Berlin Games (48 page)

Son Ki-Jung was another who attained mythical status in his homeland. After the Games, he returned to Japanese-controlled Korea as a national hero. The newspaper
Dong-a-Ilbo
published a picture of Son Ki-Jung in which the rising sun on his vest had been painted out. The Japanese were furious and jailed eight people connected with the paper and ceased its publication for nine months. Japanese rule in Korea ended in 1945, and three years later Son Ki-Jung carried the South Korean flag into the stadium for the opening ceremony of the London Olympics. A prouder moment was to come forty years later, however. During the opening of the 1988 Seoul Olympics, a sprightly old man bounded into the stadium carrying the Olympic torch. Leaping with joy, Son Ki-Jung reduced his entire nation to tears.

Although Son Ki-Jung had been good to the Olympic movement, it proved to be less good to him. In October 1983 the Korean Olympic Committee wrote to the IOC, asking for Son's medal to be ascribed to Korea rather than to Japan. ‘In view of the Olympic ideals and humanity to be achieved,' wrote Man-Lip Choy, the KOC's secretary-general, ‘we hope that you should kindly refer to our proposal to correct the nationalities of the Olympic winners who participated in the Olympic Games not under their original nationalities.' The IOC refused the request, claiming that it would be in contravention of Rule 8 of the Olympic charter, which stated that ‘only citizens or nationals of a country may represent that country and compete in the Olympic Games'. ‘Thus, in accordance with the “Olympic Charter” and the principles of international law,' said the response, ‘modification of the nationality of an athlete who has competed in Games already held is unfeasible and legally unjustified.' This was nonsense. Not only was the Korean request not a contravention of Rule 8, but neither was it asking for something that was illegal under international law. The IOC is not a public body, but a private one, and it is up to it and its national committees if it wishes to alter its records. Presumably the IOC did not wish to antagonise the Japanese. The Koreans did not give up, and four years later the KOC again requested that Son's nationality should be changed, and even asked that the inscription on the stadium be altered. Once again, the IOC refused, saying that it would be an ‘alteration to the Olympic history'. Despite his treatment, Son remained a devoted Olympian, insisting that without the Olympics there would be more war. When it was put to him that the Berlin Games did not stop the Second World War, he replied, ‘That was the fault of politicians.' Son died at the age of ninety in November 2002. The inscription at the stadium in Berlin still bears the word ‘
Japon
' after his name.

It would be tempting to say that those who won gold medals at Berlin suffered some sort of curse, but it was not so. Bill Roberts stayed in the timber trade, although in a more rarefied form, as he became a successful antiques dealer. In 1984, Roberts' house in Cheshire was broken into. The thieves took many valuables, but the biggest blow to Roberts was the loss of his gold medal. Devastated, he thought he would never see the medal again. Help came in the form of Sir Arthur Gold, a former high jumper and a senior
administrator in the world of British athletics. Gold had heard that the moulds for the original medals had been taken to the United States after the war, and he was able to use his influence to get another gold medal struck from the original mould. In 1990 Roberts was presented with the new medal by Princess Anne, the president of the British Olympic Committee. ‘The replacement medal was of much greater meaning to me than the original,' he explained. ‘You see, I knew where the Nazis had got their gold from to make those medals in 1936, and the action of Sir Arthur, himself Jewish, and of the German Olympic Committee more than fifty years later meant so much more to me.' Roberts died in December 2001 at the age of eighty-nine.

Helen Stephens retired from athletics shortly after the Games, and played professional baseball and softball. Until 1952, she ran her own semi-professional basketball team. She died in St Louis in 1994 at the age of seventy-five. The fate of Stella Walsh was somewhat bizarre. On 4 December 1980, the sixty-nine-year-old Walsh was shopping in a discount store in Cleveland, Ohio, buying ribbons for the Polish women's basketball team, who were shortly to play at Kent State University. As she entered the car park, Walsh suddenly found herself caught in the crossfire of a bank robbery that had gone wrong, and was killed. Because she had died from unnatural causes, she was subjected to an autopsy, which revealed that she had both male and female genitalia. Like everyone else, Stephens had always suspected that something was not ‘kosher' with her competitor at Berlin. Her suspicions had been confirmed in 1975, when a friend told her that she had seen Walsh actually having sex with a woman and that ‘Stella had male sex organs'. The friend was so shocked that she said she would go to the police, whereupon Walsh punched her, and ‘told her if she did that, then Stella would “get her” when they returned to Cleveland'.

At the time of writing–early 2006–Dora Ratjen is still alive, married and living quietly in Germany as Hermann after undergoing corrective surgery. Before he retired, he ran a pub, and played a lot of football. According to Elfriede Kaun, Ratjen was the subject of an inquiry by the Reich Sports Ministry in 1938, after she was apprehended by some soldiers on a train, who suspected that she was a
foreign spy masquerading as a woman. ‘The soldiers took her off the train,' Kaun recalled, ‘and they took nude pictures of her and sent them to Berlin. A fellow athlete and I received letters from Berlin asking if we had known anything.' Kaun and Dorothy Odam are both alive, and live in Kiel and Croydon respectively. Odam has earned an MBE for her services to sport.

If Ratjen was coerced by some element of the Nazi regime to work for them, then there were some athletes who willingly helped the Nazis. One was Martinus Osendarp, who had gone on to win the 100 and 200 metres in the 1938 European Championships. When Germany occupied Holland in 1940, Osendarp joined not only the Dutch Nazi Party but also the SS, serving as a member of the Security Police. As a collaborator, Osendarp was successfully tried after the war and served four years in prison. After his release, he became a miner, and he died on 20 June 2002.

Robey Leibbrandt met his hero Adolf Hitler just after the Games. The boxer told the dictator that he was a huge admirer, and that he hoped that the Afrikaners would soon throw off the English yoke. ‘Yes,' Hitler is reported to have said, ‘the English, they are everywhere.' Leibbrandt spent the next few years on the boxing circuit, and returned to Germany in 1938 to study at the Reich Gymnastics Academy. When war broke out, Leibbrandt stayed in Germany, attending the leadership school in Neustralitz, where he became a glider pilot. He then joined the army, and trained as a parachutist. Itching to fight for both the Afrikaners and Nazism, Leibbrandt was the natural choice for Operation Weissdorn, which was an Abwehr plot to assassinate Jan Smuts and replace his government with one sympathetic to the Germans. The headstrong Leibbrandt was viewed with scepticism by some in the Nazi regime, but he was the best candidate available.

After a sea voyage of 9,000 miles, Leibbrandt was landed in a rubber dinghy at Mitchell's Bay in South Africa on 10 June 1941, equipped with nothing more than a radio, a suitcase and three bottles of soda water. The dinghy capsized, however, and Leibbrandt had to swim ashore empty handed. With some difficulty, the boxer managed to make contact with the Ossewa Brandwag, a militant anti-war, pro-Nazi Afrikaner organisation. Leibbrandt and the OB spent the next six months causing as much havoc as they could, but cursed with
factionalism, poor planning and suspected infiltrators, they made little progress towards their goal of establishing an Afrikaner Reich. Leibbrandt never came close to assassinating Smuts, although the general had been warned that the renegade was out to kill him.

Leibbrandt was arrested on Christmas Eve of that year. He was not tried until the following November, in a case that lasted until March 1943, making it the longest criminal trial in South African history. Leibbrandt was unrepentant, even giving the Nazi salute in the courtroom. When he was sentenced to death, he again saluted, and announced, ‘I greet death!
Die Vierkleur Hoog
! [The Afrikaners high!]' Smuts commuted Leibbrandt's sentence to life imprisonment, however, and when the National Party won the election in 1948, he was pardoned and released. He married, and had five children, one of whom was called Izan–‘Nazi' backwards. Another was called Rayna, an anagram of ‘Aryan'. Unlike many other Nazis, Leibbrandt was unashamedly unapologetic.

Diana Mosley also remained unapologetic in her admiration for Hitler. On 6 October 1936, she and Sir Oswald Mosley married in Goebbels' drawing room, in a short ceremony that was attended by the dictator, who gave them–somewhat unimaginatively–a silver photograph frame, although this cliché of a wedding present was at least emblazoned with the initials A.H. and the German eagle. Shortly after the outbreak of war, the Mosleys were interned under Defence Regulation 18B until 1943, after which they were placed under house arrest until the war's end. The couple eventually settled in France, and became friends of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. They had two children, one of whom, Max, is the president of the FIA, the governing body of world motor sport. Mosley died in 1980, and Diana in August 2003 in Paris. The fate of her sister Unity Mitford was far more tragic. When war broke out, Unity was so distraught that she went to the English Garden in Munich, and shot herself in the head. The suicide attempt failed, and she was returned to Britain by the Nazis, although she was severely mentally disabled. It was too dangerous to remove the bullet, and she contracted meningitis caused by the swelling around it, which killed her in May 1948.

Helene Mayer also died young. Cancer claimed her in 1952 when she was just forty-one. Although she was no Nazi like Osendarp, her
decision to salute on the podium earned her a notoriety that followed her to America. Her fellow German Jew, Gretel Bergmann, also made it to the United States, where in 1937 she won the US women's high jump championships with a jump of just over 1.57 metres–a height that she cleared easily. Bergmann refused to go back to Germany until 1999, when she opened a Berlin arena named in her honour. She is still alive.

 

Joachim von Ribbentrop was not a great success as the German ambassador to London. Although he felt sure that he would be able to integrate successfully into British society–he even sent his son Rudolf to Westminster School–he was loathed. His behaviour, such as giving King George VI a fascist salute, was regarded as bizarre, and he was unable to pull off an Anglo-German agreement. It is doubtful whether anybody could have done so, but Ribbentrop was hopelessly ill equipped. Ribbentrop fulfilled his dream of becoming the German foreign minister, however, when von Neurath resigned in February 1938. The war saw a diminution in his influence, although he was still found guilty of war crimes at the Nuremberg trial. He was hanged on 16 October 1946. Ribbentrop always maintained that the British were responsible for the war, and in particular one man. ‘There are those who contend that Vansittartism and the hatred of Germany which this word implies were a result of Hitler's policy,' he wrote. ‘To this I reply–and I believe with a better right: Hitler's policy was a consequence of Vansittart's policy in 1936.'

Ribbentrop's views are not widely shared today, much as Sir Robert Vansittart's views were not shared by many members of the British government. Ignored, sidelined, he was eventually kicked upstairs to the House of Lords. He regarded his diplomatic career as a failure. He died in 1957. Sir Eric Phipps became the ambassador to France in 1937, a post he held until his retirement two years later. He died in 1945.

 

The years after the Olympics were certainly kind to one man–Avery Brundage. Between 1936 and the start of the Second World War, Brundage courted the Nazis in order to win building contracts. On 8 August 1938 he received a letter from Tschammer und Osten that would have delighted him.

Brundage wrote back later that month, thanking Tschammer und Osten effusively. By November, however, the deal had fallen through, and the project was indefinitely postponed.

This did not stop Brundage maintaining immensely cordial links with those who were taking the world to war. On 20 October 1939, some seven weeks after the outbreak of hostilities in Europe, Brundage wrote to the Reich Sports Minister, expressing his desire that the war would end early so that the next Olympic Games could take place. Typically, he repeated his view that sport would be able to cure the world's ills. ‘It is unfortunate that the sportsmen of the world are not numerous enough to demand boldly an armistice so that the Games can proceed normally,' he wrote. Brundage was more concerned about his beloved Games than those who were dying. For him, sport was seemingly more important than life itself.

The pro-German Brundage would have had no issue with the German subsuming of the Olympic movement into Nazism, a process made possible by Coubertin's death in 1937. With Lewald now removed from the German Olympic Committee, it fell to Diem to start permanently Nazifying the Olympics. Little by little, the Germans staked their territory. The International Olympic Institute was founded in Berlin, and placed under the authority of the Reich Sports Minister. The IOC bulletin was incorporated into Diem's own Olympic magazine. The Olympic Cup was awarded to the Strength through Joy movement. The Olympic Diploma was presented to Leni Riefenstahl for
Olympia
. Karl Ritter von Halt joined the IOC executive committee in place of Lewald. The list was exhaustive.