Berlin Games (31 page)

The United States was one of the last teams to enter the stadium. ‘We were a total disgrace,' recalled Joanna de Tuscan. ‘About thirty or forty non-members of the team, fat, with cigarette ashes on their clothes, marched at the head of the team.' Marty Glickman felt that the word ‘marching' was inappropriate to describe how the Americans proceeded. ‘American athletes don't march very well,' he wrote. ‘We kind of moved in our usual loose-gaited walk.' At the team's head was Avery Brundage, who was neither fat nor a smoker, and was one of the few who really did march. Brundage would have been especially proud that day, not just because he had managed to get the team to Berlin, but also because he had just achieved one of his greatest ambitions–he had been made a member of the IOC. Two days earlier, at the thirty-fifth session of the IOC, Ernest Lee Jahncke was expelled by a vote of 49 to 0. Although William May Garland did not vote, he expressed his disapproval of Jahncke. General Sherrill also did not vote, because he had died on 25 June. There was no doubt, however, as to which of the two members Brundage had replaced. The minutes of the meeting state emphatically that Brundage had been elected by a unanimous vote ‘
en replacement de M. Lee Jahncke
'. Finally, after years of battle, Brundage had got his prize.

As the Americans marched past Hitler, they removed their boaters and clutched them to their hearts. Whereas other flags were dipped in honour of the Fuehrer, the Stars and Stripes remained resolutely aloft, which caused a murmur of discontent around the stadium. Marty Glickman recalled the moment when the team passed Hitler. ‘We looked up at the box where he was flanked by Goering and Goebbels and Hess and Himmler and the rest of the Nazi hierarchy,' he wrote. ‘And you could hear the comment run through our crowd as we were walking in, “Hey, he looks like Charlie Chaplin”. And indeed he did.'

Others were more respectful of Hitler, some to the extent that they regarded him almost as a god. The South African Robey Leibbrandt was probably more fanatical in his regard for the man than any German. ‘I looked straight at him,' he recalled. ‘Suddenly I was seized by a strange sensation. I still don't know if it was his humble uniform or his magnetic personality that fascinated me, but it was as if I was taken over by a hypnotic force. I stopped hearing the march music and marched on mechanically.' Leibbrandt was leading the team in, and instead of shouting his commands in English, as had been agreed, he did so in Afrikaans. The Nazi-loving Leibbrandt had a theory as to why. ‘At the sight of Hitler the German-Irish blood pumped turbulently through my Afrikaner heart and gave the orders in my mother tongue. Perhaps I wanted to impress the Fuehrer. I wanted to tell him in the language of General de Wet [a notable Boer leader who had died in 1922] that the descendants of a heroic people were marching in front of him. I knew that Adolf Hitler held General de Wet and the Boer people in very high esteem.'

The last team to enter the stadium was that of Germany. Predictably, and reasonably enough, the spectators leaped to their feet and saluted the team, immaculately dressed all in white, and wearing yachting caps. Once again, ‘Deutschland über Alles' and the Horst Wessel Song were belted out. As the athletes passed Hitler's box, their salutes were performed immaculately, even by Werner Seelenbinder. He knew he had to be patient, but it still pained him to have to raise his right arm. His moment of protest would soon come.

At five o'clock, the words of Coubertin were broadcast around the stadium. Claiming he was too ill to make the trip to Berlin, he had instead made a recording in French. ‘The important thing at the Olympic Games is not to win, but to take part, just as the important thing in life is not to conquer, but to struggle well.' This was hardly a sentiment that Hitler would have agreed with, but then the dictator would not have cared. The recording represented a few seconds of lip-service to the Olympic ideal, spoken by a frail old man who had been bought up by the Nazis. Besides, as soon as the recording had finished, Lewald stepped up to a rostrum erected on the side of track, and started to make a speech that was to last twenty agonising minutes. The rostrum was decorated with a vast German eagle clutching the
Olympic rings. The symbolism could not have been clearer–the Olympic movement had fallen prey to Nazism, its rings helpless under the eagle's talons.

While the crowd fidgeted, Lewald pompously droned on about the nobility of the Olympic movement. This was his moment, and he was going to make it last as long as possible, even if it meant that he overran the timetable. Lewald also spoke about peace.

Quite when Hitler had re-emphasised the need for such an ideal was unclear, but Lewald was doubtless sincere. Despite the pacts he had made, the underhand dealings he had indulged in, Lewald was a believer in Olympism. He really did believe that it was a panacea for mankind, and if he had to transgress morally in order to impose what he saw as a morally perfect order, then so be it. Such an attitude, of course, was identical to that of Hitler, whose turn it now was to speak. For once, he was brief. ‘I announce as opened the Games of Berlin, celebrating the eleventh Olympiad of the modern era.'

The Olympic flag was then hoisted, and for many the most spectacular part of the ceremony took place–20,000 pigeons were released into the air. There was, however, a comic side to what should have been an uplifting spectacle. Just after the birds took flight, a terrific artillery barrage rang out, frightening the birds and causing them to deposit guano all over the athletes. ‘Those pigeons circled right overhead and dropped on us,' said Lou Zamperini, ‘and you could hear it falling on our straw hats, splat, splat. Everybody tried to stand at attention, but it was pretty hard. The poor girls got it in their hair.' The Americans were obviously unlucky, for no members of the British team were hit. As the pigeons circled and left the stadium, the orchestra, conducted by Richard Strauss, played the ‘Olympic Hymn', the music which Strauss had specially composed for the German Olympic Committee in December 1934 in his home in Garmisch. Strauss was not proud of his collaboration with the Nazis.
‘I while away the dull days of Advent with the composition of an Olympic hymn,' he wrote to his friend, the Austrian-Jewish librettist Stefan Zweig. ‘Yes, the devil finds work for idle hands.' Neither was it just the Nazis whom Strauss loathed. ‘This common lot,' he wrote to Zweig. ‘I, of all people, who hate and despise sport!' Strauss's association with the Nazis would forever taint his reputation, but many maintain that his behaviour was simply a means of ensuring the safety of his daughter-in-law, Alice, who was Jewish.

As the last notes of the hymn faded, a solitary figure appeared at the eastern entrance to the stadium. Dressed in a white vest and white running shorts, the figure was the epitome of Germanic manhood–tall and muscular. In his right hand he held a piece of Krupp steel, out of which blazed the Olympic flame. The athlete was a middle-distance runner called Fritz Schilgen, who was the 3,075th person to have carried the torch the 3,075 kilometres from Olympia, where it was lit on the morning of 20 July. The rays of the sun had lit the flame, their heat focused by a glass on to the torch. An extra element of ritualism was added by the presence of twelve Greek girls, all dressed in short athletic skirts–vestal virgins guarding the fire of Zeus. A hymn was chanted, and musicians played on ancient instruments. It was a moment of pure theatre, all of which was watched by a heaving throng of Greeks, who cheered on a local runner, Constantine Condylis, who was to take the torch for the first kilometre. Behind him travelled a car laden with spare torches and runners in case of any accidents.

Also motoring along was Leni Riefenstahl, the German film-maker who had been commissioned to make a film of the Olympics. A former actress, Riefenstahl had famously directed and produced a film of the Sixth Nuremberg Nazi Party Congress. Called
Triumph of the Will
, the film was seen as a homage to both Hitler and the Nazi movement, featuring the Fuehrer and his massed hordes in strikingly composed shots, set to stirring martial music. Riefenstahl was therefore the obvious choice to film the Games. When she was approached by Carl Diem from the Olympic Committee, however, Riefenstahl had her reservations about whether the project was feasible. ‘I had sworn to myself that I would never make another documentary,' Riefenstahl recalled. ‘ “Impossible,” I said. But Diem persisted.' The director eventually gave in, realising that the film had great potential. ‘In my
mind's eye, I could see the ancient ruins of the classical Olympic sites slowly emerging from patches of fog and the Greek temples and sculptures drifting by […]' Riefenstahl signed a contract, and soon found herself immersed in innumerable technical and bureaucratic difficulties. ‘We had to struggle against a mountain of red tape, months before the Games even began. The main issue was the location of the cameras. Actually, any camera inside the stadium was disruptive. I had to muster a lot of patience and self-control not to give up in my fights with the officials.'

In Greece, Riefenstahl found that the picture she had in her mind's eye was at odds with the reality. The scruffy Condylis in his vest and shorts did not typify the noble figure of antiquity she desired. Furthermore, the crowds got in the way of her cameras, and her attempt to follow the progress of the torch was thwarted by local officials. There was only one solution. Riefenstahl created her own idealised version of the truth and filmed her own beginning to the torch run, using the naked figure of the fourth runner, who was the handsome nineteen-year-old son of Russian émigrés. The resulting footage, while undoubtedly beautiful, is complete myth. No matter–for Riefenstahl, and indeed for the Nazis, the purpose of the film was to make explicit the supposed link between Germany and Ancient Greece. The Reich was not only the present home of the Olympics, but the true repository for all the virtues of the Ancient Greeks. As Lewald had said in his speech in a typical piece of Nazi cod history, the Olympic torch created ‘a real and spiritual bond between our German fatherland and the sacred places of Greece founded nearly 4,000 years ago by Nordic immigrants'.

Riefenstahl also glossed over the effect the torch had on the countries it passed through, most markedly in Austria, where it became a symbol of controversy. The torch arrived in Vienna in the early evening of 29 July, where it was joyfully greeted by 10,000 Austrian Nazis, who welcomed it with shouts of ‘
Heil Hitler!
' and, predictably, the Horst Wessel Song. The Nazis also demonstrated against the Jewish members of the Austrian Olympic team, which had gathered to see the torch. They shouted ‘Perish Judah!', and as matters threatened to get violent, the police made over five hundred arrests. Such events made a mockery of Coubertin's proclamation to the torch
runners, that through the run ‘…there will be established the vigorous and well-considered Peace appropriate to a sporting epoch of high ambition and strong will'.

The torch reached Germany at the Czech border at 11.45 on the morning of 31 July, and was greeted by some fifty thousand Germans. Some thirty hours and thirty minutes later, it arrived in the Olympic Stadium, which fell into a hush as Fritz Schilgen made his way around the southern half of the track, passing in front of Hitler's box. He then ran up the steps towards the Marathon Gate, and paused before he reached the brazier. The crowd remained silent until finally Schilgen lifted up the torch, igniting the flame. Once again, the stadium filled with the huge roar of 100,000 cheers. With the arrival of the flame, it felt as though the Games had finally begun. There was one more piece of ritual however–the taking of the Olympic oath. This was performed by Rudolf Ismayr, a weightlifter who had won gold at the 1932 Games. Gripping a flag, Ismayr declaimed the oath loudly and clearly. ‘We swear that we will take part in the Olympic Games in loyal competition, respecting the regulations which govern them and desirous of participating in the true spirit of sportsmanship for the honour of our country and the glory of sport.' The only mistake Ismayr made was that he clutched the wrong flag. Instead of holding on to the Olympic flag, he instead held a swastika. It was a small mistake, but a telling one.

T
HE FIRST ROUND
of the 100 metres heats started at 10.30 the following morning. There were twelve heats in total, and Jesse Owens had the misfortune to be drawn in the last one, which was due to be run just before noon. With the second round of heats starting at three o'clock, Owens would have little time to take the forty-five-minute bus ride back to the village, eat his lunch and then return to the stadium. Owens sat in the warmth of the dressing room–there was no point in exposing himself to the somewhat autumnal conditions outside. There was a chilly wind blowing from the north-west, making the air feel cooler than its actual 18 degrees. While he waited, his coach, Larry Snyder, warned him about what reaction he might expect from the crowd. ‘Don't let anything from the stands upset you,' said Snyder. ‘Ignore the insults and you'll be all right.'

Snyder's hunch could not have been more wrong. When Owens entered the stadium, he was the subject of much good-natured curiosity. Although the Germans had had weeks of derogatory articles about
der Neger
forced on them by the Nazi press, they were fascinated by this man, who had performed astonishing feats on the other side of the world. After all, Owens was, in the words of one observer, ‘a charming creature, courteous and modest, and entirely unspoilt by the fact that he is already the most-discussed athlete in Berlin'. While Owens waited for his heat, he chatted with Germany's mighty Erich Borchmeyer, who would be a serious rival for the gold. Borchmeyer reminded Owens that the two men had once met, in Los Angeles in 1932, when they had run the 100 yards in the Coliseum. Owens had won the race, and Borchmeyer, in a display of respect, had asked Owens for a signed photograph. ‘I still have that photo,' the German told Owens. ‘I always keep it. One day
I shall show my children.' Unfortunately, the men could not talk for much longer, as Borchmeyer's English was weak, and Owens' German was non-existent.

Just before 11.55, the athletes went to their marks. They got set, and then they were off. With a field of five men, it was an easy race for the American, and he breasted the tape in a time of 10.3, which equalled the world and Olympic record. Sasaki of Japan came second, a full seven-tenths of a second behind Owens, or some 7 metres. If Owens had been a 1,500 metres runner, then his margin of victory would have been just over 100 metres. As soon as the race was over, Owens hurried back to the Olympic village and grabbed a rushed lunch, returning just in time for the second round of heats. By three o'clock, the weather had worsened, and that morning's tail wind of some 6 kilometres per hour had increased to just over 8 kilometres per hour.

Owens walked to the start of lane two and removed his tracksuit. He tucked his vest into his shorts, partially obscuring the large black ‘733' stuck to the front of his vest. And then the crowd began to shout. It was a shout he had heard in Hamburg, and now he was hearing it again. Far from being racially abused, the African-American was being lionised. ‘Yess-say! Yess-say! Yess-say! Ovens! Ovens! Ovens!' ‘Ovens' placed his hands on his hips, and nervously transferred his weight from one foot to another, looking down the lane to the finishing tape. The competition to his right was hardly awesome, but Owens knew there were no certainties. A trip, a stumble, a pulled muscle, a late start–all might see him spend the rest of the afternoon back at the Olympic village, imagining the headlines on the sports pages around the world the following day.

The athletes went to their marks. Owens breathed out calmly. The starting pistol fired. Owens made a good start, but it was no better than that made by the Japanese Yoshioka, who was sporting a white headband. The two men ran abreast for the first 30 metres, and it looked as though Owens would be pushed all the way to the tape. But then something extraordinary happened, something that very few of the 100,000 spectators had ever seen in the flesh. It looked as if an invisible force suddenly pulled Owens ahead of the pack. There was no sign of any particular effort, no grimacing, no wild exertions, just
an increase in speed that seemed magical. Owens reached the line in a new world and Olympic record of 10.2 seconds. He was going so fast by the end of the race that he nearly plunged into a camera pit some 65 metres beyond the finishing line. It was only his quick reactions which made him step aside and avoid a catastrophe. The crowd loved his performance, and once more chanted his name.

The only people who were fuming were the Nazis, who were shocked not so much by Owens' success–after all, wasn't he an animal, not a human being?–but by the crowd's reaction to him. So far, the German people had cheered on not only the French, but now a ‘
Neger
' as well. The Games were not going exactly to plan. That afternoon, however, saw some Nazi face being saved as Germany won two gold medals. Tilly Fleischer won the women's javelin with a new Olympic record of 45.18 metres, and Hans Woellke projected his shot 16.20 metres, which broke the Olympic record by 20 centimetres. In the 10,000 metres final held at 5.30, Aryan ‘superiority' was again confirmed by the Finnish triumvirate of Ilmari Salminen, Arvo Askola and Volmar Iso-Hollo, who took gold, silver and bronze respectively. The Nazis were thrilled by these victories, and in the excitement Tschammer und Osten summoned the victors to Hitler's box so the Fuehrer could congratulate them personally.

While the Aryans were receiving Hitler's best wishes, the final of the high jump was taking place. Over the course of the day, nine competitors had been selected to jump in the final, all of whom had cleared 1.94 metres. The two favourites were African-Americans Cornelius ‘Corny' Johnson and Owens' old friend David Albritton, both of whom had set an unofficial new world record back on 12 July of 2.07 metres. As well as facing their fellow American, Delos Thurber, Johnson and Albritton were up against Kotkas and Kalima from Finland and Weinkoetz from Germany. Three Japanese had also made the finals. Of these seven men, Kotkas, the European champion, represented the biggest danger to Albritton and Johnson. A giant and muscular blond, he looked so heavy it was hard to imagine him attaining any great height. Nevertheless, his enormously powerful legs were able to lift him well within striking distance of the two African-Americans. Albritton was nursing an injured ankle, however, so it looked as if Johnson was going to steal the gold.

The difference in the jumpers' composure and styles was enormous. While the other athletes received intensive rub-downs and pep talks from their trainers, Albritton and Johnson lay or sat back on the grass contentedly, looking for all the world as if they were lazily waiting for a couple of women to unpack a picnic. With the bar set at 1.90, none of the nine had any trouble in clearing it, with both Johnson and Albritton doing so in their tracksuits. Of the two men, Albritton had the more graceful style. One of the first to use the straddle technique, he would approach the bar from the left, and launch himself off his right foot to roll over the bar. Johnson, however, used his immense power and height–he was 6 foot 5 inches–to more or less hurdle it.

Weinkoetz, Kalima and two of the Japanese tipped the bar at 1.97. So too did Albritton at his first attempt; he then removed his tracksuit for his second attempt, at which he was successful. Kotkas, Thurber and Johnson cleared the bar on their first attempts, with Johnson resolutely–perhaps cockily–still in his tracksuit. At 2.00 metres, Yata from Japan went out, with both Kotkas and Albritton scraping through on their third attempts. Thurber managed to get over on his second, although at 2.03 he went out, as did Kotkas and Albritton, who nudged the bar with his groin on his final try. Johnson had no problems, however, although by now he had finally removed his bulky tracksuit to sail over on his first attempt. Johnson had therefore won gold, and over the loudspeaker system he could hear the words ‘
Champion Olympique Protocolaire
'. The bar was now set for a world-record-busting height of 2.08, but with the light fading and a gentle rain starting to fall, he was unable to clear it. Nevertheless, 2.03 represented a new Olympic record. For the United States, the high jump had been a great success, as they had taken gold, silver and bronze.

Had Cornelius Johnson been wanting to meet the Patron of the Games, however, then he was to be disappointed, as Hitler had left after his congratulatory session with the Finns and the Germans and before the high jump victory ceremony. The Chancellery later maintained that Hitler had to leave both because he had an appointment and also because he did not wish to cause a traffic snarl-up if he left later. Others claimed it was because Hitler had no wish to find himself congratulating a ‘
Neger
'. Many, such as Arthur Daley of the
New York
Times
, fancied the latter theory. ‘The fact remains that his abrupt departure after reviewing virtually the entire afternoon program caused the wagging of many tongues,' he wrote. ‘Press box interpreters of this step chose to put two and two together and arrive at the figure of four.' It is impossible now to know the truth, but what is certain is that if Hitler directly snubbed anybody during the Games, then it was Cornelius Johnson and not Jesse Owens. It was not as if Johnson particularly cared, however, ‘There's nothing in the program stating that we winners are to be received by him,' he said. ‘I'm not kicking.' The following morning, Hitler found himself being taken to task by Baillet-Latour, who insisted that as the German leader would be unable to congratulate all the athletes, then it would be less discriminatory if he congratulated none at all. With a few exceptions, it was a request to which Hitler agreed.

At 3.30 the following afternoon, Jesse Owens stood at the start of lane six for the first of the two heats for the semi-finals. The fastest three athletes from each race would go through to the final. Owens looked down at the track. It was soggy and heavy from the two rain showers that had passed over the stadium at lunchtime. Earlier, he had found that his world record had been disallowed–the tail wind had been too strong. Judging by the quality of the track, there was little chance he was going to threaten the record today. Owens jogged gently on the spot, the waistband of his shorts brought up high, revealing his long legs, which Leni Riefenstahl's camera caressed. The secret behind Owens' speed lay in the fact that his body was perfectly proportioned–there was not one single flaw in its constituency. Whereas other athletes may have had longer and larger limbs, Owens' entire form was sculpture-perfect, possessing a harmony that enabled his body to work so brilliantly. It was this quality which gave Owens' running style that sense of magic. ‘He was', said Lou Zamperini, ‘athletic perfection personified.'

Owens' start that afternoon was good, but not great. Against him was his fellow American, Frank Wykoff, and Strandberg of Sweden, both of whom were strong, and were proving so as they sprinted up to the 30-metre mark, at which point Owens was running third, perhaps even fourth. It took Owens another fifteen strides to rectify the situation, and at 60 metres he was ahead. When he was just under
10 metres from the finish, Owens snapped a quick look to his left. There was no one there. Just under a second later he had broken the tape in a time of 10.4 seconds, which for him was comparatively slow. Wykoff and Strandberg finished second and third, both of them one tenth of a second behind Owens. In the other semi-final, Owens' fellow African-American Ralph Metcalfe beat Martinus Osendarp of Holland and Erich Borchmeyer in a time of 10.5 seconds.

Just under an hour and a half later, Jesse Owens had won his first gold medal. Ralph Metcalfe, who had so nearly beaten him, was second, and in third place came an ecstatic Martin Osendarp, who had just beaten Borchmeyer. Although the crowd–and indeed Hitler–had wanted the home-grown Borchmeyer to win, Owens' victory was a popular one. Nevertheless, Hitler, mindful of Baillet-Latour's words the previous evening, did not congratulate Owens, which started the apocryphal tale that he had snubbed the athlete. Owens was later to claim, however, that he and Hitler waved at each other, a claim supported by John Woodruff, the gold medal winner in the 800 metres. ‘I do recall seeing Jesse while still on the track,' said Woodruff, ‘waving and exchanging salutes with Hitler in his box.' Curiously, this friendliness between Hitler and Owens was spotted by nobody else that day, and the story appears to be apocryphal.

There is no doubt that Hitler was far from delighted with Owens' victory. Domnitsa Lanitis recalled sitting near the dictator when Owens won. ‘He was annoyed when the Negro was winning,' she said. ‘I saw him annoyed. He was furious with Jesse Owens.' Baldur von Schirach, the Reich Youth Leader, witnessed a similar reaction while he was sitting with Hitler in his box. ‘ “The Americans should be ashamed of themselves, letting negroes win their medals for them. I shall not shake hands with this negro.” ' Albert Speer's memoirs confirm this reaction. ‘He was highly annoyed by the series of triumphs by the marvellous coloured American runner, Jesse Owens,' Speer wrote. ‘People whose antecedents came from the jungle were primitive, Hitler said with a shrug; their physiques were stronger than those of civilised whites. They represented unfair competition and hence must be excluded from future games.'

In truth, Hitler was able to hide behind Baillet-Latour's edict. It let him off the hook. There would be no photographs of a humiliated
Hitler greeting a black man, displaying a smile the world knew to be false. Had Baillet-Latour not insisted that Hitler was not to congratulate the victorious athletes, then his refusal would indeed have been a snub. In order to clarify Hitler's position, the Chancellery released a statement the following day.