own countries – not about another, unthinkable war but whether to go to Berlin or not for a sporting event meant to celebrate the antithesis of the Nazi creed.

The Americans had already given strong voice to such misgivings in the New York meeting. Now others were, too. The Czechoslovaks, harbouring doubts from the beginning, said publicly they would not send a team, although eventually they did; the same went for Yugoslavia. The initial French reaction had been not to go. The Swedes were torn, a forceful movement developing against. Many Swedes thoroughly disliked German National Socialism, which was utterly alien to their way of thinking and living. Several South American countries hesitated and that perplexed the Germans because their governments seemed so pro-German. Brazil compensated by sending two distinct teams. In December 1934, Great Britain had decided to go, but political pressures compelled the British Olympic Committee and the government to hold a review. It confirmed participation, although a sense of unease persisted and would not go away.

As the time shortened to the Games, now only a year away, a third theme became evident as competitors all over the world prepared regardless of what their governments and Olympic Committees said. They could do nothing else and there is not much evidence that they wanted to do anything else.

That is how in St Louis, Missouri, a tall, strong teenager called Helen Stephens from Fulton quite naturally entered the long jump, the shot-put and the 50-metre sprint at the American Athletic Union’s championships. She won the long jump and shot, itself remarkable for an unknown seventeen-year-old, but the sprint subsequently assumed international importance. In it Stephens met a runner known as Stella Walsh. Born in Poland, her family emigrated when she was two although in international competitions she always ran for Poland because repeated attempts to secure American citizenship failed. She therefore won the 100 metres as a Pole in the 1932 Games and would compete as a Pole again in Berlin. Stephens had Stella’s picture on the wall for the purpose of sticking pins in it.

As they prepared Stephens felt nervous. She wore a blue gym suit made for her by her mother, grey sweat pants from a boy in her high school team, running shoes from another boy. Despite her nerves she was confident – and won the race. She’d claim that Walsh called her ‘a greenie from the sticks’, that Walsh said she had jumped the gun, and that she said to Walsh, ‘Come to Fulton and I’ll run against you even across a ploughed field.’
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Walsh didn’t.

They would run against each other again but not until one August afternoon in 1936 in the stone-clad stadium, and when they did, something much more than a bitter Olympic rivalry was born. Both were accused of being men.

In the spring Jews were excluded from the ‘gardens of Bad Dürkheim, the swimming pools and baths of Schweinfurt, the municipal baths of Karlsruhe, Freiburg, Gladbach, and Dortmund. Even the streetcars of Magdeburg were closed to Jews.’ In spite of this the President of the American Olympic Committee, Avery Brundage, insisted that Germany would abide by its ‘unqualified assurances of non-discrimination’.
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Brundage, a controversial figure, had competed in the 1912 Games, graduated from the University of Illinois with a degree in civil engineering and founded a construction company which did a lot of work around Chicago. Autocratic by nature, he showed no interest in the middle ground but trenchantly maintained a pro-German position.

Brundage said he had heard nothing of discrimination in Germany and there were no ‘reports whatsoever, official or otherwise, that Germany has failed to give Jewish athletes a fair opportunity’. As long as Germany adhered to its promises, the American Olympic Committee had no right to ‘interfere in its internal political, religious, or racial affairs’.
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The US Embassy, reporting to the State Department, contradicted Brundage and

by this time the Germans had managed by deft manipulation and sheer terror to transform the question of Jewish participation into a theoretical and not a practical matter. Many Jews who were potential competitors had left Germany because they knew they would not be able to train in the manner demanded of an Olympic contender. Lacking financial means and communal support, two critical components of Olympic preparation, those who remained faced such substantial psychological and personal handicaps that qualifying for a berth on a team became a virtual impossibility.
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Brundage’s position could, and ought, to have been viewed as disingenuous. The Americans would not have been interfering if they said they didn’t propose to go near it and, anyway, IOC member General Charles Sherrill would certainly interfere – but not yet. At this stage, however, Sherrill was quoted as saying he wasn’t concerned ‘one bit the way the Jews in Germany are being treated, any more than lynchings in the South of our own country’.

Frederick W. Rubien, secretary of the American Olympic Committee, was quoted as saying that ‘Germans are not discriminating against Jews in their Olympic tryouts. The Jews are eliminated because they are not good enough as athletes. Why, there are not a dozen Jews in the world of Olympic caliber.’
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Brundage had his supporters including Sigfrid Edström, Swedish delegate to the IOC who wrote to him that he was against the persecution of the Jews but something had to be done because ‘a great part of the German nation was led by the Jews and not by the Germans themselves…. They are intelligent and unscrupulous … they must be kept within certain limits.’
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Germany was rearming, Britain was rearming and, unusually, the Swiss parliament met in Bern in summer session. Although the congressmen agreed on a budget of 34 million francs for the country’s defence they refused 36,000 to finance the Olympic team for Berlin. The conservative Swiss press rounded on the ‘reds’ for doing this and the German press rounded on the Swiss, accusing them of supporting a boycott as a protest against Nazi Germany. The Swiss Olympic Committee was in favour of going, the Swiss Workers’ Federation of Gymnastics and Sport (Satus) against. They said:

Its members would like to open the eyes of public opinion to the dangerous totalitarian and racist politics of the Third Reich. From international sporting meetings, they have met German workers’ sporting associations and learnt of their situation since Hitler came to power: interdictions, imprisonment etc. For the Satus activists, to take part in the Games is to work within the Nazi propaganda game.

From the 1930s sport has been used by the Fascist regimes as a cult for the national image. Hitler wants to use the Berlin Games to prove to the world the superiority of the Aryan race. For its part, the International Olympic Committee supports the streams of Nazi propaganda to assert its supremacy in the world of sport.

In Zurich, the IOC met the Swiss Olympic Committee and reiterated the assurances given by the German Olympic Committee.
¹⁰

In Berlin 156,000 copies of the official poster were printed in four languages and circulated for free while in July, with the Games just thirteen months away, advance ticket sales began. In nineteen days they reached 1 million Reichsmarks. The Olympic housekeeping went on, every mosquito at the Olympic Village exterminated by the end of the month.

In athletic terms, Germany had sixteen districts each with their own championships. Württemberg was one and Bergmann competed in June, winning by jumping 1.56 metres. The following month the best German Jewish athletes, men and women, were told to attend a ‘one-week training course in Ettlingen, and this must have been when I competed against Elfried Kaun – one of three times I was allowed to compete agaist Aryans’. Bergmann felt the move was ‘strictly grandstanding on the world stage’ because, while she could perform at the highest level and might nurse realistic hopes of an Olympic gold medal, the others were nowhere near that standard ‘and the Nazis knew it’.
¹¹
However, the week proved productive in different ways. Because they were all Jews they had a great deal in common and friendships were forged. Briefly, because they were together, they could ‘forget the troubles of the outside world’. Bergmann came across a medical student who had ambitions as a sprinter. It seemed just another friendship but it wasn’t. She would marry him and still be married to him half a century later. By then she’d have forgotten most of her German and have a New York accent.

In August the
New York Times
reported that foreign correspondents in Berlin were being officially obstructed in reporting because the government feared losing the Games and even felt some of the correspondents wanted that to happen. In fact, as the newspaper pointed out, correspondents helped the Organising Committee with translation work. A day later the paper reported that Bergmann had been excluded from the high jump in the German Championships, an important step to Olympic selection. Von Tschammer und Osten offered the classic
Catch 22
defence. Because she was Jewish she couldn’t belong to the German Athletic Association and because they ran the championships she could not take part. In the strictest terms the German Olympic Committee remained true to their promise: her exclusion was for non-membership.

A short while later the
New York Times
highlighted how the Germans were getting away with this.

NAZI
OLYMPIC
VOW
KEPT
TECHNICALLY

In Theory Even Jews May Try For Team,

But All Except Hitlerites Are Handicapped
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Speaking in Vienna, Baillot-Latour adopted his fixed position. He explained that

removal of the Games is possible in case agreements are not kept. Hitherto such a case has never occurred in the history of the Olympics. I cannot imagine the German sports authorities not fulfilling their obligations. If it happened however that von Tschammer restricted training possibilities for ‘non-Aryans’ in the same way he did for the national championships and other sports competitions then the International Olympic Committee could – and would be compelled to – order the removal of the Games from Berlin. But I cannot believe things will develop in that direction, and hope the Olympic Games will go through in 1936 without any friction.
¹³

Baillet-Latour must have known what was happening. Gretel Bergmann’s experience highlights the public nature of anti-Semitism, the park signs ordering ‘No Jews or Dogs Allowed’, the people she knew who suddenly wouldn’t talk to her, the feeling of ‘being reduced to nothing’.

Diem, speaking in Paris, took up his stance. In the newspaper
France Soir
he said ‘we have made a promise and you can rest assured we will keep it. That promise was that we will not make any distinction between race or religion during the Games. Jewish athletes will be received the same as others.’ You needed to read that carefully because he did not say
German
Jews, a completely unsustainable claim. Of course the Jews in other teams would be received, for propaganda purposes and because a refusal to receive them would make the Berlin Games themselves unsustainable.

At Boston, Massachusetts, 1,500 people representing the town’s Jewish organisations met at a hotel and laid down a resolution: ‘This conference urges upon the Amateur Athletic Union to rescind conditional American acceptance of Germany’s invitation to participate in the 1936 Olympic Games as a solemn obligation in defense of the spirit of sportsmanship and fair play and the principles of racial and national equality upon which the Olympic Games are founded.’

Far in the background, and quietly, the president of the north-east Ohio division of the Amateur Athletic Union, Lou N. Bloom, said that one of their leading sprinters, Jesse Owens, was to be summoned over allegations concerning his amateur status, a very serious matter. The principle of absolute amateur status for participants held athletics and the Olympics in a rigid vice – hence Baillet-Latour’s preoccupation with it at the IOC meetings where it was given equal importance with the Berlin problem. Rumours circulated that Owens received money for work he hadn’t done, because of his athletic ability. He worked for the Ohio House of Representatives and was paid $3 a day but received $159 between 9 June and 31 July as an honorary page.