Hitler's Olympics (18 page)

The Americans attended a ceremony in the town hall and some expensive wine glasses went missing. Whoever had ‘borrowed’ them was ordered to return them or else. The team boarded two special trains for the three-hour journey to Berlin. The engines had large swastikas draped over their sides.

Coming as Holm did from a free country, sporting officials had the power to deselect her, but once they had done so they became powerless. Holm did not get on the
Bremen
or any other ship. She intended to continue pleading her case and raising hell.

Stephens remembered Holm out of her uniform and holding suitcases, preparing to board the train which the team wasn’t on. Stephens found the situation ‘pathetic’. Presumably the American officials boarded the second train because on the journey to Berlin Holm spent an hour talking to members of a special subcommittee, trying to persuade them to reinstate her. She told one of its members, ‘I know I’ve been drinking too much and I’m all wrong.’

The two trains eased into the Lehrter station, one of those stone-clad buildings with heavy porticos. A band welcomed them, various dignitaries prepared to greet them and the crowd in the foreground held their arms rigid in the Nazi salute. Many in the crowd wore military uniform and that immediately set the tone. Men in uniform were so numerous they provided a constant backdrop to daily life and, thus, to the Olympics.

The American team engulfed the platform, and reporters and newsreel cameras moved in among them.

Velma Dunn says that, in general, ‘every man, and every boy of military age, was in uniform.
Everyone
. That was very striking. When we got to Berlin about two-thirds of the people on the platform greeting us were military people. Definitely.’
¹⁰

As Marty Glickman made his way slowly down the platform a stranger tapped him on the back. Glickman turned and saw a man smaller than himself. The man enquired in English with a perfect American accent, ‘Are you Marty Glickman?’ Glickman felt immediate apprehension and said he was an American. (Paradoxically, Glickman had some command of German and could probably have understood the question if it had been put to him in that language.)

The stranger: ‘You’re Jewish, aren’t you?’

Glickman said he was.

The stranger said he was, too. He explained that he attended medical school in Berlin because he couldn’t get to one in America because of the anti-Semitic regulations. They wished each other luck and the stranger melted into the throng.
¹¹

Outside the station an immense crowd waited and the American team stood in the open-top buses taking them to the town hall. They were happy and making a lot of noise. The traffic halted to let the buses through, causing congestion. Brundage said that the streets ‘had been roped off and hundreds of thousands of spectators cheered and waved greetings to the American athletes from every sidewalk, window, balcony, roof and other point of vantage. It was a cordial and inspiring welcome.’
¹²

Glickman likened it to a Broadway parade and even people with considerable Olympic experience confessed they’d never seen anything like this.

At the town hall, Reich Commissar for Berlin Julius Lippert made a speech – amazingly the only speech. He presented Brundage with a commemorative medal, in response to which Brundage said: ‘No nation since ancient Greece has captured the true Olympic spirit as has Germany.’ It was a breathtaking statement, even from Brundage’s fixed position and even given the necessity to flatter.

Then the buses took the Americans out to the Olympic Village where, in those boaters and blue uniforms, they marched two and three abreast along the winding pathway to their cottages. German reporters, who had travelled from Hamburg with the team conducting interviews, were astonished at how little the Americans appeared to know about the performances of other athletes. One journalist sought out Owens and quizzed him over a rival long-jumper, Luz Long from Leipzig, who’d done 7.82 metres, enough to beat the Olympic record of 7.73 metres set in 1928. Owens professed ignorance.

However, he found the Village ‘all “very interesting” and impressive, especially the little television screen – the first one he ever saw – set in one of the central buildings for the transmission of the Olympic events. For his first evening, however, he was most impressed with the cool night air, which afforded solid sleep at the end of a hectic day.’
¹³

Years later Owens claimed he hadn’t prayed in public on the
Manhattan
and there was even less question of doing that in Berlin, which he described as a ‘godless city’ although he felt there must have been some believers who rejected Hitler’s theories of racial supremacy.
¹⁴

Because the women’s quarters were within the Olympic complex, after dinner Stephens and some of the other American athletes wandered over to have a look at the stadium.
¹⁵

Glickman wrote a letter to his parents recording his impressions. He roomed with Eddie O’Brien, a Syracuse runner on the 4 × 400 metre relay squad, and some of the other sprinters – Owens, Wykoff, Stoller – occupied rooms nearby. Glickman set out the geographical location of the Village and found its layout and buildings perfect. He described the hundreds of cottages with their twelve rooms, each containing a couple of beds, a desk and wardrobes.

Zamperini bunked nearby, too, and claims that Owens – ‘a prince of a guy, a sweet, humble man’ – was delegated to act as his chaperone for two interrelated reasons: Zamperini was by his own admission ‘frisky’, and the athletes were allowed into Berlin at night.
¹⁶
Owens didn’t prove much of a chaperone, and for two more interrelated reasons: Zamperini discovered that when you order beer in Germany they’ll be big ones and the effects can lead a man to scale a flagpole near the Reichstag to get a Nazi flag as a souvenir. When armed guards gathered below him he shouted the only German word he knew: ‘
Bier!
’

Marshall Wayne found himself in with fellow diver Elbert Root, whom he described as a ‘wild Indian’. Wayne was supposed to chaperone him, but Root regularly escaped by the window, went to Berlin, filled himself with
Wurst
(sausage), came back and threw up all over the room.
¹⁷

Holm, booked into a Berlin hotel, shed her tears in copious amounts and pleaded for Brundage to give her one last chance. Many team members supported her reinstatement – more than two hundred signed a petition, but Brundage remained unmoved. ‘We gave you every chance,’ he was quoted as saying to her. ‘You have only yourself to blame. Now you’ve got to take it [the consequences]. I appreciate how you feel but you forced our hand and we had no alternative. I can tell you the Committee’s mind is definitely made up.’ Back home in the United States, her husband Art Jarrett told the Associated Press news agency that obviously he was disappointed his wife had been dropped, but added that she ‘wasn’t a ten-year-old any more. She’s been around long enough to know how to handle herself. They ought to give some more of those swimmers champagne. Maybe they would win a couple of races.’

The American women went to their own quarters where Stephens found a political manifesto sent through the post to her, as it had been to various other likely medallists. Originally in Dutch but now translated, it said hundreds of innocent Germans could not attend the Games because they were political prisoners. It expressed the hope that Hitler would be influenced by the Olympic spirit to free them, but appealed to women competitors to refuse to compete. Similarly, Australian Pat Norton remembered Argentina’s Jeanette Campbell receiving a letter from Holland asking her to organise a women’s boycott of the Opening Ceremony and demand the release of two Dutchmen who had disappeared on a trip to Germany.
¹⁸

Dorothy Odam, the British high-jumper, remembers: ‘I was given a letter from somebody in a concentration camp telling me of all the horrible things that were going on, what was happening to them, and asking me to show it to someone in England. But being rather young I showed it to my chaperone and they took it away from me.’
¹⁹

Costa Rica, Haiti, Hungary and Switzerland arrived at the Village.

Fritz Wandt stood ‘in front of the reception building trying to get autographs. I happened to be there when the Swiss team arrived. I saw that something was going on at the entrance to the reception building and there came all the dignitaries, the commandant, a band and also the boys of honour [in white shorts and white knee-length socks wearing white caps]. The Swiss team arrived in buses and were welcomed by the commandant, who made a speech. They lined up in formation and the national anthem was played while their flag was hoisted. What was especially interesting was the standard-bearer in front of the Swiss team – it must be a habit in Switzerland – but he brandished flags in the air to produce different patterns. That was so impressive I can still remember it. Then the band moved in front of them and they all marched into the Olympic Village.’
²⁰

At midnight, two hours after the torch had left the town of Sérrai near the Bulgarian frontier, there were 2,016 runners to go and seven days to the Opening Ceremony.

The flame reached Kula on the Bulgarian frontier at 2 a.m., the rain still falling and the roads bad. The intrepid and dogged radio car crew broadcast the moment the torch crossed over from Greece into Bulgaria; it had covered 1,108 kilometres and, because of the allocation of one runner per kilometre, had so far been carried by 1,108 runners.

In Bulgaria 235 runners took the flame to the capital, Sofia. The whole route was marked by road signs bearing the five Olympic rings, and officials on horseback helped with problems and directions. Virtually every village it passed through celebrated and the big cathedral square in Sofia was packed for a ceremony. Some in the crowd, no doubt Germans, gave the Nazi salute and a banner hung nearby with a swastika on it. The intrepid radio crew were almost undone (the Official Report says they received a ‘surprise’) because no cables had been provided. The Bulgarian Radio Company stepped in and offered their facilities, and the broadcast went ahead.

Owens had woken to find himself gazing into a gloriously blue, unbroken sky. He needed to make the most of it because changeable weather returned and during his two weeks in Germany rain fell every day, including later this day. He noted in his diary: ‘The weather in Germany is somewhat funny. In the morning the sun is shining beautiful and suddenly it will rain.’ The food compensated – generous quantities of steak, bacon, eggs, ham, fruit and juices. He made friends, too, with ‘people from strange lands & most of them could speak some English’. He liked the Australians and wrote, ‘sitting around listening to a Victrola having a bull session with some of the boys. What liars they are.’
²¹

Wayne was woken at 6 a.m. to take part in Leni Riefenstahl’s film. ‘I could hardly stand on the platform. I was still partly seasick. I did the worst diving in that film I have ever seen, and they’ve been running it for the last forty years, for God’s sake. My legs were like lead. All of ours were. I mean, 6 a.m. in the morning and we had barely gotten any sleep and were still half seasick.’
²²

The American team began to train, although sporadic rain and cloud decorated the day. They had plenty to sustain them: an immense quantity of Philadelphia turkeys and Long Island ducks had been shipped over, clams for chowder, crab, 1,000 honeydew melons, 2,000 muskmelons. (Before the end of the Games, the team – plus the Canadians – would eat 36,000 grapefruits.)
²³

Some American competitors, especially the hockey players and swimmers, did some light training while others simply unpacked or took a look around. Stephens wrote that she got her competitor’s badge and, perhaps subconsciously in writing that, reflected the quickening pace towards the beginning of the Games, because the photographers started arriving and so did the autograph hunters.
²⁴

Stephens carried an injury – the shin – because she limped. She was already the centre of some attention because of her bitter rivalry with Walsh, whose sprinting career blossomed in Cleveland, Ohio. (Mercifully, for every contemporary journalist – except the Poles, of course – she did not use her full name, Stanislawa Walasiewicz. No doubt many subsequent authors share the relief.) Stephens seemed relaxed and said she’d take care of Walsh even with the injury. For her part, Walsh seemed relaxed and said she had vowed to herself that Stephens wouldn’t beat her again, here or anywhere else. Stephens said, ‘Yes, we’ll see about that.’

Like Owens, Stephens appreciated the food and the generous American-style helpings. Moreover her sexual predilections led her to a German waitress called Ruth who gave her special food and generous helpings. There would be accusations and counter-accusations of sexual impropriety between Stephens and Walsh, however, culminating in the assertion by Walsh’s supporters that Stephens was in fact a man, and much more plausible assertions that Walsh – known as ‘Stella the Fella’ –
was
.

Esther Myers, the student, remembers that

everyplace in the city there were always people completely armed but they never molested us, never harmed us in any way – never stopped us, except we were certainly aware that they were there and we’d better not try anything. I was young and having fun – a wonderful time – and it didn’t bother me. Berlin itself was a perfectly beautiful place to be, magnificent city, just magnificent. But you wondered what was going to happen [afterwards] because you knew something would. It was bound to.

We got the impression that they wanted to do away with the Jewish people and the black people and anybody else they didn’t think were as good as they were. There weren’t many propaganda posters – no, it was all so wonderful, they were the supreme people and they had accomplished so much.
²⁵

Holland and Norway arrived at the Village, and the Canadian team of 120 competitors and officials reached Le Havre on the liner
Duchess of Bedford
.