Hitler's Olympics (14 page)

The rest were fit enough to eat 700lb of beef, double the normal amount for the ship and bringing the possibility of rationing by banning second helpings.

The delicate matter of race relations has spawned two conflicting testimonies.

The first: Owens went to his assigned table ‘only to find all three of his dining mates to be outspoken, wisecracking Southerners…. All were whites, and to Jesse their necks appeared red. For all his easy-mannered adaptability, he could not cope with that situation. He found another table.’ Afterwards, one of them teased Owens ‘for his prejudice against white Southerners’.
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The second: Towns remembered that he, shot-putter Jack Torrance and Glenn ‘Slats’ Hardin, a 400 metre hurdler – three white Southerners – had been assigned a table for the voyage. Owens came up and hesitated but Hardin, who knew him, asked if it was his table, too. Owens said yes and Hardin said, ‘Well, sit your ass down here.’ Towns claimed that Owens ate with them all the way across and it didn’t bother them at all.
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John Woodruff says ‘there was no discrimination amongst the athletes on the team’.
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After dinner the competitors watched a film or danced to live music.

That night the competitors were settling to life on board. Some had already been seasick but evidently Helen Stephens was not affected as she covered eight ‘laps’ of the deck after dinner.
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In Berlin the radio links with foreign countries were tested ‘after the removal of many international difficulties which ordinarily exist. The authorities in the different countries concerned gave every assistance to the German Broadcasting Company.’

In Laupheim, Gretel Bergmann waited in a kind of nightmare to hear if she had been selected. ‘I didn’t know what was going on, I had no idea. I didn’t think they were going to let me compete. I mean, how can 100,000 people look at a Jewish girl high-jumping for Adolf Hitler? Nobody will know what psychologically I went through. Day and night I was thinking:
What am I going to do if they let me compete?
I had this idea that the madder I got the better I jumped and I said, “
Am I going to have to give the Hitler salute?
” All these things were weighing on me and I didn’t want to talk about it to my parents because I didn’t want to make their lives harder than they already were. It was a horrible time. Horrible. Psychologically I don’t know how I got through it. By being a normal human being, I think! If I hadn’t had my sense of humour I don’t think I would have.’
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An official letter from the German Reichs Union for Sport in Charlottenburg, dated 16 July, settled it. For months the German team trained at Ettlingen. Jewish athletes had much poorer conditions and might or might not be invited to regional qualifying competitions. Bergmann, by contrast, had been to Ettlingen and there found no discrimination among her fellow athletes, particularly from fellow high-jumper Elfriede Kaun – as we have seen.

The letter, delivered quite normally with the post to Bergmann’s home in Laupheim, read:

The Reichssportführer, who has selected the team for the Olympic Games, has not been able to include you in the team representing Germany during the time of 1 to 9 August in the Olympic stadium. For each competition – except relay – only three competitors could be chosen. Due to your recent performances you yourself probably did not reckon on being selected.

But Dr. von Halt [of the German Olympic Committee] is prepared to reward your willingness and hard work by offering you, free, standing tickets to the track and field week, including the Opening Ceremony, for the days 1./ 2./ 3./ 4./ 5./6./ 7./ 8./ 9 August.

Should you intend to make use of this offer please let us know. The tickets will be sent to you immediately. Unfortunately travel and living expenses cannot be included.

Heil Hitler!

Tschammer

‘I opened it and I cursed my head off. I used every word I had ever learnt and that was a lot because I was the only girl in my class – we were thirteen, I think, and I was the only girl. They cursed and I learnt. I was absolutely stunned.’
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The letter made no mention of the fact that she was joint holder of the German record or that only two competitors had been selected for the women’s high jump, Kaun and Ratjen. To pass up a likely gold medal for anti-Semitic reasons is startling enough, even in Nazi Germany. To have selected Ratjen the man instead was far more than startling. Ratjen, first name Hermann, was a member of the Hitler Youth and had been threatened with
consequences
if he did not agree to compete. The reasoning: a man has to beat the women, and he’ll have Bergmann’s gold.

The Bergmann and Ratjen cases, contrived as they were from a blind adherence to Olympic ideals, represent a neat insight into insanity.

It was measured insanity, too. Again as we have seen, Bergmann and Ratjen were ordered to be room-mates during training because, Bergmann insists looking back, as a seventeen-year-old male with testosterone pumping he might have been tempted by an Aryan girl but would never dare touch a Jew. It cut the other way, too, because she, as a Jew, would never have dared denounce Ratjen the Aryan even if she had discovered his real gender.

Bergmann ‘could never figure out’ who signed the letter dismissing her from the team – the signature is an indecipherable scrawl.
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‘Tschammer was the overall boss, I guess. But you know this is a letter that was sent, I am sure, to all the people who didn’t make the final team. That wasn’t just a letter to me, this was just a form letter. To so-and-so-and-so, then the text, so-and-so-and-so, you didn’t make it. This had nothing to do with a personal letter to me – but I am convinced that that letter went out much earlier to the others, mine got sent at the last minute after the American ship sailed. I never had any proof of this but I said, “If that’s a coincidence, I’ll eat my hat.” I was joint German record holder: of course it is nonsense to say I wasn’t good enough. I did that four weeks before the Olympics,
four weeks before
.’
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Once the
Manhattan
set sail, with her coveted cargo of American competitiors, the Nazis judged it safe to dump Bergmann without fear of repercussions, even explaining away her absence to the German Olympic team by claiming she was injured. Bergmann said this was the first time ‘I really realised my candidacy as an Olympic athlete was all a sham.’

As a ‘half Jew’ Mayer received quite different treatment. Her physical appearance was that of a stereotypical Aryan: blonde hair and fair-skinned in contrast to Bergmann’s dark eyes and hair. By one grotesque irony among so many, years before the Ministry of Propaganda had described Mayer as a perfect Nordic woman – but that was before they discovered her Jewish ancestry. The Ministry now ordered that ‘coverage should not mention there are two non-Aryans [Mayer and Bergmann] among the women on the team’. The presumption must be that Bergmann’s continued public ‘inclusion’ was intended to prolong the pretence even after she had been ditched. Whether the German public could see through these manoeuvrings – the word ‘posturings’ has been used – in a situation of tight censorship seems highly unlikely, although a day later
Der Angriff
explained that, apart from the two high-jumpers selected, no others were world class.
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The Ministry held daily press briefings at noon to exercise the censorship. That involved control over what would be printed and what omitted as well as identifying subjects to be given particular prominence. If newspapers and magazines did not have a reporter present, confidential directives were sent to editors and section editors. These directives had to be kept in a safe place and destroyed at regular intervals.

Hans Bollmann, the head of the Nazi sportswriters association, insisted journalists reporting the Games should be totally committed to National Socialism, drawing, he wrote, on the Nazi imperatives of ‘
Volk
[people], race, blood, and soil’.

On 16 July, the Turkish and Brazilian contingents arrived at the Olympic Village.

The
Manhattan
maintained her course for Europe. On board, most competitors, American officials noted, went ‘through their training program almost as they would at home’ (although Stephens lapped the deck again). Space had been allocated on several decks for training and it gave the ship ‘the appearance of a floating gymnasium’.
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In the afternoon Brundage addressed the team. He said the deeds accomplished in Berlin would make these Games long remembered and some of the men’s track team shouted their approval so rowdily and clapped so loudly that Brundage halted. Once they had settled down again he explained that each of them would have to take the Olympic Oath at the Games and he read it out. He also explained that the team did not have the facility to provide each competitor with their own coach but added that the competitors knew what to do anyway. He wished them luck.

Brundage added that when he sailed to Stockholm for the 1912 Games he saw ‘several of his comrades destroy their chances by eating too much. Exposure to the unlimited menus on shipboard was fatal to some,’ he said: medals had been lost at the dinner table.
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That raised a problem for many because, by definition, they were active or hyperactive and bored by the shipboard rhythm. The diary Helen Stephens kept is extremely eloquent about how mundane things filled most people’s days. They certainly couldn’t train as they would have on dry land, burning off the calories, and they discovered what every seasoned transatlantic passenger knew: on a ship the food is rich, plentiful and a too-tempting way to pass the time.

Wykoff, an experienced competitor, understood exactly what Brundage was getting at because on the ship to Amsterdam in 1928 he’d put on 10lb and was determined not to make that mistake again – especially since he found the food on the
Manhattan
‘swell’. But Donald Ray Lash, a 5,000-metre runner from the University of Indiana, put on 1lb a day – 10lb over the duration of the voyage – and would have a disastrous run in Berlin, finishing thirteenth.

Louis Zamperini beat him but only by six places, having himself put on 12lb. Being a kid from the Depression, Zamperini had never even bought a sandwich from a drugstore and here he suddenly was taking the train from California to New York and the
Manhattan
. The adventure of the travel seemed more exciting than the prospect of the Games themselves and the food more exciting still: it was free and with his bacon and egg at breakfast he’d have about seven sweet (say, cinnamon or caramel) rolls. ‘My eyes were like saucers.’
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Williams remembered having the sweet rolls before breakfast, then breakfast from the menu, lunch, a tea break, supper and at 10 p.m. more food which passengers could ‘pig out’ on. He estimated he gained 8 or 9lb during the voyage.

Ellison ‘Tarzan’ Brown, a Narraganset Indian and marathon runner, put on 14lb, suffered an Achilles tendon injury because of the extra weight and got no further than 2 miles into the marathon. Owens, by contrast, dealt with ‘his boredom, homesickness and anxiety by sleeping, not by eating foolishly’.
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There were things to do. Gertrude Wilhemsen, javelin and discus thrower, remembered that Owens ‘asked me to be his shuffle board partner on the ship. I was thrilled! A green farm girl being a team mate of Jesse Owens! Jesse was my hero and I gave up a chance of meeting Hitler to see Owens compete in his events.’
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After Brundage had spoken, an official handed out a list of conduct rules and mail from home then four of the girls, including Stephens, had to don their running gear and go on deck for a photo shoot.

That night the ship hit a storm and several athletes were very seasick, including Owens. Velma Dunn remembers, ‘The voyage was a little rough because ships in those days were not stabilised, but other than that it was fine. I met Jesse Owens on the ship but I didn’t make too much of him at that time because being a diver I wasn’t into track and field so he was just one of the athletes and nobody knew what he was going to do in Berlin.’
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On Friday 17 July, a coach, Dee Boeckmann, seemed preoccupied. The athletes gathered to watch film of the Olympic trials and afterwards Boeckmann asked Stephens to come by her cabin. There, Boeckmann wanted to know if Eleanor Holm was ‘influencing’ any of the other girls by stirring up trouble. Evidently, Stephens had received protest letters about anti-Semitism in the German team and Boeckmann said Brundage wanted to see them because they could auger trouble in Berlin.
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Through it all the
Manhattan
kept on coming.

The torch relay was being prepared. German broadcasters made their way towards Olympia for the start but the rough roads and tracks slowed them down, to 10 miles an hour.

The Egyptian team arrived at the Village.

Fritz Wandt recalls:

[there was a building called] the Bastion, a small round kiosk in the middle of the Village where the sportsmen could meet at night and have a (non-alcoholic) drink for which they had to pay. From that Bastion they had a wonderful view of the Village, the forest, the lake with the sauna or to the reception building or to the Speisehaus der Nationen (restaurant of the nations).

Some of the dining halls were for up to 150 persons – for the bigger national teams. The Americans were more than 300 and they couldn’t eat all at the same time, of course. The dining halls all looked out onto the terrace. Only the sportsmen from a few countries were allowed to have alcoholic drinks, like the Dutch and the Belgians who drank beer and the Italians and the French who preferred wine.

The sportsmen also met in the Hindenburghaus where 500 to 600 people could sit each night in the great hall and watch cultural events. The most famous artists would come from Berlin and present singing or dancing programmes.

And there was a ring of birches around a small paved area next to the Bastion where orchestras – Navy, Air Force or other military – would play each day. They came from all over Germany. At noon they played at the Speisehaus and, in the evenings, in the ring of birch trees. They played all sorts of music.
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