Hitler's Olympics (30 page)

Holm remained very unhappy. Husband Jarrett had planned to come to Berlin and arrived. He said that when he returned to New York he intended to instigate legal action against the American Olympic Committee. He stated plaintively that he had asked for, and been refused, a meeting with Brundage. He wanted to ‘obtain the facts about the case, which the American Olympic Committee apparently tried to conceal, and secondly to get redress for damages to my wife’s reputation’.
³

The newpaper
Der Angriff
carried an astonishing and revealing comment condemning the American team for bringing ‘black auxiliaries’ to Berlin. How this inflammatory statement got through the Goebbels safety machine is not clear because his Propaganda Ministry published the paper.
Der Angriff
suggested the Americans had been ‘compelled’ to pick these ‘auxiliaries’ to combat the might of German athletics.
⁴
This drew lofty responses from the American press on the grounds of gratuitous offence – and, anyone could have added, it demonstrated that for all the money, preparations and events contested so far, some people in Germany
still
did not understand the ethos of the Olympic Games. At one stage the German Foreign Minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, actually made a complaint to Martha Dodds, daughter of the US Ambassador, that America virtually cheated by bringing black athletes like Owens – ‘non-humans’.
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Owens would say ‘we knew all about the racial thing but we couldn’t read German so we couldn’t read what was being written about us, being animals and all that. But the German people were tremendous. Every day we got a standing ovation from the multitude of people. They were looking at you not as a black man but in terms of the ability you displayed. This was the Olympics and there was spillover into your own country. You made headlines here [in America] and people saw them and they had second thoughts about you and about blacks, instead of making just a categorisation.’
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One is prompted to ask: how did, how could and how should competitors reconcile themselves to a political climate? They were perfectly entitled to ignore it because they had travelled to Berlin only for the non-political Olympic Games and, as we have seen, no doubt a majority did ignore it.

John Woodruff recounted how in the city they saw a lot of soldiers ‘moving about. Of course we didn’t pay any attention to that activity.’
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He heard about the anti-Semitism but he was not a political man and it didn’t interest him. He thought many other athletes were like that, too. ‘This is true: most athletes went to Berlin to compete and were
not
interested in the politics. It was certainly true of the American team. Very definitely. We just had no interest in politics. What we were interested in was going to the Games and trying to win gold medals.’

‘Spec’ Towns said ‘Of course, I did not participate in the politics of it. I went there to run and do my thing, and that’s what I did. I don’t think any athlete got involved in the political side of things.’
⁸

Australian swimmer Pat Norton, however, went to Berlin ‘very conscious’ the Games were ‘politically-motivated’. She wrote in her diary that ‘the sports fields were guarded by [storm troopers]. Their uniforms were very forbidding to see for the first time. The tunics and trousers are black, with black boots and leggings. The tunics are belted with red armbands with the Nazi swastika emblazoned on them, but it is the black helmets that add a sombre picture to this. They come low down on the forehead, level with the eyebrows, giving the wearer a sinister look. I became used to them after a while, but I did not like them.’
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Another Australian, Doris Carter, felt ‘it was very obvious Hitler was preparing for war – more than every second person wore a uniform of some sort’. She ‘did not hear any mention of concentration camps but several of the charming girls who worked in the Friesenhaus whispered to us that they were afraid – they were quarter Jewish and they had heard several of their Jewish friends had disappeared.’

Dorothy Odam remembered that ‘we woke every morning to the sound of marching feet. When I got to the window, I could see young people with shovels held like rifles over their shoulders. I learned that they were Hitler Youth. When we went shopping we were greeted with ‘
Guten Morgen, Heil Hitler
.’ We replied ‘
Guten Morgen, King George!
’ On one shopping expedition the chaperone told her group not to go into a Jewish shop ‘so we all just walked in’.
¹⁰

American diver Velma Dunn says ‘You’ve got to remember that being seventeen I didn’t look at the Games at that time as so controversial, I looked at it as a swimming competition. If I had been older I might have thought more about the politics but we had gone for sport, not politics. That was the way I went, purely to dive.’
¹¹

A member of the American basketball team, Francis Johnson, remembered the ‘unusual’ sight of what must have been Hitler Youth out marching and training.
¹²
He was told they were the equivalent of the boy scouts and concluded they were much better provided for than the older generation. Young, healthy, fit, strong, obedient, unquestioning, they were to be Hitler’s instrument of conquest.

The words of Owens, Woodruff, Towns, Norton, Carter, Odam and Johnson require a context. During those August days in 1936 nobody knew there would be a war never mind that it would be the most destructive ever fought, spreading death throughout Europe as far as Moscow, across North Africa, across the Pacific and whole tracts of Asia. Most people could not conceive of evil on the scale of the Holocaust, that atomic bombs would devastate entire cities and a thousand other unimaginable horrors. Perhaps the full realisation of the true character of the Berlin Olympics only revealed itself long afterwards, even to the people who attended it.

Esther Myers, visiting Berlin, caught the mood. She found

uniformed troops marching here and there in the streets. Often officers strolled into hotels or business places. Museums and public buildings would often remain closed so that the visitors could watch a parade of young boys and girls in uniform. There was one question on everyone’s mind: ‘What do you think about Hitler?’ That was the question we asked our German friends at the balls, dinners, and entertainments. ‘Please don’t talk about him,’ we were told. ‘Are you a member of the Nazi Party?’ we often asked someone. If the answer was negative, the reply was always a hushed ‘no’ and ‘I don’t want to talk about it.’ However, if we went to the public cabarets to dance and eat the young Germans would more readily talk. I received a letter from my father sent by airmail all the way from Wichita, Kansas, to Berlin, Germany. He pleaded for me to return home as soon as the games were over. ‘War is imminent, I fear,’ my father wrote.
¹³

Cool air currents brought cloud, sometimes heavy, that Wednesday and a shower fell in the morning with more rain later. The day’s timetable inevitably ran against a backdrop of mounting tension as the time drew towards 6 p.m. in the evening and the climax, Owens and the men’s 200 metres final.

The pole vault attracted an entry of thirty-six from twenty-three countries. From the 10.30 a.m. eliminators it stretched across the day and into the night, the final vaults taking place in a surreal dimension under floodlighting.

The discus sudden death was set at 44.0 metres and eighteen contestants failed to meet that.

The background, far beyond the stadium, teemed with activity.

The 50-kilometre walkers prepared to take on a course through the wooded Grünewald area with, mercifully, 42 of those kilometres in the shade of tall trees. The nine refreshment stations each had 5 litres of warm tea sweetened with grape juice, cold tea sweetened with grape juice, warm tea unsweetened, cold tea unsweetened, malt coffee, orange juice, cold lemonade sweetened with grape-sugar, warm oatmeal porridge; half a litre of sugar in cubes and thirty cubes of grape-sugar tablets, as well as copious quantities of bananas, oranges and whole lemons.

At the British trials, in July at Derby, a motor mechanic called Harold Whitlock broke the world record with 4 hours 30 minutes 38 seconds. Around the Grünewald, on a course damp from a shower, he intended to show what he could do but initially didn’t feel well. He would wait and watch. The Swede Evald Segerström led from Germany’s Friedrich Prehn.

In the foreground, as the twelve 200 metres sprinters prepared for the semi-finals, the walkers had covered 17.5 kilometres, Jaroslav Štork-Žofka of Czechoslovakia leading now and Whitlock ninth.

Owens watched Mack Robinson from Pasadena win the first semi-final in 21.1 seconds, a new Olympic record, from Orr (Canada). Owens was so relaxed he kept his sweatshirt on and did 21.3 seconds, enough to win from Osendarp.

The discus throwers moved into a long, unbroken session, the final following the semi-finals. Willi Schröder (Germany) held the world record and the crowd chanted ‘Take your discus in your hand and throw it for the Fatherland.’ It didn’t help. He threw 47.22 metres and faced sudden death elimination but won a throw-off.

At 3.30 p.m., ten minutes before the walkers reached half distance, the women 80 metres hurdlers contested four heats. Two girls from Bologna had been rivals since their school championships: Claudia Testoni, taciturn and twenty-one, took the first heat, Trebisonda Valla, twenty, came second in the last heat. Her father called her Trebisonda after the Turkish town he judged one of the world’s most beautiful. She was also known as Onida – ‘little wave’.
¹⁴
She’d make a big wave the next day.

At 3.40 p.m. the walkers reached half distance, Jnis Dalnisch of Latvia leading from Štork-Žofka, Whitlock moving up to third.

The 110 metres hurdles seemed relatively open after the six heats though Americans won three of them and Towns looked in prime form: he did 14.5 seconds, the fastest. Towns was a character. A National Guardsman, he wore GI boots and sometimes before a race he’d place a cigar beside his starting position, return and get it after the race, but there were questions about whether he ever lit the cigars.
¹⁵
The others hurdlers through were Fritz Pollard Jnr of North Dakota and Don Finlay, Britain’s best, on 14.7 seconds, Häkan Lidman (Sweden) on 14.9, and Californian Roy Staly and Tom Lavery (South Africa) on 15.0 seconds.

As the walkers reached 38.5 kilometres – Whitlock easing into the lead from Arthur Schwab (Switzerland), Štork-Žofka third – the 1,500 metre men lined up for the metric equivalent of the mile, a lean, strong New Zealander named Lovelock among them. He had been preparing for three years. Educated at South Canterbury, he was good early and in his last year won the school’s senior 440 yards, 880 and mile. He went to Otago University studying medicine but playing rugby broke a leg. That led him towards athletics, where runners don’t break their legs. At Princetown, USA, in 1933 he became the first New Zealander to hold a recognised world record when he ran the mile in 4 minutes 7.6 seconds. A year later he won the mile in the Empire Games in London.
¹⁶
Now he finished third in a slow second heat. Eighteen runners went faster than him, but that didn’t concern him at all. He had a secret and he knew that when he revealed it every one of them would be vulnerable.

In the first women’s 80 metres semi-final Valla broke the Olympic record. In the second semi-final the first three finished on 11.8 seconds, Testoni the third of them.

Ken Carpenter of the University of Southern California took the discus.

As the walkers moved beyond 48 kilometres – Whitlock leading from Schwab – Owens prepared for the 200 metres. Hitler arrived, as was his custom, in mid-afternoon and theatrically. He was just in time.

The six runners dug their holes when Harold Whitlock came into the stadium and moved on to the track to complete the 50 kilometres – and the six sprinters had to move off it. The wind raked the stadium, dragging rain which fell heavier and heavier. It stabbed at Owens, who shivered.

They went to their marks. A great, almost superhuman pressure bore down on Owens and he responded to it with a great, almost superhuman performance from the gun. He lined up in the third lane, the tall, angular Robinson – an impoverished college freshman and virtually unknown before Randall’s Island – next to him. His only pair of running shoes disintegrated and he had no coach to seek out and pay for another pair, but here he was.

Coming out of the stagger on the bend that compulsive, clockwork lope took Owens ahead, Robinson clinging. The lope looked so natural that one seasoned observer felt Owens wasn’t actually running in the way other human beings do;
¹⁷
Der Angriff
coined a lovely phrase:
His feet didn’t seem to touch the ground
. Towards the line he went faster still, crossing it in 20.7 seconds and scattering the Olympic record to the wind. No one had ever finished below 21.0 at a Games before.

Robinson, clinging on to the end, also beat the old Olympic record.

Hitler beat it, too – out of the stadium. A downpour forced him indoors from his box and, while the whole stadium roared their delight for Owens, Hitler chose not to return to see the presentation of the third Owens gold medal.