Hitler's Olympics (16 page)

 
2
.
 
Stephanie Daniels and Anita Tedder,
‘A Proper Spectacle’ – Women Olympians 1900–1936
(Houghton Conquest, Beds., ZeNaNa Press, 2000), p. 100.

 
3
.
 
Australian Olympic Report.

 
4
.
 
Ibid
.

 
5
.
 
The XIth Olympic Games, Berlin, 1936 Official Report.

 
6
.
 
Giles MacDonogh,
Berlin
(London, Sinclair-Stevenson, 1997), p. 64.

 
7
.
 
N.M. Masood,
The World’s Hockey Champions
(Delhi, Model Press, 1937) in
www.bharatiyahockey.org
(visited 21 November 2005).

 
8
.
 
Australian Olympic Report.

 
9
.
 
Daniels and Tedder, ‘
A Proper Spectacle
’, p. 100.

10
.
 
Australian Olympic Report.

11
.
 
According to Owens’s biographer William J. Baker: ‘Crucial to Jesse Owens’s fame in August in Berlin was the fall of Joe Louis in June just a few weeks before. All the team sports were segregated in America and Joe Louis and Jesse Owens were the only two really visible black athletes. With the fall of Louis the king had died, long live the king! Jesse Owens becomes king. His glamour, his acclaim is all the greater, I contend, because the king was dead.’

12
.
 
Jesse Owens and Paul Neimark,
JESSE: The Man Who Outran Hitler
(New York, Fawcett Gold Medal, 1978).

13
.
 
Ibid
.

14
.
 
usatf.org/athletes/hof/snyder.asp (visited 18 May 2005).

15
.
 
William J. Baker,
Jesse Owens, An American Life
(New York, The Free Press, 1986), p. 54.

16
.
 
www.ubcsportshalloffame.com/cgi-bin/search.cgi?person
(visited 25 April 2005).

17
.
 
The XIth Olympic Games, Berlin, 1936 Official Report.

18
.
 
Masood,
The World’s Hockey Champions
.

19
.
 
Presumably the Australians were described as the first team to arrive because, prior to that, only the five Japanese had come rather than the entire Japanese team.

20
.
 
www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/olympics.html
(visited 16 November 2005).

21
.
 
Masood,
The World’s Hockey Champions
.

22
.
 
Daniels and Tedder, ‘
A Proper Spectacle’
, p.
106.

23
.
 
Masood,
The World’s Hockey Champions
.

24
.
 
New York Times
, June 1996.

25
.
 
www.bharatiyahockey.org/granthalaya/goal/1936/page5.htm

One report suggests that during the voyage the Indian hockey team practised so assiduously on deck that hundreds of balls were lost – hit into the sea.

26
.
 
iwitnesstohistory.org/ResidentPages/Wenzel/Wenzel%2036% 20olympics.htm (visited 10 October 2005).

27
.
 
www.bharatiyahockey.org/granthalaya/goal/1936/page5.htm

28
.
 
The XIth Olympic Games, Berlin, 1936 Official Report.

29
.
 
www.canadianboxing.com/profiles_content.htm
(visited 23 April 2006).

30
.
 
The American selectors can afford to be ruthless because they have such strength in depth: if you don’t make the qualification on the day you don’t go. Other countries simply couldn’t do this – witness the British controversy over whether Sebastian Coe should have gone to Los Angeles in 1984 on reputation and known world-class achievement rather than present form. Britain was simply not strong enough in talent to leave him at home. See also below, Michael Johnson, Chapter 10, ‘Village People’.

31
.
 
New York Times
, 12 July 1936.

32
.
 
Mack’s brother Jackie made a profound social impact when he became the first African-American to play in a major league baseball match, for the Brooklyn Dodgers, in 1947.
www.walteromalley.com
(visited 16 November 2005).

33
.
 
Marty Glickman with Stan Isaacs,
The Fastest Kid on the Block
(Syracuse, NY, Syracuse University Press, 1996).

34
.
 
Masood,
The World’s Hockey Champions
.

35
.
 
www.bharatiyahockey.org/granthalaya/goal/1936/page5.htm
(visited 4 November 2005).

36
.
 
Christine Duerksen Sant, ‘“Genuine German Girls”: The Nazi Portrayal of its Sportswomen of the 1936 Berlin Olympics’, unpublished doctoral thesis. Winston Salem, Wake Forest University, 2000, p. 67.

37
.
 
Ibid
.

38
.
 
Sant, ‘“Genuine German Girls”’, p. 89. NB: blond used in America for women, blonde in Britain.

39
.
 
Gretel Bergmann; interview with author.

40
.
 
Sant, ‘“Genuine German Girls”’, p. 69.

41
.
 
The story of the United States in Olympic football needs a book of its own. Suffice it to say, that the $7,000 enabled them to go to Berlin to lose to Italy 1–0, and get home again.

42
.
 
Lewis H. Carlson and John J. Fogarty,
Tales of Gold
(Chicago, IL, Contemporary Books, 1987), p. 171.

43
.
 
Sharon Kinney Hanson,
The Fulton Flash
(Carbondale, IL, Southern Illinois University Press, 2004).

44
.
 
Velma Dunn; interview with author.

45
.
 
Carlson and Fogarty,
Tales of Gold
, p. 150.

46
.
 
Ibid
., p. 146.

47
.
 
Baker,
Jesse Owens
, p. 78.

48
.
 
Owens and Neimark,
The Man Who Outran Hitler
, p. 67.

49
.
 
The Man Who Outran Hitler
reads like a post-event justification for many things and at crucial moments does not seem to ring true – something we shall meet again. I have used what is recorded in the book with caution.

50
.
 
Smallwood, in fact, recovered sufficiently to qualify for the 400-metre semi-finals in Berlin, only to fall ill again. He finally had his appendix removed in a Berlin hospital.

51
.
 
Baker,
Jesse Owens
, p. 79.

52
.
 
Carlson and Fogarty,
Tales of Gold
, p. 173.

53
.
 
John Woodruff; interview with author.

54
.
 
Hanson,
The Fulton Flash
, p. 64.

55
.
 
Gretel Bergmann; interview with author.

56
.
 
Ibid
.

57
.
 
My neighbour Inge Donnell spent a long time with her magnifying glass trying to decipher the signature and it really is a scrawl. By a careful examination of each individual letter – and some deduction! – we concluded it had to be Tschammer’s.

58
.
 
Gretel Bergmann; interview with author. Interestingly, Christine Sant wrote in ‘“Genuine German Girls”’: ‘Tolerating Bergmann at training courses and some track meets, although in conflict with Nazi racial principles, was a small price to pay in order to keep the aim of hosting the Olympics alive. But in the final moments, priorities shifted again. Allowing Bergmann actually to compete in the Olympics would have appeared an egregious violation of Nazi racial policies. A victory by her most likely would have been taken as an embarrassing blow to the political leadership, who sought to impress the huge national and international audience. In the case of Bergmann, racism clearly won out over the chance for a medal for Germany and the promises of fair competition.’ (p. 60).

59
.
 
Ibid
., p. 63.

60
.
 
Official US Report of the Games.

61
.
 
Baker,
Jesse Owens
, p. 78.

62
.
 
www.usc.edu/dept/pubrel/trojan_family/summer03/F_Zamperini.html
(visited 26 September 2005).

63
.
 
Baker,
Jesse Owens
, p. 79.

64
.
 
Daniels and Tedder,
‘A Proper Spectacle’
.

65
.
 
Velma Dunn; interview with author.

66
.
 
Hanson,
The Fulton Flash
.

67
.
 
Fritz Wandt; interview with Birgit Kubisch.

68
.
 
www.swimming.org
(visited 13 April 2005).

69
.
 
Velma Dunn; interview with author.

70
.
 
Masood,
The World’s Hockey Champions
.

71
.
 
Baker,
Jesse Owens
, p. 78.

72
.
 
The XIth Olympic Games, Berlin, 1936 Official Report.

73
.
 
Ibid
.

74
.
 
Duff Hart-Davis,
Hitler’s Games
(London, Century Hutchinson 1986).

75
.
 
The XIth Olympic Games, Berlin, 1936 Official Report.

I refer to the mock marriage and mock trial ostensibly given as an entertainment feature but so shocking that many athletes walked out of the social hall. The trial was presided over by Gustavus T. Kirby who so handled the dialogue having to do with marital situations that it was open to questionable interpretations and altogether unsuitable for youthful ears.

Eleanor Holm, US swimmer

T
he city of heavy stone had a population of over 4 million, making it the third largest in the world behind London’s 8 million and New York’s 7. It had its own accent and its own irreverent, quick-fire humour like any Cockney barrow boy, self-respecting New York cab driver or Parisian barman. Hitler never felt comfortable with the Berliners and a lot of them never felt comfortable with him.

Albert Speer recorded how, during the nations’ march past at the Opening Ceremony, the Berliners’ open enthusiasm for the French team, which they applauded long and loud, ‘jolted’ Hitler.
¹
He sensed ‘a popular mood, a longing for peace and reconciliation’ with France which was not what he had in mind after the humiliation of the Versailles treaty. Their reaction, Speer thought, disturbed Hitler.

Berlin’s stone-clad facades, the imposing avenues and ornate palaces, the squares and museums, the ponderous streets of three- and four-storey apartments with their secluded communal courtyards, gave the city its public face. It had another. The 1920s had been gloriously decadent, especially the city’s nightlife with the nude reviews, upper-class brothels, homosexual haunts and artists’ quarters (one club/restaurant even had phones on the tables so one customer could proposition another by ringing their table). Whatever the puritans in the Nazi movement did to this they did not get their way all over the city. Entire working-class districts remained staunchly communist and would do for generations. Berlin was not a placid capital, unifying the aspirations of a people with their politics. Right and left lived their principles not as matters of academic debate or fuel for ballot boxes but as something to fight and die for.

The city, squatting so heavily on the flat Brandenburg plain, could be arctic cold in winter and jungle hot in summer. Despite that, outdoor café life flourished and Berliners loved to walk their Sundays away in the woodlands close by or lie along the shore of Lake Wannsee. They even called the fresh air –
Die Berliner Luft
– their own because, they claimed, it invigorated and refreshed.

A visitor peering out of a carriage easing into any of Berlin’s railway stations with their beguiling names – Schleisser, Gorlitzer, Anhalter, Potsdamer, Lehrter, Friedrichstrasse, Zoologischer, Charlottenburg – immediately sensed that they had arrived somewhere important, that the city felt like a capital. Now it prepared to open its arms to embrace the Olympic Games and, by extension, the attention of the world. Big, old capital cities know how to do that.

The difficult part is trying to reconstruct this assumption of welcome, or rather the apparent truth of this assumption. There is no easy evidence to the contrary, that any residents of Berlin thought the whole thing a waste of time and money; no easy evidence that the nightlife people made cutting asides about how horribly healthy they thought the whole business of the Games; no protests about disruption to daily life, especially traffic; certainly no sense that there were questions raised about value for money or, more sensitively, about what was really being done to the purity of the Olympic movement; no mention of any of the other questions one would be tempted to ask, especially anyone who loathed everything the Nazis represented. The ultimate question – ‘Do you want this?’ – was never asked, either. All the black-and-white pictures of crowds show herd-like groups, but what else would they be? About the Games, the cynical Berliner – sharp, perceptive, living in the current of the moment – remains silent. The rest comes to us as caricature, which is precisely what was intended. Powerful people would make simple, obedient, normal people enact the rituals which the powerful people demanded. And that is just what happened.