Berlin Games (3 page)

Even though the standard of competition was almost abysmal–no world records were set, and the only two nations whose athletes had trained for the events were Great Britain and the United States–the Games were considered a success. The Greeks found a new national hero in the form of Spiridon Louis, a water-carrier who won the marathon in a time of 2:58:50, his efforts fuelled by wine, milk, beer, orange juice and even an Easter egg. When Louis won, the Greeks in the stadium went wild. ‘Here the Olympic Victor was received with full honour; the King rose from his seat and congratulated him most warmly on his success,' reads the official report of the Games. ‘Some of the King's aides-de-camp, and several members of the Committee went so far as to kiss and embrace the victor, who finally was carried in triumph to the retiring room under the vaulted entrance. The scene witnessed then inside the Stadion cannot be easily described, and even foreigners were carried away by the general enthusiasm.'

The closing ceremony was held on 12 April. Over 100,000 packed
into the stadium and massed on the surrounding hills to watch as the athletes received their medals and laurel wreaths. Pigeons with blue-and-white streamers were released, and flower petals were tossed into the air. Spiridon Louis then led the athletes in a lap round the track, his presence once more causing a massive outburst of nationalist fervour. After the lap, King George closed the ceremony with the portentous words: ‘I proclaim the ending of the first Olympiad.' Later, King George declared that the Games should be held in Greece for all time. This went against the wishes of Coubertin, who had found himself almost as a bystander during the past week. Coubertin wished to see the Games held in a different city every four years, thus encouraging internationalism. Many of the athletes were not in agreement, however; even most of the American athletes signed a petition to the Crown Prince of Greece asking for the Games to be held in Athens in perpetuity.

Nevertheless, Coubertin got his way. Over the next few decades the Olympics were held in Paris in 1900, St Louis in 1904, London in 1908 and, Stockholm in 1912; there was also an ‘Intercalated Games' in Athens in 1906. The Paris and St Louis Olympics had been considered failures, overshadowed by massive international exhibitions held concurrently in their host cities. The Athens Games of 1906 were a successful attempt to reinvigorate the Games, but it was not until the 1912 Games that the Olympics became recognisable in the form they maintain today. For the first time athletes came from all five continents, thus ensuring that the symbolism of the five Olympic rings was truly representative. The ceremonies and rituals also became more elaborate, and the establishment of national Olympic committees ensured a high level of competition.

By the early 1930s, however, the ageing baron in Lausanne was not as happy as he should have been. After standing down from the presidency of the IOC after the 1924 Paris Games, Coubertin watched as the Olympic movement swelled and outgrew its founder. He grew increasingly bitter, partly because he felt he had not received the international recognition that he deserved, and also because he was worried about his dwindling financial resources. In the late summer of 1934 he was to be found in a positively suicidal mood. ‘He seemed in excellent health, though he still pronounced that he wished soon to
die,' wrote Sigfrid Edstrøm, the vice-president of the IOC, to Baillet-Latour. ‘He said that he had nothing to live for. His wife is very ill.' Coubertin also told Edstrøm in confidence that ‘he had lost all his money', and that he would have to sell the furniture and paintings that his wife had left in the Olympic museum, items that the couple had wished to leave to the city of Lausanne. It was unsurprising, therefore, that Edstrøm found Coubertin ‘difficult to handle'.

One of Lewald's and Diem's first actions upon securing the Olympics for Berlin was to head to the United States for the Los Angeles Olympics of 1932. The two men, along with the million other visitors to California, were impressed. Despite the depression, the Californian Treasury Department had managed to donate $1 million (nearly $11 million in 2005), and a special bond raised $1.5 million (over $16 million in 2005), all of which ensured that Los Angeles was able to hold a glittering Games. A massive stadium meant that 104,000 could watch the athletes competing under–for the first time–the Olympic flame. This new piece of ritual was invented by Hollywood, and it had no roots in ancient Greek culture. One element that did have its roots in Olympism, albeit of the modern variety, was the releasing of pigeons, which had been a feature of the 1896 Games. The most important addition to the Olympic pageant, however, at least from the point of view of anybody who organises Olympic Games, was the Los Angelenos' building of an Olympic village. Previously, athletes had been housed in cheap hotels or had had to stay with friends, but the provision of purpose-built cottages and halls meant that the athletes had their first chance to mingle ‘after hours'.

Lewald and Diem spent their time furiously making notes. Diem went so far as to take photographs of workshops, and even noted the culinary preferences of each participating country. With their country in an even worse financial state than the United States, the two men knew they would be pushed to duplicate, let alone better, the tenth Olympiad. Their mood was not improved by the poor showing Germany made in the medals table, lagging in ninth place with a mere three gold medals, twelve silver and five bronze. The Americans were the victors by a long chalk, with a total of 103 medals, forty-one of which were gold. The Italians and the French were second and third respectively, and the British came eighth, with a total
of sixteen medals, four of which, being gold, secured them a place above Germany.

Germany's showing caused much upset back home. The most virulent reaction came in the pages of
Der Angriff
(The Attack), the Nazi newspaper. A fortnight after the German team returned from Los Angeles, the newspaper commented that members of the German Olympic Committee were ‘traitors' for allowing German athletes to compete against Jews and ‘niggers'. For the time being, Lewald and Diem were able to dismiss such rantings as the outpourings of extremists, but they would soon find themselves having to curry favour from those who shared such execrable views.

In the meantime, they had work to do. On 11 November 1932, the German Olympic Committee met to found the Organising Committee, and it was swiftly agreed that Lewald should become its chairman. The Olympic Committee also pondered the adoption of a symbol for the Games, and after some discussion Lewald's idea of a bell was chosen. On 24 January the following year, the Organising Committee held its first meeting at the Berlin Town Hall. There, Lewald estimated that some four thousand athletes and one thousand team leaders and trainers would attend the Games–an unprecedented number. He also advocated that the existing stadium should have its capacity increased to around 80,000–85,000. The money for all this, he said, would come from the sale of tickets, which would raise some 3 million Reichsmarks ($712,589–$10,000,000 in 2005). A million Reichsmarks would be raised by the addition of a small levy on postage stamps, and an unspecified amount would be earned from the payment by spectators at sporting events of an ‘Olympic penny'. The economics minister, Dr Hjalmar Schacht, had also given his blessing to a lottery that would run for three years.

Six days after Lewald's meeting, however, the entire face of Germany changed: the Nazis came to power. Since the election of September 1930, Hitler's path to power had been steady but not quite sure. In 1932 he stood against Hindenburg in the presidential election, and although he came second, he won nearly 37 per cent of the vote. In the Reichstag election of July that same year, the Nazis won 230 seats, thus becoming the largest party in parliament. Franz von Papen, the beleaguered Chancellor, soon lost a no-confidence vote, and a further election was
called for November. Frantic efforts by Papen to secure Nazi support for his Centre Party failed, and although the Nazis lost seats in the November election, they remained the largest party. Papen was fired by Hindenburg and was replaced by General Kurt von Schleicher, who had promised he could form a majority government without the Nazis. Unsurprisingly, his attempt failed, and Hindenburg reluctantly called upon Hitler to assume the chancellorship. On the morning of 30 January 1933, Hitler was sworn in.

Hitler's elevation represented a severe threat to the efforts of the Organising Committee. The previous year, Hitler had declared that the Olympics was ‘an invention of Jews and Freemasons' and ‘could not possibly be put on in a Reich ruled by National Socialists'. Lewald and Diem now feared that the Olympics in Germany might be cancelled for a second time, not through external pressure, but through inimical forces within. The Organising Committee had another problem, however, which no amount of smooth talking to the Nazis by Lewald would be able to banish: Lewald's paternal grandmother had been a Jew. Although his father had converted to Christianity at the age of seventeen–some 110 years earlier–Lewald knew that as far as the Nazis were concerned he was still a de facto Jew. What made matters worse was that Diem's wife, Liselott, also had Jewish forebears, an association that made some Nazis describe Diem as a ‘white Jew'.

Lewald was canny enough to have anticipated the difficulty of his and Diem's position in the event of the Nazis coming to power. The Organising Committee was founded as a not-for-profit private society, which meant that if the Nazis respected the German legal system, they would not be able to oust Lewald for being a Jew. Lewald's influence and range of contacts meant that he was able to register the company in far less than the normal six weeks. In fact, the Organising Committee of the 1936 Olympics was registered in just one hour.

In March, Lewald met the Chancellor and his new Minister for Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda, Josef Goebbels. Although Goebbels, who showed little interest in sport, saw the advantages of the Olympics as a showcase for the regime, Hitler remained unconvinced. According to the official Olympic Report, however, Lewald appeared to have impressed Hitler to the extent that his opinion of the previous
year was turned round: ‘The Games, he [Hitler] asserted, would contribute substantially towards furthering understanding among the nations of the world and would promote the development of sport among the German youth, this being in his opinion of vast importance to the welfare of the nation.' Naturally, the report is anodyne, but with Lewald securing an official public statement from Hitler pledging his support for the Games, there is little doubt that Hitler was at least paying lip-service to them. What the report does not mention is the question of Lewald's Jewishness. The Nazis wanted Lewald to relinquish his post, but Baillet-Latour would not have it. The Nazis relented, and allowed him to stay, with the proviso that he step down from the German Olympic Committee as soon as the Games were finished. In effect, Lewald would be nothing more than a titular head of the Organising Committee, while the bulk of the work would be carried out by Diem, who would in turn report to the government through the figure of Hans von Tschammer und Osten, the Reich's sports minister, one of Hitler's oldest allies. Furthermore, both Diem and Lewald had to relinquish their posts at the Deutsche Hochschule fuer Leibesuebungen, the sports university they had established.

Nevertheless, on 1 April Lewald felt sufficiently confident to write a letter soothing the disquiet any of his fellow IOC members may have felt about the new regime:

Unsurprisingly, Lewald did not mention his Faustian pact with his new rulers. It would be the first of many times that Lewald would mislead the Olympic movement, mendacities all the more shocking coming from a man whose career had been threatened by the regime
for reasons of race.

Lewald's letter did not work. The IOC remained troubled by what it heard coming from Germany. With each week, its members, along with the rest of the world, heard more and more stories concerning prejudice against Jewish sportsmen and women. One of them was Brigadier General E. Charles Sherrill, one of three American members of the IOC. Like many, Sherrill was appalled by the situation in Germany, and wrote to the American Jewish Congress, promising them that he would ‘stoutly maintain the American principle that all citizens are equal under all laws'. The IOC was also concerned about the stranglehold the Nazis were already starting to exert on the Games. On 5 May Baillet-Latour wrote to Lewald, von Halt and the Duke of Mecklenburg-Schwerin, the third German member of the IOC, warning them that measures ‘taken against certain athletes have created a hostile movement of opinion in the sporting world overseas and in international federations, against the celebration in Berlin of the XIth Olympiad'. Baillet-Latour laid down the Olympic law firmly, insisting that Hitler should be made to realise that the Games were the IOC's and not his. If Hitler did not offer a written guarantee saying that he would leave the Games alone, then Berlin would have to withdraw as the host city. He then invited the three men to attend the next IOC congress in Vienna in June to explain their position.

An incensed von Halt replied on 16 May, claiming that he understood Baillet-Latour's worries, but that he did not understand the content of his letters, fearing that the IOC president had been influenced by biased newspapers. He did not deny, however, that discrimination had taken place.