Hitler's Olympics (6 page)

The patronage of the Games passed to him as the new head of state, which is how he threw a tantrum about the stadium of glass and said he wouldn’t open the Games in a place like that (see n. 13).

On 29 September America accepted their invitation.
²⁴

The first plans for the torch relay and its route went out:

Total 3,075km

The route was divided into sections of 1 kilometre and a different runner would be assigned to cover each, the flame being passed from one to the next and forming a great chain extending across Europe. The Olympic countries taking part ‘were authorised to make special provisions such as increasing the stretches in thinly populated sections or allowing more time for traversing difficult districts. To ensure the smooth progress of the run, each participant was required not only to be acquainted with his own stretch but the following one as well so that he could continue in the case of an unforeseen emergency.’
²⁵

The flame had to stay alight. Expert historical advice was sought and initially it seemed the original Greek method – using only fagots of a certain wood found at Ephesus, whose pith retained fire – might be the solution, but these fagots didn’t burn for long enough. In an emergency, a runner would be covering 2 kilometres and that meant the flame had to burn for 10 minutes. The problem was exacerbated by the fact that various different torches could not be carried in the open and keep burning whatever the weather – ‘heat, rain, storms’ – never mind for 10 minutes.

The German Organising Committee commissioned their own magnesium torches, each containing two fuses so that if one failed the other would reignite it. The top of the torches contained a special substance enabling rapid ignition in the flame’s transfer from runner to runner.
²⁶
Sample torches were sent to the six Olympic countries for trials.

The Olympic flame in the stadium posed a much bigger problem because it had to burn throughout the Games – 363 hours – once it had been lit by the 3,075th and last runner. The organisers wanted the flame to be very visible and settled on a height of 3 metres. They intended to use lighting gas from the Berlin Municipal Works but that didn’t give the right flame and to get enough of it would require construction of a pipeline to the stadium costing 300,000 Reichsmarks: a Volkswagen car was 1,000 Reichsmarks, the average weekly wage 35 and, even with Hitler’s backing, 300,000 was a fortune. Worse, this ordinary gas contained chemical and oil substances that created smoke, giving rise to the potential scenario of thousands of spectators coughing even if they could see through it. Attempts to use oil pressure burners, coal tar and benzol all failed. To get the height of the flame right and sustain it needed from 350 to 400 tons of heavy benzol, costing 36,000 Reichsmarks. Eventually a company in Hannover solved the problem by providing new liquid propane gas.

In October 1934 the official Olympic poster was selected and the warrior at the Brandenburg Gate became an enduring icon.
²⁷
Hitler visited the Reich Sports Field and the stadium to inspect progress and keep his eye on the details, expressing ‘several wishes for slight changes’. There was no mistaking the subtext: Hitler was watching. More than that he had the sort of mind which remembered what he had asked for, and if you had not done it, he would not forget.

The promotion of the Games within Germany started with a touring exhibition in an Olympic caravan designed to generate interest for the event in every citizen under the slogan

OLYMPIA, A NATIONAL MISSION

‘It was intended that no German should feel himself merely to be a visitor at the Games but that everyone should share in the responsibility of presenting them.’
²⁸

Goebbels knew his craft and, club-footed or not, was just getting into his stride.

Notes

 
1
.
 
Duff Hart-Davis,
Hitler’s Games
(London, Century Hutchinson, 1986), p. 43.

 
2
.
 
www.athensenvironmental.org/modern_olympics/modern_olympics06.asp
(visited 5 May 2005).

 
3
.
 
‘Jewish Women in Gymnastics and Sport in Germany 1898–1938’,
Journal of Sport History
, Vol. 26, No. 2 (Summer 1999); (visited 5 May 2005).

 
4
.
 
William L. Shirer,
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
(London, Pan Books, 1971), p. 171.

 
5
.
 
Los Angeles Times
, 3 August 1932, p. 9.

 
6
.
 
The XIth Olympic Games, Berlin, 1936 Official Report.

 
7
.
 
Milly Mogulof,
Foiled
(Oakland, CA, RDR Books, 2002), p. 61.

 
8
.
 
Shirer,
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
, p. 236.

 
9
.
 
The XIth Olympic Games, Berlin, 1936 Official Report.

10
.
 
IOC Official Bulletin, 1933.

11
.
 
The XIth Olympic Games, Berlin, 1936 Official Report.

12
.
 
The XIth Olympic Games, Berlin, 1936 Official Report.

13
.
 
There is confusion about chronology because March presented the new stadium plans but a long time
afterwards
Hitler reacted violently when construction began. According to Albert Speer in his
Inside the Third Reich
(London, Sphere Books, 1979 reprint), p. 129, Hitler ‘went to inspect the site and came back in a state of anger and agitation’. March’s design was a ‘concrete structure with glass partition walls’ like one in Vienna but Hitler stormed that he would ‘never set foot inside a modern glass box like that’. Speer remembered Hitler ordering Pfundtner to cancel the Games because, as head of state, he – Hitler – had to declare them open and he wouldn’t do it in such a stadium. Overnight, Speer added, he himself sketched how natural stone cladding could be attached to the steel skeleton now up. The glass partitions went, bringing Hitler back. Speer wondered irreverently whether Hitler really would have cancelled the Games or whether he used a ‘flash of pique’ to get his way, a tactic he deployed often.

14
.
 
The XIth Olympic Games, Berlin, 1936 Official Report.

15
.
 
Ibid
.

16
.
 
Ibid
.

17
.
 
Ibid
.

18
.
 
New York Times
, 8 March 1934.

19
.
 
Gretel Bergmann; interview with author.

20
.
 
Paul Yogi Mayer,
Jews and the Olympic Games
(London, Valentine Mitchell, 2004), p. 15.

21
.
 
Gretel Bergmann; interview with author.

22
.
 
Ibid
.

23
.
 
I am indebted to my neighbour Inge Donnell for pointing out that although
Führer
does mean leader – and could be used quite innocently, as for the leader of a trade union or a troupe of boy scouts – Hitler decreed that it only be used about him, and as a consequence it became intimately associated with him, and acquired a strength and force through the connection.

24
.
 
Part of the triumph of the Olympic ideal is how, as a global movement, it has been able to accommodate the conflicting demands of member nation-states – ostensibly by offering itself as a totally unpolitical movement and therefore both above politics and not concerned with them. This has not always proved possible and the 1980s were particularly bad, with the United States and some allies boycotting Moscow in 1980, the Soviet Union and some of its allies boycotting Los Angeles in 1984. For a fuller discussion of this, and its relevance to Berlin in 1936, see Chapter 10, ‘Aftermath’.

25
.
 
The XIth Olympic Games, Berlin, 1936 Official Report.

26
.
 
Ibid
.

27
.
 
The Brandenburg Gate stood then and stands now as a symbol of Berlin comparable to the Statue of Liberty, the Eiffel Tower or Buckingham Palace. By an almost impossible irony it lay almost exactly on the line that partitioned East and West Berlin – it was just on the eastern side – and, when the Berlin Wall went up, became a symbol of that. (It was so tall it could, of course, be seen from both sides even though the Easterners were kept well away from it by an inner wall.) Instinctively, the night the Wall came down, and even though there was no checkpoint there, the world’s television crews gathered at the Gate’s western side. They had the perfect backdrop, the same one that adorned the 1936 poster.

28
.
 
The XIth Olympic Games, Berlin, 1936 Official Report.

Removal of the Games is possible in case agreements are not kept. Hitherto such a case has never occurred in the history of the Olympics.

Count Baillet-Latour, President, IOC

I
n the winter of 1935 the national Olympic Committees received details of the accommodation for the Games. An Olympic exhibition opened in Berlin, and remained open until the spring. An Olympic Publicity Week, run by a Nazi leisure organisation, proferred ‘Strength Through Joy’. Training areas were being selected for the athletes before and during the Games. A news service charted progress in fourteen languages.

The pace was quickening and that kept the twin themes of sport and politics flowing in something approaching tandem. It does not make for a smooth narrative because the staccato sequence of events in both strands were not themselves smooth.

By now Hitler held Germany in an iron grip. All news was heavily censored so that an ordinary citizen had no informed perspective about anything. German cultural and artistic life, once so wonderfully vibrant and challenging in so many spheres, lay dead; in its place Hitler put his hatred of Jews and communists. And he had begun to rearm, something in theory under the control of the Treaty of Versailles. So he did it in secret.

In early March 1935 Britain’s Ambassador in Berlin, Sir Eric Phipps, a man who understood the nature of Hitler and Hitlerism perfectly well, told the Foreign Office in London he had confidential information: inside a month the Germans expected their air force to be stronger than that of France, and within a year their army to be stronger than the French army. Nor would they stop there. Phipps added that his confidant ‘expressed intense surprise that France had allowed Germany to get so strong’.

On 15 March the French government doubled military service to two years and next day Hitler summoned Phipps to say that in response conscription would be introduced in Germany immediately, and that the country would have half a million men under arms.

At the end of the month in the Saarland, the coal-rich area on the French border taken over by the League of Nations after the First World War where France was allowed to exploit the mines for fifteen years as reparations, 99 per cent of the population voted for reunification with Germany – more, William Shirer noted, than anticipated, although he felt most voted for it in case anyone found out they hadn’t. Shirer added: ‘Hitler has said, and repeated in a broadcast, that the Saar was the last territorial bone of contention with France. We shall see …’.
¹

Arguably, and in hindsight, the inevitability of a world war began here, because Hitler had got away with it. From 1933 many did not need hindsight to see through him, but there was a problem with that. Since the Western powers had surrendered the Saarland he sensed weakness: for all the sane reasons so soon after the slaughter of the First World War, they preferred appeasement to confrontation. That gave him room to manoeuvre, and he’d created a disciplined, subservient, heavily militarised nation to use as an instrument to exploit it.

America’s Ambassador, William E. Dodds, had studied in Leipzig and arrived in Berlin hoping to bring the two countries closer but, like Phipps, he understood Hitler. Over the next four years his frustration mounted to the point where he felt open bitterness and hostility to the Nazis and resigned. Ignoring all conventions about customary farewell for such dignitaries, the Nazis completely ignored his departure. Albeit he had tried to do so on an almost daily basis, Dodds had not been able to convince Washington of what Germany was actually doing and what it meant. Hitler was left with a free hand.

The Olympics provided beautiful international camouflage, because they seemed to show that Germany was
not
really like that at all while, at the same time, making Germans feel good about themselves and their Führer. Meanwhile, the British Foreign Office took care not to become enmeshed in the question of whether a British team should go to the Olympics, and the British Olympic Committee was nothing to do with the government, anyway (as Margaret Thatcher was to discover in 1980 when she tried unsuccessfully to get a British boycott of the Moscow Games).