Berlin Games (17 page)

 

Salford in northern England was once described as the ‘ugly illiterate scrawl of the Industrial Revolution'. When Bill Roberts was born there on 5 April 1912, the town was little better. Ranked as one of the unhealthiest places in Britain, it suffered an infant mortality rate for the under-fives of a shocking 50 per cent, with many dying from respiratory diseases such as tuberculosis and bronchitis. Others were claimed by scarlet fever and dysentery. The town, wrote one historian, was created not only by hard work and skill, but also by ‘grasping greed and insensitivity to the appalling social consequences of industrialisation'. In his play
Love on the Dole
, the playwright Walter Greenwood described Salford as ‘drab and sluttish'. ‘A raving maniac
could not have dreamed up a more shocking place had he been suffering from the most outrageous nightmare,' he wrote.

Roberts was born at the family's terraced house just a few hundred yards from the docks. His father was a pattern-maker, and although working-class, the family was reasonably comfortable. The outbreak of war in 1914 meant that Roberts' father was secure in his job, but times were still hard. Roberts was too young to remember the war, but he did recall the anti-German feeling on the streets. ‘I can remember crowds breaking into a butcher's shop near our house because the owner was German,' he said, ‘or at least he had a German name.' In fact, there were many families who bore German names in Salford, the descendants of immigrants of the previous century. As the war dragged on, many of these families were ostracised. ‘You had to understand,' said Roberts, ‘[…] that didn't make any of it right, of course.' Roberts' other early memories were of the visit of King George V, and the Americans entering the war. Many of the troops arrived at Salford docks, and Roberts was there to see them. ‘By then I was old enough to realise that it would make a difference to the war now that they were here.'

Roberts attended the Trafford Road School, and although he was a conscientious and bright pupil, he left at thirteen. The headmaster had found him a job in a timber yard, and Roberts knew that he had to take it. Timber was a vitally important business in the area, and Roberts knew that if he succeeded he would be secure. He started by being a Boy Friday, but his diligence saw him attending evening classes to learn all about the trade. By the age of sixteen, he was supervising grown men, wore a suit and tie, and even had his own car.

During his spare time, Roberts liked to go hiking and to indulge in his other love–athletics. His first significant athletic success was at the age of fourteen, when he won a running-backwards race at Salford Athletics Club. Running forwards also came naturally to Roberts, not least because he had spent most of his childhood running around the streets. Roberts joined the club, although it did not even have a ground. Even when he and his fellow members found somewhere to train, their efforts were hardly professional. ‘We didn't know how to [train],' Roberts recalled, ‘and in any case nobody that we knew in those days believed that you should train very hard […] So we
just ran round and round for a bit and did a few strides and some stretching, and that was it.'

By the time Roberts turned eighteen, he had found that his best distances were 220 yards and the quarter-mile. Soon, he was helping the club to win prizes in the relay, as well as winning the odd 220 yards on his own. The local newspaper noted that he showed ‘much promise', but this was by no means delivered with an air of excitement. After all, Roberts was just another talented runner in just another small club. There were thousands like him in the country. Roberts persisted, however, and just as he had climbed the career ladder at the timber yard, he climbed the equivalent ladder in the athletics world. By 1932, he was still outside the 51.4 seconds required to enter the quarter-mile at the AAA Championships in London, but he continued to win prizes at lesser competitions, including the Lancashire quarter-mile title the following year. By 1933, he still wasn't good enough for the AAA Championships, but by 1934 he made the semi-finals. The final was won by Godfrey Rampling, an army officer to whom Roberts came second in the British Empire Games in August. Roberts' time of 48.6 was a vast improvement, and soon the press was beginning to take notice of the lad from Salford. The
Manchester Guardian
commented that his place was a surprise, and that he had ‘the most wholehearted resolution'. This was quite correct–Roberts had honed what was a good talent into an exceptional one by willpower and hard work. The
Daily Telegraph
noted at the end of the year that ‘this young man from Salford will certainly see Berlin'.

On 13 July 1935 Roberts once more found himself in the finals of the AAA Championships. As was becoming habit, he had come down to London with a third-class rail ticket costing him £117
s
9
d
(some £85 or $150 in 2005). Given than he earned not much more than £250 a year (some £11,000 or $19,500 in 2005), even the ticket would have hurt his pocket. The only expenses that were met were the few pennies for the Underground fare. It was hardly surprising that there were so few working-class men among the Oxbridge students and army officers at White City. Money worries were at the back of his mind, however, as Roberts approached the starting line in the inside lane. Drawing the inside was bad luck, as that was the lane that got
the most wear, and was therefore trickier to run on. Roberts dismissed his misfortune, and steeled himself.

A few seconds after the pistol went off, Roberts had already built up a commanding lead. His style was not pretty, with his head thrown back and his face in an agonised grimace. His strides were long and sweeping, although they were beginning to show the finesse of a world-class quarter-miler. He pushed himself as hard as he could, and the effort was rewarded by his crossing the line in first place, several yards ahead of the rest of the field. The only criticism came from the
Manchester Guardian
, which cautioned Roberts for ‘squandering' his powers on every race: ‘He should remember in next year's Olympic Games he will have run six quarter-miles in a week and that Berlin is hot in August. It is time for him to learn to economise energy and to win by what he must, not what he can.' This was surely nit-picking. All that now stood in Roberts' way between Salford and Berlin was the following year's AAA championships.

Three hundred and sixty-three days later, Roberts once more found himself in the quarter-mile final at White City. This time the stakes were the highest possible–places on the Olympic team. Luckily, Roberts was not drawn in the dreaded inside lane, but in lane four. Next to him in lane five stood Godfrey Rampling, who had recently rediscovered his form. In lane six was Godfrey Brown, a schoolmaster and perhaps the fastest of the six. Roberts knew that he was capable of beating both of them, but it would be tough. To his left in lane three stood Jack Whittingham, who was beatable. In lane two was the heir to a banking dynasty, Freddy Woolf, who could also be outrun, as could Oades in lane one. It would be Roberts' toughest race.

‘L
ET ME SAY
that I shall not resign from the International Olympic Committee. In opposing American participation in the Olympic Games in Nazi Germany, I have only been true to Olympic ideals and to American ideals of sportsmanship and fair play.' These words, written the day after the opening ceremony at Garmisch, were those of IOC member Ernest Lee Jahncke, and they were addressed to Count Baillet-Latour. Ever since the boycotters had been defeated at the AAU convention in New York in December 1935, the Louisianan's position on the committee had looked unstable. Baillet-Latour had insisted that he resign, but Jahncke had stayed firm. In his opinion, the boycott debate was still very much alive, not least because the majority at the AAU convention had been so slight. ‘The issue is still open,' he informed Baillet-Latour, ‘not only because of the circumstances under which the American Amateur Athletic Union gave its answer, but because great moral issues cannot be resolved by counting noses but only by an appeal to what is right and what is wrong.'

As far as Avery Brundage was concerned, the issue was very much closed and Jahncke was a figure from the past. ‘The boycotters were badly whipped,' he wrote to a fellow AOC member, ‘but the less said about it, the better. They should not be given any opportunities in the future to revive their agitation if we can help it. Jahncke's letter, of course, is filled with misstatements, which, if one is charitably inclined, might be forgiven because of his gross ignorance of the sport world in this country.' If one were charitably inclined towards Brundage, then his attitude might be forgiven not only on account of the AAU result, but because of the success of the Winter Olympics. Brundage would certainly have agreed with the words Gustavus Kirby uttered when he
returned from Germany in the middle of February, telling them that the best sort of fact-finding committee on the state of Germany consisted of ‘the athletes, the officials and the spectators who attended the Olympic Winter Games'. Kirby said that he had seen ‘no discrimination whatsoever' and he was ‘confident that not a single person at Garmisch will bring back a report other than I have'. Brundage returned at the end of February, and was even more effusive than Kirby. ‘We've had sports fans to Olympic Games before,' he said, ‘but I never saw an entire people dressed for sports and engaging in them the way the Germans did. Athletes, people and government are sports-minded on a national scale for the first time since the old Greek games.' Brundage was no doubt also delighted that he had met Hitler for the first time–Lewald and Diem had secured him a meeting immediately after the opening ceremony. A touch of the
Fuehrerkontakt
would have thrilled Brundage, and would have made him truly feel a player on the world stage.

Brundage was right about the Germans as sports fans. They were engaging in sports in the way that few other nations did, partly because their new masters were forcing them to do so. In fact, the Nazis saw sport as being essential not only for the body corporal, but also for the body politic. In the Nazi handbook
Sport and State
, commissioned by Tschammer und Osten in 1934, Hitler had written in the introduction: ‘In the Third Reich it is not only knowledge which counts, but also strength, and our absolute ideal for the future would be a human being of radiant mind and magnificent body, that people may again find a way to riches through money and property.'

The Nazis looked back to Friedrich Ludwig ‘Father' Jahn, who preached in the early nineteenth century a form of patriotism based on the body. Father Jahn popularised the Turners, gymnastic societies in which the participants engaged in highly regimented and coordinated movements. Instead of celebrating individualism, as English sport had done, the Turners were an exercise in creating solidarity. Their ethos was clearly very appealing to the Nazis. ‘A new German physical education must be built on two powerful pillars,' declaimed
Sport and State
. ‘The first was set solidly in the depths of German manhood more than 100 years ago by Friedrich Ludwig Jahn, the other was erected by the SA, when they gave their blood in the fight
for the German state. In the future, it will not be possible to differentiate between the spirit of German physical education and the spirit of the SA.' The spirit of the SA was of course a violently military one, and
Sport and State
juxtaposed countless photographs of youths in sportswear alongside youths in uniform. For the Nazis, there was no differentiation between sports and militarism–the former was just the latter without rifles. In order to bolster the legitimacy of such an approach,
Sport and State
insisted that ‘we should educate people in the way of the Greeks', because, the book claimed, ‘Greek civilisation was a civilisation of force, like any great civilisation'.

One implementation of this ‘force' was through the Kraft durch Freude (Strength through Joy) movement, of which millions of Germans were members. Attached to the Labour Front, Kraft durch Freude provided its members with sports and ‘sensible amusements'. Every year, hundreds of thousands would be entrained to pleasure resorts, where they would undergo a kind of sporting indoctrination as they performed gymnastics in massed ranks. Athletics and other sports were also played, and any youth who showed an aptitude for a particular sport was given the opportunity and equipment to practise it. Kraft durch Freude was open to all ages, and it was by no means an informal affair–it was organised on quasi-military lines. Tschammer und Osten denied, however, that there was anything militaristic in the German approach to sport. ‘The ideals of the founders were frequently misunderstood by other nations,' he wrote, ‘for it was said of them that their motives were of a purely military nature. This was not the case formerly, nor is it the case now.' The Reichsportsfuehrer had clearly not read his copy of
Sport and State
, or indeed visited a Hitler Youth camp, where its boys trained under banners that shouted: ‘Our duty is to die for Germany.'

There were many who disagreed with Tschammer und Osten. Among them was Ivone Kirkpatrick, who was on the staff at the British embassy in Berlin. Kirkpatrick saw Kraft durch Freude and the Nazi educational system as means of turning Germany's youth into tools of an aggressive state.

Brundage would have taken issue with such words. ‘In 1930, German youth was undersized, anaemic and undernourished,' he said in speech. ‘They were of poor colour. Today, they are strong and vigorous all because they are better athletes.' Brundage harkened back to a ‘Golden Age' in Ancient Greece, in which ‘physical soundness led to sound thinking'. He then drew an equivalence between the sporting health of a nation and its standing, using the example of Finland. ‘It has the finest Olympic record per capita,' he said. ‘It is a nation of athletes. What pleases those of us who are interested in sports is that the Finns carry the ideals from the playing field into other relations. At least little Finland is the only country that recognises its obligations to pay war debts.' The idea that athletic prowess is linked to sound financial management is a curious one, to say the least. Brundage pooh-poohed talk that Germany's zeal for physicality was in any way related to militarism. ‘Perhaps some political leaders think healthy youth make better soldiers, but no one country can fail to profit universally, intellectually, physically, culturally and recreationally from clean wholesome sport.' Therein lay the flaw in Brundage's thinking. He felt that sport was an incorruptible divinity, or, as he said in another speech, ‘sport is a religion'. What Brundage failed to recognise was that sport can be used for evil ends. It never occurred to him that the simple act of running around a track, or skiing down a mountain, might not always be taken at face value. If sport can be used to promote a nation's health and vitality, then it can also be used to promote ugly nationalism. Brundage's naivety was not to recognise that the Olympic Games were the perfect sporting vehicle to advance the appeal of something quite repugnant–in this case, Nazism. For the Nazis, Olympism and
Nazism dovetailed so neatly that, in the words of a memorandum from the Propaganda Ministry from October 1934, ‘the Olympic idea is a cultural requirement of National Socialism, which concerns the entire German people'.

Brundage had more mundane and pressing matters to attend to, however, the most urgent of which was raising the $350,000 required to send the team to the Summer Games. According to Gustavus Kirby, the AOC's treasurer, however, the organisation was ‘in a hell of a hole financially'. All the AOC had in the bank by the middle of March 1936 was $9,844, and all of this, according to Kirby, was earmarked. The boycott movement had certainly had its effect on fund-raising, and Brundage referred to how people would turn ‘cold and fishy-eyed' when asked to contribute.

Brundage's solution was to go on the speech trail. He spent weeks lecturing businessmen on the glory of the Olympics, and reminding them that the Games were a great opportunity for America to take a stand against what really lay behind the boycott movement–communism. ‘Shall we allow Communists, in whatever disguise and for whatever specious reasons, to trick any of our 400 athletes into such a course [i.e. non-attendance] for the Summer Games?' Brundage asked. Furthermore, he argued that sport itself would provide an essential bulwark against the threat of communism. To support this notion, he quoted Major J. L. Griffith, the president of the National Collegiate Athletic Association, who maintained that ‘the countries subjected to regimentation are not the athletic nations, and I feel that our sports are a defence against it'. Presumably, Major Griffith thought Germany an unregimented society. ‘Competitive sport', said Griffith, ‘is the antithesis of the Communist principle. They cannot regiment the American people as long as we believe firmly in amateur athletics.' This was just what Brundage wanted to hear, and he even sent the statement out as a press release. Never mind that sport had no place in politics. So long as sport supported Brundage's own politics, then he was happy to break his own mantra. In short, Brundage was a hypocrite.

Brundage's idea was to raise the money through appealing to citizens directly. ‘Truly American is our method of raising the American Olympic fund,' Brundage somewhat predictably claimed.
German-Americans constituted a particularly fertile group, but approaching them had its drawbacks. At a fund-raising dinner held by the German-American Bund at the Yorkville Casino in New York City in June, a hundred protesters gathered outside to voice their anger. The night was foul, driving rain literally damping their demonstration. Nevertheless, as the one thousand attendees arrived, the demonstrators marched up and down in twos, shouting ‘Boycott the Olympics!', ‘Hitler wants war!' and ‘Defend American democracy: boycott the Nazi Olympics!' The attendees obviously viewed the protesters wryly, as some saluted them with a ‘
Heil!
' before going inside for their banquet. At the event, the German vice-consul, Friedhelm Draeger, told the guests that Germany under Hitler was ‘a country united for peace'. The evening raised some $200, so it could hardly have been considered a huge success.

The man who received the $200 on behalf of the Olympic committee was none other than the German-American Dietrich Wortmann. It was Wortmann who in 1933 had vociferously opposed any AAU move to boycott the Games, and at the crucial meeting in New York in December 1935, it was Wortmann's hard lobbying which had helped Brundage secure the necessary votes. There were some who doubted Wortmann's motives, however, and it was openly suggested that he was nothing less than a Nazi. One of his accusers was Charles Ornstein, a Jewish member of the American Olympic Association whom Brundage and Wortmann wanted to expel for his pro-boycott stance. In April, Ornstein told the
New York Times
that the AOC was ‘representative not of the sporting spirit of American tradition, but that it has adopted the color and tactics of Nazi Germany […] Dietrich Wortmann was simply following the pattern of the man to whom he gives his allegiance–Adolph Hitler'.

This was robust criticism. Ornstein may well have been overreacting to his treatment and hurling convenient insults, but there was no doubt that if Wortmann was not a Nazi, then he was immensely sympathetic to the Nazi cause. Back in 1928, Wortmann had helped to found the German-American newspaper the
Deutsche Zeitung
, which was sympathetic to Hitler and hostile to the ‘Jewish Bolsheviks'. The newspaper was circulated to various Turnvereins–German gymnasiums–in and around New York City, of one of which, the New
York Turnverein, Wortmann was a member. After the Olympics, this Turnverein was accused of being a hotbed of Nazism. In 1933, Samuel Dickstein, a congressman from New York, placed Wortmann on a list of ‘smugglers, aliens, agitators, Hitlerites and propagandists' who Dickstein feared were trying to inveigle themselves into American society. It was Wortmann's April 1936 fund-raising letter to German-Americans, however, which attracted the most censure. Written on AOC headed paper, the letter cited the need for ‘the united, moral and financial support of all German-Americans so that American Athletes, after competing at the Olympic Games in Berlin, return as apostles of truth and justice for the promotion of friendship between our great countries'.