Hitler's Olympics (34 page)

In the background Sohn looked perfectly composed as he came back through the lanes of shadow into the stadium and sprinted for the line, reaching it at 2 hours 29 minutes 19 seconds. He moved away from people trying to help him, face expressionless, and sat, taking his shoes off. Huddled under a blanket he looked slightly lost, as if he didn’t know how to handle winning the gold medal for the country oppressing his own; then he trotted off to the showers. He didn’t see Harper come in second after holding off a strong challenge from Nam in the tunnel.
⁵³
Sohn said, ‘much credit for my victory must go to Mr. Harper of England. He kept telling me not to worry about Zabala but to let him run himself out so we paid no attention to him or any other runners and set our own pace.’
⁵⁴
Reportedly Harper couldn’t find the Great Britain team’s changing rooms and no British official sought him out to tell him where they were. Barefoot and limping, he wandered the concrete corridors beneath the stadium vainly asking policemen but they couldn’t understand him. He limped on, smoking a cigarette.

At the medal ceremony Sohn and Nam stood with their heads bowed.

Back at the Village Sohn lay on his bed, a blanket covering him, while a succession of tearful Japanese paid homage to him, some even laying their heads on his chest. One said, ‘we have been preparing for this victory for 24 years’.
⁵⁵

The next day the Seoul daily newspaper
Dong a Ilbo
reported the marathon as a ‘Korean victory in Berlin’. It carried a photograph of Sohn on the podium but the little Japanese flag had been removed from his tracksuit. Ten members of the newspaper staff were arrested and publication suspended for nine months. Sohn never ran again.
⁵⁶

In the swimming pool Mastenbroek beat Arendt in the first 100 metres freestyle semi-final, and Campbell won the other from another Dutch girl, ‘Willy’ den Ouden.

Owens had gone, Mastenbroek still very much here.

And that was the eighth day.

Notes

 
1
.
 
Christine Duerksen Sant, ‘“Genuine German Girls”: The Nazi Portrayal of its Sportswomen of the 1936 Berlin Olympics’, p. 99. Unpublished doctoral thesis, Winston-Salem, Wake Forest University, 2000.

 
2
.
 
Stephanie Daniels and Anita Tedder,
‘A Proper Spectacle’ – Women Olympians 1900–1936
(Houghton Conquest, ZeNaNa Press, 2000), p. 105.

 
3
.
 
New York Times
, 5 August 1936.

 
4
.
 
Deborah E. Lipstadt,
Beyond Belief
(New York, The Free Press, 1986).

 
5
.
 
William J. Baker,
Jesse Owens, An American Life
(New York, The Free Press, 1986), p. 100.

 
6
.
 
Neil Duncanson,
The Fastest Men on Earth
(London, Willow Books, 1988).

 
7
.
 
Lewis H. Carlson and John J. Fogarty,
Tales of Gold
(Chicago, IL, Contemporary Books, 1987), p. 181.

 
8
.
 
Ibid
., p. 174.

 
9
.
 
Daniels and Tedder, ‘
A Proper Spectacle
’, p. 102.

10
.
 
Ibid
., pp. 102–3.

11
.
 
Velma Dunn; interview with author.

12
.
 
Carlson and Fogarty,
Tales of Gold
, p. 188.

13
.
 
iwitnesstohistory.org/ResidentPages/Wenzel/Wenzel%2036% 20olympics.htm (visited 10 October 2005).

14
.
 
www.answers.com/topic/trebisonda-valla marathon
(visited 1 October 2005).

15
.
 
Carlson and Fogarty,
Tales of Gold
, p. 151.

16
.
 
www.athletics.org.nz/lovelock2.html
(visited 23 November 2005).

17
.
 
New York Times
, 5 August 1936.

18
.
 
It seems that Riefenstahl staged a recreation of this for her film on the Games. Viewing it today, it certainly looks and feels like a reconstruction. No doubt the darkness hampered her filming of the original event.

19
.
 
Carlson and Fogarty,
Tales of Gold
, p. 148.

20
.
 
Marty Glickman with Stan Isaacs,
Fastest Kid on the Block
(Syracuse, NY, Syracuse University Press, 1996).

21
.
 
Harold Abrahams, British sprinter who won the 100 metres gold at Paris in 1924 (and became one of the subjects of the film
Chariots of Fire
). Ironically, in the context of the Berlin Games, he was Jewish.

22
.
 
www.library.otago.ac.nz/exhibitions/rhodes_scholars/jack_lovelock.html
(visited 1 October 2005).

23
.
 
www.library.otago.ac.nz/exhibitions/rhodes_scholars/jack_lovelock.html
(visited 1 October 2005).

24
.
 
Associated Press quoted in the
New York Times
, 6 August 1936.

25
.
 
Baker,
Jesse Owens
, p. 103.

26
.
 
Carlson and Fogarty,
Tales of Gold
, p. 153.

27
.
 
www.usc.edu/dept/pubrel/trojan_family/summer03/F_Zamperini.html
(visited 29 September 2005).

28
.
 
Carlson and Fogarty,
Tales of Gold
, p. 150.

29
.
 
Ibid
., p. 146.

30
.
 
Werner Schwieger; interview with Birgit Kubisch.

31
.
 
Glickman with Isaacs,
Fastest Kid on the Block
.

32
.
 
Baker,
Jesse Owens
, p. 104.

33
.
 
Ibid
., p. 102.

34
.
 
Ibid
., p. 105.

35
.
 
Daniels and Tedder, ‘
A Proper Spectacle
’, p. 101.

36
.
 
www.sport.nl/boek.php3?artid=2691
(visited 20 August 2005).

37
.
 
Anthony Read and David Fisher,
Berlin: The Biography of a City
(London, Hutchinson, 1994), p. 214.

38
.
 
The Times
, London, 11 August 1936.

39
.
 
New York Times
, 9 August 1936.

40
.
 
www.olympic.org/uk/athletes/heroes/bio_uk.asp?PAR_I_ID=88103
(visited 15 August 2005).

41
.
 
marathoninfo.free.fr/jo/berlin1936.htm (visited 2 October 2005).

42
.
 
Daniels and Tedder, ‘
A Proper Spectacle
’, p. 120.

43
.
 
Ibid.
, p. 111.

44
.
 
Baker,
Jesse Owens
, p. 110.

45
.
 
Daniels and Tedder, ‘
A Proper Spectacle
’, p. 112.

46
.
 
Such coverage lent itself nicely to critics of women’s sports who claimed that women were emotionally ill-suited for serious competition. Most assuredly, the press and Nazi leadership would have refrained from drawing such attention to any male athletes who similarly let their emotions show. members.fortunecity.com/dikigoros/inter sexism.htm (visited 18 April 2005).

47
.
 
Daniels and Tedder, ‘
A Proper Spectacle
’, p. 117.

48
.
 
Sant, ‘“Genuine German Girls”’, p. 89.

49
.
 
Father of Charlotte Rampling, the film actress.

50
.
 
Baker,
Jesse Owens
, p. 111.

51
.
 
The XIth Olympic Games, Berlin, 1936 Official Report.

52
.
 
Werner Schwieger; interview with Birgit Kubisch.

53
.
 
marathoninfo.free.fr/jo/berlin1936.htm (visited 2 October 2005).

54
.
 
New York Times
, 9 August 1936.

55
.
 
Ibid
.

56
.
 
marathoninfo.free.fr/jo/berlin1936.htm (visited 2 October 2005).

I came all the way from California to do this.

The woman who kissed Hitler

T
he fine weather held as the Games moved into their second week. With the track and field events over, this second week would be a different mosaic of movement from the first, the competitions more varied and spread out; and always the raw politics of the mid-1930s crept, like a dark, distant shadow, closer and closer. This time the shadow came from Spain.

The American athletes left Berlin for a sequence of meetings whatever their feelings or exhaustion: on the Monday, one party to Dresden, another to Cologne; both parties in Prague on the Tuesday, some to a town called Bochum on the Wednesday and after that to London; on the Thursday another party from Hamburg to London for a Saturday competition. The prospect of their arrival excited anticipation, they filled stadiums and they filled column inches. The Berlin Olympics made them and Germany proved reluctant to let them go.

Hendrika Mastenbroek faced a week of incessant stress in the pool and she emerged from it with such stature that, fifty years later, someone said at a reunion for the Games Owens had been King and she Queen, but because the main weight of column inches was devoted to track and field events a lot of people scarcely noticed. Her week:

There were many pieces to the mosaic, including administrative. The International Amateur Athletic Federation met in Berlin and ratified the twenty-seven new records. It also took over running women’s athletics from the International Womens’ Sports Federation and in doing that stepped into delicate territory. The IAAF passed a resolution dealing with the ‘man–woman’ controversy although they couched it in careful language: ‘Questions of a physical nature’. The Swedish secretary, Bo Ekelund, explained what it really meant. The resolution said that in the event of a protest the organisers of any meeting had to ‘arrange for a physical inspection made by a medical expert’. The competitor had to undergo this test and accept its findings.

It would not be good news for Dora Ratjen although, as we shall see, she wasn’t ‘outed’ by that but by her five o’clock shadow which made a couple of fellow passengers on her train curious …

Most competitors were quite normal and behaved quite normally. Pat Norton remembered: ‘We were often escorted to open air restaurants by four good looking, heel clicking, Nazi officers for supper. The men were studiously polite and we got the impression they were there in the line of duty! The American girls didn’t sit at home with nothing to do either. A bus would arrive after dinner with some of the American male athletes and they would all pile in and off they’d go – even one lass with her leg in plaster wasn’t going to be left behind and was gratefully carried to the bus! One night we were joined by some German girls for singing. We Australians sang in a traditional way, light and pleasant, the Japanese with sweet nasally tinklings, and the Germans finished the night with robust marching songs.’
¹

In contrast Velma Dunn went into Berlin once. ‘In 1932 I met – I don’t know how – one of the British swimming judges and when I made the team in 1936 she sent me a congratulations telegram. I met her at the Games. The British girls team had hired a bus and she invited me to go along. Like all tours on a bus, you go by all these big buildings and everything, and you really don’t know what’s in them. That was the only time that I had a chance to get to Berlin. I didn’t get off the bus. I do remember there were Swastica flags everywhere but when we had the Olympics here in the United States it was all decorated with our flags. To me it wasn’t any different than it would be at home.’
²

There was talk at the IAAF meeting of Owens losing his amateur status because he’d intimated he might turn professional. With coach Snyder he sought advice from one AAU official but met a policy of wait and see.

By the time the IAAF met, part of the American team – Albritton, Cunningham, Woodruff and Helen Stephens among them – had left for the meeting in Dresden, Snyder accompanying that group and saying the athletes looked ‘dead tired’. They reached Dresden, which was already in Olympic mood since the torch passed through, by lunchtime, dined with the mayor and were shown the town.

In the 100 metres freestyle Arendt led at the turn from Campbell, Campbell ploughed a furrow past her but with some 25 metres to go Mastenbroek unleashed her power. Suddenly she was in a different race. Ten cleaving, scything strokes took her clear. Mastenbroeck: one gold. She had forced her time down to 1 minute 5.9 seconds. Campbell, second, and Arendt, third, beat the old record again.