Hitler's Olympics (10 page)

From their members, sports clubs chose those whom they thought to be the most suitable for the gymnastics events and sent their names forward to the organising body. At twenty-three, Schwieger and his discretion would be among them. From his club ‘there was only me. The clubs were asked to nominate their best sportsmen and they wanted to name my friend Edmund because he was better than me but for some reason he did not go. So I did.’ He’d take part in the torch run, too.
³⁰

In Stockholm trade unions were enraged that some Swedish sailors, distributing anti-Nazi leaflets in German sea ports, had been given five years’ hard labour. The unions formed a committee to force a boycott and the Social Democrats asked any of their members who were competitors not to go; if they did, they risked losing their union membership.

The
New York Times
noted that the process of taking down offensive posters, as at Garmisch, had begun in Berlin and added cryptically that perhaps the way to get proper treatment for Jews would be to hold the Olympics every year and in Germany. Hitler, the newspaper concluded, normally ignored what the world thought but was sensitive to it while he had the Games.

The Olympic Village was almost ready and we have many testaments to its scale, efficiency and mode of working. Suffice to say here that it comprised single-storey brick cottages for the teams, a welcome building, a building for meetings, a restaurant, a lake and sauna, swimming pool and training track, all harmoniously blended into the countryside.

Local lad Fritz Wandt recalls:

from 1 May to 15 June the Olympic Village was opened to the public for sightseeing. There were double-decker buses that came from Berlin according to a fixed schedule and during that time about 400,000 people visited, including me. There were guided tours of the Village, carried out by
Ehrenjungs
[boys of honour]. Some time before, 400 boys and 200 girls were chosen from track and field associations and were sent to a school to be trained. They all had to pass an exam and of the boys 170 remained, of the girls 70 or 80, I think. They were to look after the sportsmen in the Village throughout the Games, run errands and they also did the guided tours. They were all dressed in white.

The tours lasted about 90 minutes. It was very detailed. I can remember that the tour started at the entrance and then we went along to the Waldsee [forest lake], and I can remember that the boy who did the tour – he was seventeen or eighteen – told us there had always been a little murky pool there. When it was enlarged and all the old sand and mud taken out they found gnats and dragonflies and other insects, and all were registered meticulously. The excavated earth was used to raise the level of the upper and lower village green in the middle of the Village. At the far end of the lake there was a Finnish sauna that had not been planned initially, but when the Finns asked for one it was built there.

After 15 June it was closed except, of course, for the people who worked there, gardeners, telephone people and others who had to do the rest of the construction work.
³¹

The bell had been taken to the stadium on a flat railway truck and, at 7 a.m. on 11 May, the laborious process of hoisting it into position got under way. This was a quiet and, for some reason, secret operation with only about a hundred people present. ‘In order to reduce the weight, the different parts of the Bell (bell, yoke, clapper) were elevated separately.’ An electrical 5-ton winch accomplished this and at 7.55 a.m. it reached the top of the tower. By 9 a.m. it rested in its place, the ‘successful completion’ relayed to the Reich Minister of the Interior.
³²

It didn’t do to fail in Hitler’s Germany.

Notes

 
1
.
 
William Shirer,
Berlin Diary
(London, Hamish Hamilton, 1941), p. 30.

 
2
.
 
IOC Bulletin, February 1935.

 
3
.
 
Danzig, at various times in it history German, was now a Free City on the Baltic between the German provinces of Pomerania and East Prussia and they had a corridor of Polish land between them, too. Hitler fully intended to bring Danzig back into the Reich.

 
4
.
 
Lewis H. Carlson and John J. Fogarty,
Tales of Gold
(Chicago, IL, Contemporary Books, 1987), p. 135.

 
5
.
 
Deborah E. Lipstadt,
Beyond Belief
(New York, The Free Press, 1986) p. 66.

 
6
.
 
New York Times
, 2 August 1935; quoted in Lipstadt,
Beyond Belief
, p. 66.

 
7
.
 
Lipstadt,
Beyond Belief
, p. 66.

 
8
.
 
William Johnson,
All That Glitters Is Not Gold
(New York, Putnam, 1972); quoted in Lipstadt,
Beyond Belief
, p. 66.

 
9
.
 
Quoted in Milly Mogulof,
Foiled
(Oakland, CA, RDR Books, 2002), p. 98.

10
.
 
La Suisse «face aux Jeux Olympiques de Berlin 1936», 2004
, éditions de l’Université de Fribourg, in
www.lexpress.ch/loisirs/livres/2004/jo.htm
(visited 14 April 2005).

11
.
 
Margaret Bergmann Lambert,
By Leaps and Bounds
(United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington DC, 2005).

12
.
 
Quoted in Lipstadt,
Beyond Belief
, p. 66.

13
.
 
Even with all imaginable caveats this is an astonishingly naive speech. For the effects of legalised anti-Semitism – down to Jewish mothers unable to buy milk for their children in some places – see William L. Shirer,
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
(London, Pan Books, 1971), p. 291.

14
.
 
Shirer,
Berlin Diary
, p. 68.

15
.
 
Lipstadt,
Beyond Belief
, p. 67.

16
.
 
Quoted
ibid
.

17
.
 
Based on Mogulof,
Foiled
, pp. 112–15.

18
.
 
www.shoreac.org/THE%20COLUMBIA%20COMET.htm
(visited 3 August 2005). Incidentally, Johnson did not go to Berlin.
A torn hamstring kept him out of competition for almost all of 1936.

19
.
 
Mogulof,
Foiled
, p. 118.

20
.
 
Ibid
., p. 118.

21
.
 
Ibid
., p. 112.

22
.
 
Ibid
., p. 126.

23
.
 
Fritz Wandt; interview with Birgit Kubisch.

24
.
 
Marty Glickman with Stan Isaacs,
Fastest Kid on the Block
(Syracuse, NY, Syracuse University Press, 1996), p. 13.

25
.
 
The resolution against going to Berlin:

Whereas, on Nov 20, 1933, the Amateur Athletic Union of the United States in annual meeting assembled, adopted a resolution calling upon the American Olympic Association to notify the International Olympic Committee and the German Government that American athletes would not be certified to the Olympic Games of 1936 unless German-Jewish athletes were permitted and encouraged in fact, as well as in theory to train, prepare for and participate in these games; and

Whereas the German sports authorities thereupon renewed their pledges to observe the Olympic code and not to discriminate against German-Jewish athletes in the selection of the German team directly to the Amateur Athletic Union of the United States and subsequently to the president of the American Olympic Committee; and

Whereas acceptance of the invitation by the American Olympic Committee to participate in these Games was made conditional upon the keeping to these pledges; and

Whereas in spite of their pledges the German sports authorities in the two years that have since elapsed have not permitted or encouraged German-Jewish athletes to train, prepare for and participate in the Games, but on the contrary have denied them as a group solely because of their race, not only an equal opportunity with non-Jewish athletes but also a fair and adequate opportunity to train and compete for places on the German Olympic team; and

Whereas the German sports authorities have thus made race a test of eligibility for the German Olympic team; and

Whereas, in order to further the war which it is waging upon Christianity and the Christian churches and for the purpose of gaining complete control over the minds and souls as well as the bodies of German youth, the German Government has made it impossible for Catholic and

Protestant athletes to engage in sports and athletics except as members of Nazi organisations; and

Whereas, these measures have resulted in the denial of opportunity to train and compete for places on the German Olympic team to devout Catholic and Protestant athletes who for reasons of conscience have been unwilling to deliver themselves over to those hostile to their religion and their churches; and

Whereas, the German sports authorities have thus made religion a test of eligibility for the German Olympic team; and

Whereas, the German sports authorities have declared their intention of promoting the racial and anti-Semitic, the pagan and anti-Christian and other political policies of the German Government and the Nazi party in the regulation of sport and in the selection of the German Olympic team; and in the selection of the German team; and

Whereas, the German sports authorities have thus introduced political considerations into sports and the Olympics; and

Whereas, the injection of these considerations is a contravention of the purpose of amateur sport and the Olympic ideal of fair play; and

Whereas, the participation of American athletes in the Olympic Games under these conditions will represent and will be interpreted to the German people by the German Government as American endorsement of its sports and other policies and will thus give support to the Nazi efforts to destroy those principles of liberty and equality for the preservation of which the American Republic was established;

Therefore be it resolved, that the Amateur Athletic Union of the United States declare itself against America’s participation in the Olympic Games in 1936 if held in Berlin and solemnly calls upon American athletes to refuse to participate in the Eleventh Olympiad, if it is held in Germany, and requests the American Olympic Committee to revoke its conditional acceptance of the German Olympic Committee’s invitation to an American team to the Games and calls upon the International Olympic Committee to remove the 1936 Olympic Games to another country where it is possible for them to be held in accordance with the Olympic ideal of chivalry and fair play; and

Be it further resolved, that the Amateur Athletic Union of the United States calls upon the American Olympic Association and the American Olympic Committee to convene special meetings of these bodies as soon as possible for the purpose of reconsidering the question of American participation in the Games, if they are held in Germany, in the light of developments since the American Olympic Committee conditionally accepted the invitation of the German Olympic Committee.

Be it further resolved that the Amateur Athletic Union of the United States instructs its delegates to such meetings to vote against American participation in the Eleventh Olympiad, if it is held in Germany.

Be it further resolved that the A.A.U. of the United States calls upon the A.O.C and the American representatives on the International Olympic Committee to request the I.O.C to convene itself as soon as possible in special session to consider the question of the removal of the Eleventh Olympiad from Germany in the light of the evidence of the failure of the German authorities to conform to the Olympic code and to their numerous pledges.

Be it further resolved that the Amateur Athletic Union of the United States calls upon American athletes, upon amateur athletes and upon all who love fair play to govern themselves in accordance with the letter and the spirit of these resolutions to give no support or encouragement to the formation of an American team to compete in the Games and to take no part in the Games either as spectators or competitors, if they are held in Germany.

26
.
 
The XIth Olympic Games, Berlin, 1936 Official Report.

27
.
 
Ibid
.

28
.
 
IOC Bulletin, February 1936.

29
.
 
www.sok.se/?open&f=F16&id=98F96&mid=200
(visited 12 August 2005).

30
.
 
Werner Schwieger; interview with Birgit Kubisch.

31
.
 
Fritz Wandt; interview with Birgit Kubisch.

32
.
 
The XIth Olympic Games, Berlin, 1936 Official Report.

The train trip to Paris, with six in a second-class carriage, was none too comfortable but the Team took it in good part, knowing that sleepers were out of all reason, as the cost in Australian money was about £5 each.

Australian Olympic Committee report

O
n Wednesday 13 May the Australian team left Sydney for Europe on the steamer
Mongolia
to a rousing send-off. They’d travel via Hobart, Melbourne, Adelaide and Fremantle (to visit neighbouring Perth). The German Organising Committee presented the ship with an Olympic flag and she flew it whenever she was in port, somehow bringing distant Berlin physically closer.

The great gathering was under way and between May and 1 August, competitors from forty-eight other countries from all over the world would board ships and trains for Berlin.