Hitler's Olympics (8 page)

On 15 August, Hitler banned German–Jewish weddings and a day later the London
Times
correspondent in Berlin, Norman Ebbutt, was expelled in retaliation for the British government’s expulsion of some Nazi journalists. Ebbutt had been ‘hated and feared for years because of his exhaustive knowledge of this country and of what was going on behind the scenes’, Shirer wrote. In a touching farewell, some fifty foreign correspondents assembled at the Charlottenburg Station to see him off, although Nazi whispering warned them against it. Shirer found himself amused to note the correspondents
not
there, including a couple of well-known Americans. He watched as the platform crawled with Gestapo agents ‘noting down our names and photographing us. Ebbutt terribly high-strung, but moved by our sincere, if boisterous, demonstration.’
¹⁴

The Olympic bell was cast in the town of Bochum and, like the Olympic poster and the torch run, was a matter of enormous importance for the Organising Committee and the government. In early September a senior member of the Organising Committee covered the entire route of the proposed torch run in an enormous recce.

At Nuremberg Hitler announced a series of decrees which reduced Jews to subjects without rights and barred them from holding jobs in public services except the law and medicine. The Nuremberg Laws, as they became known, could scarcely be misunderstood.

The debate about the Games now spilled over from the [American] sports pages, where it was first raised, to the editorial pages, and from the meetings of the Amateur Athletic Union to the Congressional floor. The presence of an American team at the 1936 Olympic Games became a matter of national significance and remained so until the day the team set sail for Germany. In the twelve months preceding the Games reporters, columnists, sports writers, and editorial boards debated how an American presence at the Games would be interpreted and what was more likely to violate America’s neutrality: boycotting or participating in the Games.
¹⁵

Perhaps the view expressed by the
Norfolk Pilot
, Virginia, was typical of the domestic American mood. It wasn’t ‘the function of the Olympic Games to distribute clean bills of political health. Too many glass houses are involved.’ That view held until the paper discovered anti-Semitic signs were decorating Garmisch. The
Pilot
wanted a boycott.
¹⁶

The twin themes converged on Helene Mayer, teaching at a fashionable girls’ school in Oakland. Classified as a ‘half Jew’, her club in Offenbach had barred her under the ‘non-Aryan’ rule. The German Academic Exchange Council withdrew her grant but she came from a wealthy family, continued to live and fence in America and won the national championships from 1933 to 1935.

Like Bergmann, she could be exploited.

The
New York Times
reported the IOC had received a ‘purported text’ from the German Organising Committee inviting her to join the German fencing team. Von Tschammer und Osten claimed there would be two Jews, Mayer and (presumably) Bergmann, and as a consequence promises were being kept. However, Mayer sent a telegram to an official at the German Jewish Men’s League in New York saying ‘Have not received any such invitation from German Olympic Committee’.

If the Nazis intended to exploit Mayer, she intended to exploit them. Both sides knew the respective strengths and weaknesses of their positions. Their dispute became, in an exquisitely appropriate way, a fencing match complete with tactical advances and retreats, hits and misses, and many, many feints.
¹⁷

An American magazine cabled her asking if she had been invited, whether the American team should go to Berlin, if she regarded herself as a refugee and would she comment on the Nazi newpapers that regularly reported her suicide. She replied sardonically that she had not received an invitation, couldn’t answer as to whether Americans should go – none of her business – and certainly did not regard herself as a refugee. She added a feint, ‘My suicides amuse me.’

Lewald journeyed to America to promote the Games and said he would be inviting her to the German trials in February ‘with all expenses paid’. He said he hoped she had kept her form as a leading fencer – perhaps he was unaware of what she had done in the championships – because they wanted Jewish athletes of Olympic standard but ‘we have none’. He was sure Americans would not want the Germans to have token Jews …

Mayer said that she had not received any communication from Lewald. Von Tschammer und Osten sent a letter to Sherrill reiterating that Mayer and Bergmann had been invited and would be given the same treatment as any other ‘candidates’ for the team ‘although they are Jewesses’. He enclosed a copy of the letter that had been sent to Mayer although this might have been
the
letter to her and not a copy at all, meaning it had not been sent to her.

Mayer said she had not received any letter and added that she didn’t believe a letter had been or would be sent.

That autumn Brundage and Sherrill journeyed to Germany and met Hitler. Sherrill insisted that the German Olympic team be open to Jewish athletes with, presumably, the implication that if it wasn’t, American participation would come into question. Sherrill told the
San Francisco Chronicle
that he had gone to Germany with ‘the purpose of getting at least one Jew on the German Olympic team’. Sherrill faced a delicate problem, as many others would, because, as he said, he would not countenance Germans lecturing him on the ‘Negro situation’ in the United States. He had not therefore discussed any ‘obstacles’ German Jewish athletes faced but only the principle of picking at least one – Mayer. The delicacy did not end there. Sherrill knew an American withdrawal risked a domestic anti-Semitic backlash. ‘If our Jews force us to stay out of the Olympic Games they will be taking a great chance with their own comfort,’ he said.

Still Mayer had received no invitation.

The German tactic seemed to wear her down and make her refuse to return – the ideal solution for the Nazis, simultaneously absolving them and removing the problem. Mayer seems to have seen that particular feint quickly and clearly.

Sonja Branting, the daughter of a former Swedish prime minister, told a meeting of the Manhattan division of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom in New York that sending a team would be a dangerous step, not least because they would be subject to the ‘most insidious Nazi propaganda’. A resolution opposing the team going was carried unanimously.

The President of the American Athletic Union, former Supreme Court Justice Jeremiah Mahoney, firmly against, spoke at a dinner with five hundred guests in honour of Branting. He described how some people ‘went to Germany with the intention of keeping their eyes closed’. Pressed if he meant Brundage and Sherrill he said ‘I didn’t mention any names’, although a little later he spoke of ‘my dear friend Sherrill [who’d] spent four days with Hitler and patted him on the back and said “Old Sport Hitler”’.

Mahoney, of course, was not an athlete and had a very different perspective. He’d discover that from Benjamin Washington Johnson, a black freshman and sprinter (known, inevitably, as the Colombia Comet). In 1932, Johnson qualified for the American Olympic trials but his family were so poor they couldn’t afford for him to go. It took a local appeal to raise the money. Since then he had proved good enough to beat Jesse Owens in a 60-yard dash and Ralph Metcalfe in a 100.

Mahoney went to Columbia University to gather support for a boycott but after he had spoken Johnson said he was for going: the conditions of blacks in the South were just as bad as those for Jews in Germany. ‘It is futile and hypocritical that Judge Mahoney should attempt to clean up conditions in Germany before cleaning up similar conditions in America,’ said Johnson.
¹⁸

Mahoney remained undeterred. He wrote to Lewald in Berlin saying that if Germany did not have Jewish athletes of Olympic standard might that be because they are ‘either dead, exiled or barred?’ Of the Mayer case, he stressed it was not important whether she made the team but it
was
important that she be allowed to compete in the trials. He also pointed out that publicly she had been invited four times but actually she hadn’t been invited at all.

Lewald tried to parry by saying Mayer had accepted the invitation and brandished a telegram from California which read ‘Sickness delayed answering you and Tschammer [
sic
]. Acceptance left yesterday. Love’. It was signed ‘H’.
¹⁹

What moves lay behind all this – Mayer’s biographer speaks of obfuscating ‘lies and pointless statements by many spokesmen’
²⁰
– have disappeared from the record, but Mayer felt she now had the force with her and made a thrust. She demanded restoration of her full German citizenship, lost under the Nuremberg Laws, as a condition of returning. The Laws stated: ‘An individual of mixed Jewish blood is one who is descended from one or two grandparents who, racially, were full Jews … Full-blooded Jewish grandparents are those who belonged to the Jewish religious community.’ Mayer had the grandparents but had never belonged to a religious community. She sought out the German Consul-General in San Francisco and asked him to negotiate a compromise, assuring him she felt in no way Jewish.
²¹
He recommended she be granted citizenship despite the grandparents factor.

Maybe pressure of unpleasant consequences was brought to bear on the family. Her mother cabled her saying her brothers were considered German citizens and so she was, too. One report suggested she had been obliged to disassociate herself from her Jewish father and say she was the product of her Aryan mother and an illicit affair with an Aryan father. Another report hinted that some test had been carried out and she had only 25 per cent Jewish blood.
²²

She would go to Berlin.

Fritz Wandt was eleven and his family were farmers at Dyrotz, a tiny place within walking distance of where the Olympic Village would be. They’d moved about a bit but his father considered Dyrotz ‘as his elixir of life’ and they came back in 1935. He leased land and literally made hay. At the military camp nearby ‘there were a lot of horses and they needed hay and so we took ours and sold it to them. The Olympic Village was already under construction. We could see it when we came past it with our loads of hay. As early as this time, it was possible for all the nations that were going to take part in the three-day event to have their horses there and exercise on the military training area – very similar to the Olympic course. As a little boy you could get into the stables and watch the horses. I remember that the Swedish team – I think it was, or it may have been the Swiss – had their horses. That was the beginning of it for me, the beginning of my Olympic enthusiasm.’
²³

In September, a German football team called Ratibor played a Polish team in Upper Silesia – part of Germany, of course – in front of 50,000 people. After the game a member of that crowd, a Polish Jew called Edmund Baumgartner, was reportedly beaten to death by some Nazis. The facts remain disputed because other sources suggest Baumgartner played and when his team took the lead the crowd invaded the pitch, and he was beaten to death on it. Whatever the truth, newspapers spread the story far and wide, and the stark brutality of it seemed to encapsulate the Nazis. That it happened at a sporting event provoked its own kind of disquiet, heightened because the German team was due to play England on 4 December at White Hart Lane, London – the home of the Tottenham Hotspur team, which had wide Jewish support. The ominous mood heightened further with the announcement that the Germans would be bringing 10,000 of their own supporters.

Hitler intended to use the behaviour of the 10,000 as living proof that the Nazi regime was humane, normal and sporting. This might help to head off any boycotts of the Olympics, as would the presence in London at the time of the match of von Tschammer und Osten, Lewald and Diem. They would be lobbying hard.

On 5 November, three months to the day before the Winter Games opened, Baillet-Latour visited Hitler and had a long conversation with him. Judging the nuances of it, recapturing the hard and soft moments, is very difficult. Baillet-Latour pointed out that Munich newspapers worked under censorship and carried stories about signs at the Garmisch recreation hall saying ‘Jews Are Forbidden to Enter’, words that violated the spirit which the Germans had assured the world they would respect. Hitler promised the signs would come down there, in Berlin and from centres of foreign tourists, but gave no promise about the special glass cases on the streets which displayed the rabidly anti-Semitic
Der Stürmer
magazine for people to read.

The German newspapers did not carry any of this and the Propaganda Ministry refused to issue a statement. The news emerged when Baillet-Latour met foreign correspondents and answered their questions. He was asked about a reported official German news service announcement that ‘in future the winners of athletics contests in the Third Reich may only be those who master the Nazi ideology and who make known not only in athletic contests but also in national life that they stand up for that ideology’. He responded that the IOC did not concern itself with ‘such details’. He condemned those in America who demanded a boycott. That led to a question about the Lake Shore Swimming Club of Chicago, in Berlin the month before to take on the provisional German team, who had found signs on all entrances to the pool ‘Jews Are Not Wanted’. Baillet-Latour gave a politician’s answer: what might have happened in the past did not interest him, only the future. He pointed out that a recent Germany–Hungary fencing match in Munich passed without incident and the Jewish fencers in the Hungarian team had been received with cordiality.

He was asked about the letter Mahoney had written to Lewald and said crisply: ‘Mr Mahoney has demonstrated his lack of arguments by having recourse to personalities. It is of no value.’

Baillet-Latour restated his fixed position by issuing a declaration which began: