Hitler's Olympics (41 page)

Gisela Mauermayer’s career ended in 1942. She taught sport in Munich until the end of the war but because, at eighteen, she had joined the NSDAP (
Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei
, the Nazi Party) she couldn’t continue teaching. She studied biology and from 1954 to 1975 was chief librarian at the Munich zoological collection.

Because she had been friendly before the Games, Gretel Bergmann decided to get in touch with her. ‘There was an article in the paper about her. I got her address and I wrote her. I said, “Did you know that I was Jewish because you were always so nice to me?” she said, “Of course we knew you were Jewish but it didn’t make any difference to us because you were an athlete like we were athletes.”’ Mauermayer died in 1995.
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Gretel Bergmann’s husband Bruno fought with the US Army in the war. They had sons in 1947 and 1951. In 1980 she was inducted into the Jewish Hall of Fame. The German Athletic Association saluted her, too. She was caught in a great moral dilemma and resolved it in this way: ‘It would be unfair to transfer that hatred to those who had absolutely nothing to do with the events of the Hitler time.’ She would say this often.
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‘I don’t think you can hold the next generation responsible. I got a lot of lip from the American Jewish people. I made a speech and I said that. I keep telling them. I must say that the town of Laupheim has conducted itself beautifully.’

In 1996 the German Olympic Committee invited Bergmann to be a guest of honour at the Atlanta Games.

The envelope from Frankfurt was franked
Der Präsident, Nationales Olympisches Komitee für Deutschland
and delivered to a ‘two-storey brick house’ in Queens, New York. The letter, in English, read: ‘It is my honor and pleasure to inform you that the National Olympic Committee for Germany has decided to invite you to be our guest of honor during the Olympic Centennial Games in Atlanta. This is on the grounds of our relations over the last year, and the discussion we had in New York. As you were not in a position to accept our invitation to Germany for reasons we understand and honor, we feel that this invitation might be an equivalence.’
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Again she ‘decided that I could not blame this generation for what their fathers and grandfathers did. I mean, if my father killed somebody, I should not be held responsible.’

When she arrived at Atlanta airport – a tall, white-haired woman in a blue blouse and slacks – two girls approached and asked for her autograph. She could hardly believe they knew who she was. They did. She asked them if they’d heard of Hitler and when they said yes she said
If one ever surfaces in America kick him in the pants
.

‘We feel that Mrs Lambert was not treated adequately at the time of the Berlin Olympics,’ Walter Troger, President of the German Olympic Committee, explained. ‘She was an Olympic candidate who did not get a fair chance. We wanted to do something for her. We felt she deserved it.’

Over the years she received several invitations to visit Germany, but wouldn’t go. In 1937 she had promised herself she would never return and it became a matter of principle. This led a German television company to wonder if accepting the German invitation to Atlanta and refusing to go back did not represent a contradiction. She explained again how she had resolved the dilemma. ‘The German Olympic Committee was making an attempt at making amends, and I thought I can’t hold the sins of the fathers and grandfathers against the new generation. After all, many of them hate what Hitler and the Nazis did, too. So as long as the Olympics are in my country now, I’ll meet them halfway. If that’s considered a contradiction by anyone, well then, I can’t help it and I make no apologies.’

In 1999 Bergmann faced a further dilemma when she was invited back to Germany to receive a shower of honours, including a sports centre named after her. Now she reasoned that the present and future generations would be curious to know who she was, and the only way to let them find out would be for her to tell them what had happened in those distant August days and why. It was so long since she had spoken German that she needed an interpreter.
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‘I felt it was important to remember, and so I agreed to return to the place I swore I’d never go again. But I had stopped speaking German and didn’t even try when I was there. It seemed that there was a new and completely different atmosphere in Germany. I’m sure there’s still anti-Semitism in Germany, but there’s anti-Semitism in America, too.’

She had some specific memories of that trip. ‘We were in one of the best hotels in Frankfurt. My son was with me and we went in the elevator and there were two swastikas scratched into the elevator. I went to complain and nobody gave me any satisfaction. I wrote to them and still nobody gave me any satisfaction. Then I wrote to Walter Tröger, the head of the German Olympic Committee, who got to be very friendly. I told him about it and he did something. I got a letter of apology from the hotel. I was so upset: some kids did it and they’d let it go. When they wrote to me they said they’d tried to get the swastikas out but they couldn’t so finally they put a plaque over them.

‘I was so comfortable in Laupheim because all those people who made life so miserable for us are all down under the ground.’
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And a final glimpse of the sanity which eventually emerged from the madness. Gretel Bergmann was sent a colour photograph from Laupheim. It was of the entrance to the town’s track; over the entrance the sign read:

GRETEL-BERGMANN-STADION

In 1933, she recalled, ‘I was nineteen, the Nazis came and I was forbidden to enter that track even to watch.
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The height I jumped just before the Games was the same height as the gold medal at the Games ….’

Marathon winner Sohn went to the 1947 Boston Marathon as a coach and remained active within athletics, helping Seoul with the bid for the 1988 Olympics and acting as chairman of the Olympics Organising Committee. He died in November 2002.

In 1936 Judith Deutsch was the leading Austrian swimmer but as a Jew she decided not to go to Berlin and ‘a land which so shamefully persecutes my people’. She emigrated to what was then Palestine. Her records were erased and the Austrians banned her from competing for life. In 1995 she was finally invited to Vienna for a ceremony reinstating them but wouldn’t go because, she said, she’d had to wait far too long. Undeterred, the Austrians flew to Israel and held the ceremony there. In 2003 a reunion was organised in Vienna. Judith’s sister went with some contemporary swimmers but reportedly Judith was by now too frail for such a journey.

In old age Rie Mastenbroek lived in a small Dutch town where she kept a wheelchair handy, the legacy of a car accident in 1968. She died in November 2003.

Leni Riefenstahl never joined the Nazi Party and subsequently claimed naivety about their motives. She’d been an actress and could have skiied in the German cross-country team at Garmisch in 1936 but chose to make the film instead. After the war she became a photographer. She died in 2003, aged 101.

Eleanor Holm did not, as one might imagine, fade into obscurity. Once her swimming career ended she made a film in 1938 with another Olympic athlete, Glenn Morris. He played Tarzan to her Jane in
Tarzan’s Revenge
. She stayed briefly in films, divorced Art Jarrett and married an impresario. She married a third time and died in Miami, at ninety, in 2004.
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Tilly Fleischer, who was given a car by her home town of Frankfurt, in honour of her Olympic achievements, ran several leather businesses after the war. In the autumn of 1988 her oak tree for winning in 1936 finally died. She planted another one immediately at the Frankfurt Stadium. Fleischer died in the summer of 2005.

Fritz Schilgen, who had padded into the stadium and lit the flame, died near Frankfurt in September 2005, aged ninety-nine.

Doris Runzheimer who, under her maiden name of Eckert, finished sixth in the 80 metres hurdles, died at the end of October 2005.

The University of Southern California received two oak trees, one from Ken Carpenter and the other from the 4 x 100 relay team. They provided two of its members and, anyway, Owens already had three trees of his own. Carpenter’s still stands (in 2005), but the relay tree came down – the victim of root rot – in the summer of 2002. A mature oak has been rededicated.

I’m indebted to the research of Jerry Papazian, Past President, USC Alumni Association, which appears on the FrankWykoff2.com website, for the known locations of other trees (2005): Owens’s at his high school in Cleveland, Ohio and at Ohio State University (the fate of the third, at his mother’s home, also in Cleveland, is not known); Cornelius Johnson’s ‘in the backyard of a home on Hobart Street in Korea town’; Forest Towns’s on the University of Georgia Campus.
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On his return, John Woodruff’s sapling was cleared in Washington, DC for unwanted bugs and planted at his home town of Connellsville, Pennsylvania, in the grounds of the Carnegie Library. Later, Connellsville had a new stadium and the tree went there. A plaque told people about it.

Velma Dunn Ploessel’s single chance, like so many others, came and went in Berlin. Of course Tokyo never happened, nor were any Games held in 1944 and ‘very few people could make that long transition from 1936 to the next Games in 1948. I got married in 1943. I have a boy and a girl, both teachers, and I have three grandsons from my son. They are all college graduates. My son was a swimmer at college and my grandsons are all swimmers or water polo players and I think some kind of sport is the thing to do. Have I still got the silver medal? I sure have!

‘I’m eighty-seven, I just took my drivers’ test again [October 2005] and I’ve got a licence for five more years but I really don’t expect to drive that much longer.’
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Louis Zamperini led an astonishing life, or rather lives, but reflected ruefully that he had shaken hands with ‘the worst tyrant the world has ever known’. He remembered Hitler as ‘like a dangerous comedian’. He served as a bomber pilot in the Pacific during the Second World War, spent forty-seven days on a life-raft in shark-infested waters and was taken prisoner by the Japanese. Believed dead, his parents collected his life insurance and when he turned up the US government would not take it back. He found religion and went back to Japan preaching forgiveness. There’s even talk of a Hollywood film.
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When the war started, Werner Schwieger was not conscripted but continued his job in a foundry until 1940 when he joined the Luftwaffe as an instructor. He returned to the foundry and worked there until he was called up by the army in September 1944. In January 1945 he was fighting the Americans in Alsace but the retreat took him to Bavaria where in May he was taken prisoner. Transferred to the French military he became a prisoner working on French farms. On his release in November 1947 he returned to Berlin and started studying at the teachers’ training college. He eventually became a vocational teacher.

He still reminisces a lot and he still (2005) has the medal which every participant got. ‘There is a bell on it. There used to be a swastika beneath the bell but I scratched it out.’ Asked whether the 1936 Olympics were exciting, he answers emphatically: ‘Oh, yes.’

John Woodruff of the tumultuous 800 metres graduated in sociology and fought as a second lieutenant from 1941. Later he saw action in Korea then worked at the New York City Children’s Aid Society, became a teacher, worked with the New York police athletics league, and served as a parole officer. A 5-kilometre Run and Walk is held each year in Connellsville in his memory.
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At time of writing he is resident in a senior living community in Arizona and, although slightly deaf, his memory is sharp. He can relive the 800 metres, the ebb and flow of it, how he found himself trapped.

‘I still think about it, oh yes. It was the type of race I did not intend to run. If I’d have tried to break out of the “box”, with my stride I would have fouled somebody and I would have been disqualified. So the only thing that I could do in order to try and win the race was to stop without incident, go into the third lane and let the other athletes precede me. And then I ran around all of them, and that’s why I came in at 1 minute 52.9: it was a very slow race. 800 metres? Going round the outside I must have covered nearly a kilometre ….’

In 2005 he was ninety. ‘I was ninety on July 5. I still keep interested in things.’ He sounds a man without any form of bitterness and when I ask him about the discrimination of the time he says: ‘Well, I can envision why something like that happened, because there was a lot of discrimination everywhere.’

And now the seventh decade since those August days has come.

Fritz Wandt, the autograph hunter who became a farmer, was called up into the army in 1942. He fought in France and Italy, where he received wounds severe enough to keep him in hospital for a year. He was sent to the front and wounded again so that as Hitler’s war moved through its final convulsions, and the Soviets advanced, he found himself in a castle-cum-hospital at Rostock. The Soviets moved through on 1 May but left him and the staff unmolested. One of the doctors said that anyone who thought they were fit enough could go. So he went. His parents still had the farm near the Village.

The farm became part of a collective in East Germany. Wandt was happy and liked the people and later he experienced all the mixed emotions of his fellow East Germans when the Wall came down.

The interview was carried out by my intrepid Berlin helper, Birgit Kubisch, on a November evening. When she reached Dyrotz, where Wandt lives, he stood in the street wearing a brown hat but no jacket, waiting. Inside the farmhouse there was steaming coffee and stollen, the traditional German Christmas cake, already laid out on the kitchen table. They sat and he started talking in a warm Berlin accent.

After I visited the Village in 1936 on the guided tour I never went again afterwards. It was a military training centre, with guards in front. Why should we have gone there? In 1998, however, the Historia Elstal Association was founded. [Döberitz the name of the original barracks; Elstal the name of the place where the Village was situated; Dyrotz a nearby hamlet]. Since I have always been interested in history in general and local history and geography in particular, and since the Olympic Village was part of this, I registered as a member of the Association. The Association employed a historian – at that time, after 1990, you would still get public funds for such things – and she dealt very thoroughly with all the stories of this community. I have met a lot of very interesting people – television, student journalists – and it’s fun when people thank you and say they liked it. Normally they come to the Olympic Village for guided tours. Sometimes television or radio stations make appointments to visit us and take recordings for their programmes. We normally meet at the Olympic Village, because they want to see it, of course, and then we do the interviews there. The last guided tour this year was at the end of November.