Hitler's Olympics (39 page)

Leni Riefenstahl’s extraordinary film ‘documentary’ of the Games had its premiere in the spring of 1938. In 1934 she had done something similar with the Nuremberg Rally, making
Triumph of the Will
, an eerie, militaristic masterpiece with Hitler at its centre. She had used innovative techniques (cameramen on roller skates to capture movement) and did so again with the Olympics. Her
Olympia
used seven leading cameramen and ‘many others’. It had a big production staff – five editors, alone – and used so much film they needed until 1938 to get it into a manageable state. Even then it came in two parts:
Festival of the People
(126 minutes) and
Festival of Beauty
(100 minutes). It was revolutionary by comparison with the static newsreels of the day, capturing the moods and human emotions of the Games. Some of the footage lingering over men’s bodies was deliberately sensual, if not overtly sexual.

By then Hitler had entered Vienna in triumph, incorporating Austria into the Reich.

On 22 June 1938 Max Schmeling fought Joe Louis in New York for the heavyweight championship of the world again. It lasted 2 minutes and 4 seconds. In that time Schmeling went down three times and afterwards, so the legend goes, they found some of Schmeling’s teeth in Louis’s glove. His face looked like a landfill site.

Because of the Sino–Japanese War, on 15 July 1938 Tokyo and Sapporo renounced their holding of the 1940 Games so there would be time to find other hosts for them. Two months later the high-jumper Dora Ratjen broke the world record at the European Championships in Vienna and afterwards, says Gretel Bergmann, ‘it came out she was not a man and not a woman. I heard this from the discus winner, Mauermayer. I was in touch with her for a while and she wrote me that Ratjen was “in between”.’

‘I know how he got caught – the shaving. He was on a train coming back from Vienna [and the European Championships]. At Magdeburg two women saw this person in women’s clothing with a five o’clock shadow and you know in Germany to denounce somebody was a great sport. So at the next stop these two women got the police and the police pulled her/him off the train and took him to the police station. Then he was told, or she was told – I don’t know [chuckle] –
it
was told that there would be a medical examination.
Then
he admitted he was a male. His genitalia were set back, evidently. The funny part of it, I always say, is that there were three girls in that family already and when Dora was born the midwife told the parents “You have another girl” because there was this
thing
that wasn’t quite right down there. And that’s how they brought him up as a girl. But if you wipe a baby’s bottom you know whether it’s a boy or a girl!’

The German Athletic Federation banned her/him from women’s competitions.

In October Germany occupied the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia through which, only three years earlier, the Olympic torch had come.

In May 1939, Werner Schwieger had to take part in a three-month exercise with the German Luftwaffe (an anti-aircraft unit). Through part of our story he has been a representative of many others. Now he became representative of millions. The darkness was very close.

In January 1939 Franco captured Barcelona and in March took Madrid without resistance. The Spanish Civil War, one of many ominous backdrops to the Olympics, finally drew to a close. In March, Hitler entered Prague, Czechoslovakia dismembered. The darkness was much closer.

Hitler’s war began on 3 September 1939 when Britain declared war after he had invaded Poland on the 1st.

With Sapporo withdrawn the Winter Games were awarded to St Mortitz but, after a dispute about Swiss ski instructors and their amateur status, they went to Garmisch. The choice of Garmisch remained even after the invasion of Poland but once Britain and France declared war the Games had to be abandoned.

Lewald, the half Jew, was forced to resign. Karl Ritter von Halt, a Nazi, replaced him on the IOC’s executive committee. It was he who told Baillet-Latour of the cancellation of Garmisch. As with everything else, the Nazis sought to control the IOC, or as von Tschammer und Osten put it, ‘reorganise’ it. Baillet-Latour was ‘the most obvious lever’ for the Nazis to use, ‘but it is nevertheless striking that he should have been invited to act as a puppet of Hitler’s Germany’. He died in 1942.
²¹

The long-jumper Luz Long was wounded fighting in Sicily in 1943 and died in a British military hospital. He was awarded the de Coubertin medal for sportsmanship posthumously. What he had done for Jesse Owens was not forgotten.

Von Tschammer und Osten died in 1943 of pneumonia.

American sprinter Foy Draper joined the US Army Air Corps and served in North Africa. In 1943 he flew on a mission to attack German and Italian troops in Tunisia and never returned.
²²

The Hungarian Ferenc Csík, who had taken the 100 metres freestyle and added a bronze in the 800 metres freestyle relay, became a doctor. In 1945, aged thirty-two, he died in the town of Sporon during an Allied bombing raid. He was treating patients.
²³

As the Soviet armies overran East Prussia and Silesia they pushed before them a tide of refugees fleeing these eastern German provinces. Some were temporarily housed in the cottages at the Olympic Village.

In March 1945, members of the Hitler Youth, some aged as young as 12, were being fed mindlessly into the killing machine to die for nothing – the war lost except to the insane. Five hundred of these Hitler Youth were addressed at the May Field. These children were exhorted to sacrifice their lives in a way which, more than half a century after, made one participant physically ill to recall. A little while later some of the Hitler Youth were ordered to reassemble there to watch the execution of members who had gone absent without leave: shot or hanged – it’s not clear which – as an example. That these brutal acts were carried out on the May Field, or perhaps even close by, where in those August days the eager youth of the world had assembled to compete in peace, remains grotesque and eloquent and almost unbearable in its poignancy.

Tilly Fleischer was evacuated from her village near Frankfurt after heavy bombing in 1944 and went to the city of Halle, which would later be in the Soviet zone of Germany. Her husband came and took her back to Frankfurt ‘just before the Russians arrived’. In April 1945 American soldiers did arrive and briefly occupied the village before pressing on. She remembered how they cooked ham and eggs, a seemingly impossible luxury in what had become a broken land.
²⁴

The Olympic Village fell into the Soviet zone of occupation. On 20 April there was a bombing raid on a shunting yard nearby, the next day the last person living in the Village was evacuated. The Red Army arrived that evening, on 24 or 25 April. On 28 April they took control of the Olympic Stadium as the Russians tightened their grip on the whole city.

When Hitler’s war ended on 7 May 1945 Berlin lay destroyed almost beyond recognition. William Shirer, who had known it so intimately, returned and at moments was unsure where he was actually standing. Perhaps he reflected ruefully on those visiting American businessmen who, during the Olympics, had assured him what a splendid place Germany was and what a good job Hitler was doing.

Werner Albrecht von und zu Gilsa, who took the credit for the Olympic Village, became a general and the last combat commander of Dresden. He committed suicide.

Hitler himself, who had journeyed from Wilhelmstrasse almost every day to fete and be feted by the Olympic Games now lay in a shallow grave in the area behind the Chancellory. He shot himself in the bunker below and his body, brought up, had been burnt. Goebbels, who not so long ago had given that memorable party for 2,000 guests on the island in the Havel, took poison in the bunker as did his wife Magda. They ensured it was also administered to their children.

A great jungle of wrecked machinery littered Unter den Linden, the stone-clad buildings pock-marked by shell, mortar and small arms fire from the street-to-street fighting as the Soviet army conquered it. Most of the buildings themselves stood like rows of rotting teeth, bombed to the point where only external walls remained. The population, traumatised, faced a long summer at the mercy of the Soviet conquerors and then a bitter cold winter, a killing winter.

The Olympic stadium, protected from the bombing and street fighting because of its distance from the city, survived. That gave it a curious atmosphere of its own because it stood in such direct contrast to the devastation everywhere else.

Hitler’s plan with Speer to recast the whole centre of the city on a monumental scale, making it the centre of the world, lay dead in the rubble. Some of what Hitler did build lived on as ghosts, altered forever. In the eastern sector a vast concrete bomb shelter was dynamited, but instead of shattering it sank and remained, grotesque, on the edge of a public park. The East Germans did blow up the catacomb of Hitler’s bunkers behind the Chancellory in Wilhelmstrasse, entombing them and levelling the earth above them. Nobody would be able to locate where he died or where his body was burnt afterwards. The area fell within no man’s land when the East Germans built the wall in 1961: no possibility of a shrine, of pilgrims, of memorials, of a place for a rebirth. There, in fact, no possibility of
anything
.

Goering’s Air Ministry came through so unscathed that East German politicans used it and, because the Wall ran alongside it, one person used the roof to throw a line over and, when friends secured it on the western side, he and his family went down the rope to freedom on a home-made pulley.

From 1945, the soon-to-be affluent West completely rebuilt its half of the city; the impoverished east couldn’t afford that, so whole districts remained as they had been in those August days except that virtually every building carried the scars of the street fighting that marked the closing chapter of Nazi Berlin. When the city had been divided between the Soviet Union, America, France and Great Britain the stadium fell into the British sector. Once upon a time, so the legend goes, they played a cricket match there. It attracted no spectators.

In August 1945 Korea regained its independence from a defeated Japan. At that moment Kitei Son reverted to Sohn Kee-chung. He would become a senior and influential Olympic figure.

Doris Carter, the Australian high-jumper, went back to the Reich Sports Field in 1946. ‘The stadium was little damaged but other buildings were wrecked. Trees and window frames had been burnt for firewood. What was left of the Bell Tower that called the “youth of the world” to the Games contained damaged machinery that I imagine [had once] provided the air conditioning for all those tunnels.’
²⁵

At the Nuremberg Trials, Goering – he who had staged those three preposterous parties of self-aggrandisement during the Olympics – refused to plead against charges of crimes against humanity. When films of the death camps were shown in court he turned away, unable or unwilling to watch. He was sentenced to death by hanging but poisoned himself.

Cornelius Johnson, co-holder of the world high jump record and winner of the Olympic gold, was working as a baker on a ship when, in February 1946, he was suddenly taken ill. He died on his way to hospital in California, aged thirty-two.
²⁶

In June 1948 the Soviet Union imposed a blockade on West Berlin. The Cold War was replacing the darkness.

Throughout these desperate years the International Olympic Committee tried to hold the middle ground, to maintain normality. When the 1940 Games could not be held in Tokyo they were transferred to Helsinki but the Soviet invasion of Finland in November 1939 ended that. The IOC awarded the 1944 Games to London over bids from Detroit, Lausanne and Rome. In fact, normality did not return until July 1948 when London, itself battered by the bombing of the war, finally hosted the Games. Fifty-nine countries and 4,099 competitors came. Germany and Japan were not invited.

The fencer Ilona Elek was twenty-nine in 1936, her first Olympics. When the Games resumed she became one of only two competitors to defend her title successfully. She went to Helsinki four years later and won silver.

Don Finlay, the Briton who finished second in the 110 metres hurdles in Berlin, took the athlete’s oath in London. The United States dominated with 38 gold medals, Sweden 16, France and Hungary 10. Czechoslovakia and Austria, restored to nationhood, had 6 and 1 respectively. The Indians won the hockey, of course.

In May 1949 the Berlin blockade ended and West Germany came into existence as the Federal Republic. West Berlin remained under the control of America, Britain and France. In response the Soviets made their zone of Germany into the German Democratic Republic, calling their sector of Berlin the capital. The Western powers did not recognise that, or the Democratic Republic, which began to tighten the ‘border’ between the two Germanies and round West Berlin. The Olympic Village fell just inside the Democratic Republic.

A strained kind of normality was achieved because in 1952 Germany went to the Helsinki Games as a single team and continued like that until 1968. Japan came back at Helsinki, too.

The fencer Helene Mayer, who visited her native Offenbach in 1938, returned to Germany from America but died from cancer. She was forty-three.

On 13 August 1961 the German Democratic Republic, in a bid to stop the haemorrhaging of her citizens to the growing prosperity of the Federal Republic, closed the border round West Berlin. The planning was carried out in absolute secrecy and nobody in the West knew until 1.54 a.m. when a train went into the east and did not come back. Then the Wall went up.

Carl Diem died in 1962. Immediately after the war he worked in physical education in Berlin and two years later, with the British military administration, helped create the German sports university in Cologne.

Dean Cromwell, who coached the United States Olympic team to London and then retired, died that same year. He’d coached ten Olympic gold medal winners.

The 1964 Winter Games went to Sapporo, the Summer Games to Tokyo. The Japanese rehabilitation was complete.