Berlin Games (21 page)

Epstein was one of the very few Americans to boycott the Games. She was joined in her decision by three other Jews, Milton Green, Norman Cahners and Herman Neugass. Of these, Green was the
most distinguished–he jointly held the world record of 5.8 seconds in the 45-yard hurdles and had been selected to compete at Randall's Island. Cahners, Green's room-mate at Harvard University, had also been selected, but the two were dissuaded by their rabbi, who told them what was happening in Germany. According to Green, the meeting was a ‘shocker'. ‘He suggested the boycott,' Green recalled, ‘and we talked it over with our families and decided.' Their coach tried to change their minds, but he failed. In this, he was no more successful than the Olympic coach Lawson Robertson, who asked sprinter Herman Neugass to reconsider his boycott. Neugass had decided not to try for Berlin in December 1935, after he heard about that year's Nuremberg Laws. He wrote to the
New Orleans Times-Picayune
, saying that he had been informed by an ‘unimpeachable authority' that the Germans were discriminating against the Jews.

Other Jews around the world boycotted the Games as well. Three female Austrian swimmers, who were members of the Austrian Jewish sports association called ‘Hakoah'(Strength), decided not to go. One of them, Ruth Langer, was only fifteen, yet she was already the Austrian champion in the 100 metre and 400 metre freestyle. Because of their refusal to go to Berlin, the Federation of Austrian Swimming Clubs banned Langer and her two teammates from competing for life, and stripped them of their records ‘due to severe damage of Austrian sports' and ‘gross disrespect for the Olympic spirit'. In Denmark, Abraham Kurland, the winner of the silver medal at Los Angeles for Greco-Roman wrestling, also boycotted the Games. ‘Many people wrote to him and called him up, telling him not to go,' his brother Simon Kurland recalled. ‘My family and I also told him that he shouldn't go. At first, he wanted to, but then he got lots of information about the Jews in Germany. He received letters from Germany, many of which were anonymous. That's when he decided not to go.' In Canada, two Jewish boxers, Yisrael Luftspring and Norman Yack, told the
Toronto Globe
that they would not be trying for Berlin because ‘we would have been very loath to hurt the feelings of our fellow Jews by going to a land that would exterminate them if it could'. Jews had also boycotted the Winter Olympics. Perhaps the most notable was Philippe de Rothschild, who had competed in the bobsleigh at the 1928 St Moritz Games.

 

Saturday, 11 July was as wet in Britain as it was in New York City. There were thunderstorms all over the country, and many boats had been struck by lightning. By the time the final of the 440 yards was due to start at 5.15, the cinders on the track at the White City stadium in West London were not only sodden, but also worn and rutted by the afternoon's previous competitors. Bill Roberts took his place in lane four next to Godfrey Brown in lane five, and Godfrey Rampling in lane six. The eyes of the stadium were on this trio, as they were the best in the country. As he crouched down, however, Roberts knew that if he finished outside the top three places, then he was unlikely to be getting a train ticket to Berlin.

After the starting pistol went off, Brown powered into an early lead, his relaxed running style belying his immense power. Roberts ran close behind him, with Rampling narrowly in third place. Roberts knew that he not only had to beat Brown, but that he also had to stop being beaten by Rampling. At the start of the last 200 metres, Roberts put the pressure on Brown, gradually closing the gap. But Brown was too strong and staved off the assault from the ‘Salford Lad'. The attempt was to prove costly to Roberts, because his pace started to diminish. Rampling saw his chance just a few metres away from the finishing line, and with a supreme effort he swept past Roberts to take second place. Roberts had done enough by finishing third, yet his time of fifty seconds was well short of his personal best. The sogginess of the cinders could be blamed, but so too could Roberts' inexperience. His tactics left something to be desired, but for the time being he could justifiably congratulate himself that he was on his way to Germany to represent his country in the Olympics. Despite his achievement, Roberts' employers would not give him the two weeks off in August. The time therefore had to be regarded as his annual leave–a problem not shared by his fellow relay runners, who were to be Brown, Rampling and Woolf. Nevertheless, as a result of the imminent events in Berlin, the men would share a bond that transcended class barriers and would last until the ends of their lives.

 

The letter that sealed Gretel Bergmann's fate was dated 16 July 1936. There was nothing personal about it, nothing anodyne. It was simply a standard form letter, one issued to thousands of aspiring German
Olympians. It told Bergmann that because of her ‘mediocre performances', she had not been selected to compete in Berlin. An insulting panacea came in the form of an offer of a standing-room ticket for the Games, which Bergmann declined. ‘I read it again and again and again,' Bergmann recalled. ‘And then, instead of tears, a stream of invectives came pouring out of my mouth.' Two years of highs and lows had come to this point. Her dream of competing in order to show the Nazis what a Jew was capable of had come to nothing, her efforts stymied by an Olympic committee conspiring with a despicable regime. Seeking solitude, Bergmann travelled to Baden-Baden and stayed under an assumed name. What was she to do now? There was only one thing she could do, and that was to leave Germany. She made the decision, she said, in less time that it took her to decide what to wear when she got up.

She returned home, and booked an appointment with the American consul-general in Stuttgart, who encouraged her to migrate to the United States. A rich friend of her father who had moved there had promised to sponsor her, and so, just before the Olympic Games started, Bergmann found herself posting a letter asking whether she could take him up on his offer. It would be several weeks before she heard back from him. In the meantime, she had to endure the fact that the mysterious Dora from Ettlingen and Elfriede Kaun, neither of whom were aware of the truth, would be competing instead of her. ‘We were told that Gretel Bergmann was injured,' Kaun recalled, ‘and we were told that her place would be kept open until she was fit enough to join the competition. I was a friend of Gretel's, and so I started writing letters to her, but I never got an answer. I wanted to know what happened, and how she was, but I never heard.' Kaun said she never guessed that the Nazis were lying: ‘We never suspected anything because her place was always kept open.' The Nazis had timed their letter to Bergmann well. By the time the news got out that she was not competing, the American team was already on the high seas. There was no way they would turn round, not for the sake of one Jewish girl.

 

As well as ensuring that as few Jews as possible would appear on their team, Lewald and Diem had been working hard since the beginning of the year to guarantee the success of the Games. One aspect of the coordination they did not need to worry about was the propaganda
for the event, as this had been taken over by Goebbels' Propaganda Ministry in January. This raised eyebrows around the world, not least in the editorial pages of the
New York Times
, which commented wryly that ‘from the Nazi standpoint a man can do 100 meters under 11 seconds in a manner that is beneficial to the State or inimical to the State'. In fact, the German state was exerting such a stranglehold over the GOC that its list of members reads like a Who's Who of the Third Reich; many of them were to find notoriety as the worst disciples of Nazism. The list included the loathsome chief of the Reich Security Head Office, Gruppenfuehrer Reinhard Heydrich, who was later to become Protector of Bohemia and Moravia until he was assassinated by SOE-trained Czech agents in 1942. His former deputy and fellow GOC member, Police General Kurt Daluege, succeeded Heydrich as Protector, and was responsible for the brutal reprisals that followed Heydrich's killing. Daluege was hanged by the Czechs in 1946. Lieutenant General von Reichenau was to earn his reputation as a liquidator of Jews on the Russian front, for which he would have been tried at Nuremberg had he not died in a plane crash in 1942. His fellow army officer, Lieutenant General Keitel, also sat on the committee. It was Keitel who was to issue the infamous ‘Night and Fog' decree in 1941 that enabled the Nazis to execute without trial, and for which Keitel was hanged at Nuremberg.

As the mighty stadium neared completion and the boycott movement died down, Lewald and Diem could start to reassure themselves that the Games were definitely going to take place. A physical manifestation of the coming of the Olympics was the transportation of the massive 30,000-pound bell from Bochum, north of Cologne, to Berlin–a journey of well over 300 miles. The bell, the rim of which was inscribed with ‘
Ich rufe die Jugend der Welt
' (‘I call the Youth of the World'), took several weeks to make the journey to the bell-tower on the Mayfield next to the Olympic Stadium. It was mobbed all the way, cheered by schoolchildren and saluted by SS and SA men. At seven o'clock on the morning of 11 May, the bell was hoisted to the top of its 75-metre home, from where its first peals–pitched in E minor–rang out on 20 May. The procession of the bell also anticipated another piece of theatre that would take place in July–the Olympic torch relay from Olympia to Berlin. This was the idea
of Carl Diem, and for the past year the timetable for the 2000-mile run, which would involve 3,075 runners, had been worked out in great detail.

There was a piece of the Olympic jigsaw that was not fitting into place, however, and that was Pierre de Coubertin. Unlike the bell, and much to the concern of Lewald and Diem, the penniless baron had so far not given the Games of the XIth Olympiad his ringing endorsement. Coubertin was noticeably non-committal about the Games, despite the fact that Lewald wrote him the most oleaginous of letters. During the Winter Games, Lewald told Coubertin that ‘all those who are working for the Olympic Games have spoken of you over and over with so much hearteness [
sic
], thankfulness and respectfulness'. Lewald knew, however, that smarminess would not be enough to woo Coubertin. What Coubertin wanted more than anything else–apart from money–was recognition. In the same letter, Lewald broached a subject that the IOC had discussed on previous occasions–the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to Coubertin. In December, Lewald had told Coubertin that he was asking the Norwegian members of the IOC to have a word with the peace prize's Norwegian awarding committee, and now, in February, he was able to report a small piece of progress.

It was clear to Coubertin that Lewald was going to be the man to deliver the prize. Although he had so far stopped short of asking Coubertin to endorse the Games, there was enough implication in his letter to make Coubertin realise that this was the price of his prize.

The Germans had another reason for wanting Coubertin to win the prize. In 1934 Carl von Ossietzky was nominated for the 1934 peace prize. Ossietzky was an anti-Nazi journalist who had been imprisoned in February 1933, and subsequently locked up in concentration camps in Sonnenburg and at Esterwegen-Papenburg, where he was forced to do heavy labour, despite having suffered a heart attack. Unfortunately,
the nomination for the 1934 prize arrived too late, but when 1936 came and Ossietzky was still incarcerated, it looked likely that he would win the prize for 1935. There was little the Nazis could do about it, but if Lewald, through the IOC, could persuade the awarding committee to present Coubertin with the 1936 award, then the glory of the prize would be reflected on to their Olympics.

By May, Lewald had still not received his endorsement from Coubertin, and so he and Hitler took advantage of Coubertin's impecuniousness and they bribed him. On 25 May, Lewald wrote to Coubertin at his house in Geneva.

It is hard to put a precise modern figure on the two sums, as the two currencies had a different purchasing power. In 1936, however, 10,000 Reichsmarks had the purchasing power of some $350,000 today, although 12,300 Swiss francs had a value equivalent to around $550,000. If one takes the average, the sum being offered to the poverty-stricken Coubertin was around $450,000. To a man who was having to sell his furniture, the sum was too tempting to resist. There can be little doubt that the money was indeed a bribe, otherwise Lewald would not have urged Coubertin to lie to Baillet-Latour, nor would he have insisted that the money was for the ageing baron's personal use. The conspiratorial nature of the offer was enhanced by the fact that Lewald, upon Coubertin's acceptance, was discreetly going
to ask Hjalmar Schacht, the president of the Reichsbank and an old friend of Lewald, to obtain the authority to transfer the money.