Berlin Games (32 page)

Hitler's position may have been unfair, but at least it was honest. Nevertheless, there were some around him who were brave enough to suggest that he should meet the man of the moment, among them Tschammer und Osten, who told Hitler that he should do so ‘in the interest of sport'. Schirach also appealed to Hitler, who snapped back ferociously, telling the Reich Youth Leader that there was no way he was going to be photographed with Owens.

Even if Hitler had not technically snubbed Owens, there were many who felt that the accusation that he had had the ring of truth to it. One of them was Peter Gay, a young Jewish boy who was growing up in Berlin. His father had bought some tickets in 1932 on a visit to Budapest, and the two of them had watched Owens' performance with the usual astonishment. Of the ‘snub', Gay was to claim that it was ‘
morally
true'. ‘The swine who were ruining our lives could not have behaved differently,' he wrote. ‘Whatever did happen, there was no denying that Owens had done his bit to puncture the myth of Aryan superiority.' As many commentators back in the United States agreed with Arthur Daley and Peter Gay–that the accusation concerning the snub
felt
true, and if it wasn't true then it was so close to the truth as to be indistinguishable–the myth was therefore born. For the majority of newspaper readers, there was no point in questioning a story that involved a man who didn't like black people refusing to shake the hand of a black person. After all, refusing to touch black people was the reason for segregation in the Southern states. Nevertheless, endemic racism in American society did little to dampen
the outrage that the German leader had snubbed America's new golden boy.

There were some who saw much hypocrisy in all the brouhaha. Among them was an African-American from New York called Henry A. Slaughter. His letter to the
New York Times
on 8 August was a powerful reminder that all was not well back home.

Ironically, Owens and his fellow African-Americans were being treated better in Germany than they were in the United States. As M. N. Masood, the vice-captain of the Indian hockey team, was to observe, ‘they were members of a coloured race, but no one in Germany seemed to think of it. They were sportsmen, and that was all that was necessary'.

If Hitler wanted to use the Games to promote his own ideology, then there were those who wanted the athletes to use their positions to denigrate Nazism. On the afternoon that Owens won his gold medal in the 100 metres, a J. M. Loraine in Britain decided to write to the new hero of the Games, outlining a way in which the sprinter could draw attention to the iniquities of Hitler's new order.

It was certainly not in Jesse Owens' character to take such a stance. He was too retiring, too modest and unsure of his position to start lambasting the Nazis on the world stage. Unlike Werner Seelenbinder, he was not a political creature. Nevertheless, Owens never got a chance to read the letter, because it was intercepted by the Gestapo at the Charlottenburg Post Office No. 2, the sorting office that served the Olympic village. Had Owens–and indeed the other athletes–known about this, then there would have been a furore. A copy of this letter was sent to the head of the Reich Security Main Office, Reinhard Heydrich, who had asked for the Gestapo to monitor the mail of any medal winners who were coloured. By the end of the Games, the Gestapo must have had to open a separate section to deal with the volume of correspondence sent to Owens.

Other letter writers were more successful in getting their pleas through to the athletes. Dorothy Odam, the sixteen-year-old British high jumper, received a letter at the Friesian House from the inmate of a concentration camp. ‘It was about the atrocities and what was
going on,' she recalled. ‘About how terrible the camps were. I was a bit frightened by it. The writer asked me to show the letter to somebody in England. But imagine being caught going out of Germany with a letter like that.' Odam decided to hand the letter to one of her German chaperones, who took it away and asked Odam not to mention it. ‘I felt that it had nothing to do with me,' she said. ‘I thought it was a thing that I shouldn't have personally with me or take home to England. Who would I have given it to?' Odam suspected that many other athletes received similar letters. Although her letter no doubt ended up in a Gestapo file, it at least made the teenager aware of the real Germany. ‘It did bring in the fact that there was something going on behind all the strutting and the
Heil Hitlers
.'

Odam was right–she was not the only athlete to receive such a letter. Pat Norton remembered how Jeanette Campbell, an Argentine 100 metres freestyler, received a letter from a man from Holland two weeks before the Games started, stating that two of his friends had recently disappeared in Germany. ‘He asked would we rally the women competitors together and demand their release or the women would boycott the opening ceremony,' Norton recalled. ‘She read the letter to us and there was considerable discussion about what we should do. Finally, Jeanette decided it was asking too much of her and decided to let the matter drop. We had heard stories before arriving in Berlin of missing people, but what was speculation was now a reality.'

Sometimes the communications were made verbally. Doris Carter, an Australian high jumper, recalled how some of the girls who worked at the Friesian House feared for their lives. ‘Several charming girls […] whispered to us that they were afraid,' she said. ‘They were quarter Jewish and they had heard several of their Jewish friends had disappeared.' It was not just the young women who spoke of their fears. Both Baroness von Wangenheim and Fräulein Weimbeir, who was the officer in charge of the female guides, mentioned their dislike of the regime. ‘They both said that they really didn't approve of the way things were,' said Carter, ‘but had no option but to go along with it.'

Although she was only fifteen, Iris Cummings was also sensitive to what was going on behind the razzmatazz of the Games. ‘I got a feeling
for the subterranean disapproval of Hitler,' she said. Cummings recalled how her mother and the mother of Marjorie Gestring, the prodigious thirteen-year-old American springboard diver, had made friends with a German woman, who accompanied them to the stadium. ‘This lady was afraid to go,' said Cummings, ‘and asked if she could stand between my mother and Mrs Gestring, because when they [the German spectators] all stood and sang the national anthem and went “
Sieg Heil! Sieg Hiel!
”, she would not salute.' The woman–who was not Jewish, but simply hated the regime–was so afraid that she hid behind the Americans, down under her seat and as low as she could get. ‘At the end of the row there were Gestapo in uniform,' said Cummings, ‘and they noticed who saluted and who didn't.' The woman hid on a number of occasions, and Mrs Cummings and Mrs Gestring helped to conceal her each time. It is unlikely that there were uniformed Gestapo men stationed at the end of each row, but such is the nature of police states that it requires only a minority of the population to be informers in order to make the majority fearful and therefore behave as the regime wishes. Two German spectators who did feel safe were Peter Gay and his father, who were sitting among the Hungarians. ‘It meant that my father and I could simply blend in with our surroundings,' Gay wrote later, ‘so that we did not have to give the Nazi salute when the Fuehrer appeared or a German was awarded a gold medal.'

Cummings also remembered meeting another German who was fearful of the regime. One day, she and Velma Dunn went to a teahouse on the Unter den Linden, where there was a small, all-female orchestra playing. ‘They were playing violins and strings,' said Cummings, ‘and I liked the music. We went there several times. After the first time, I noticed one of the girls, the leader of the orchestra, making eye contact. We spoke to each other.' The girl's name was Irmgard Schnell, and she gave Cummings her address. ‘Before we left, she came to us and made it very clear that she was terrified for her life. It wasn't because she was Jewish, but she was one of those who didn't salute and didn't agree. She was trying to figure out how she was going to survive.' Cummings and Schnell exchanged letters over the next three years until the war came, at which point they stopped. Cummings never knew what happened to Schnell.

 

Not all the sporting action was confined to the Olympic Stadium. The competitors in the modern pentathlon found themselves seeing a lot more of the German countryside than many of the other athletes. Among them was Charles Leonard, who found that he was enjoying the company of his fellow competitors in the week leading up to the Games. ‘Our most pleasant contact so far has been the Belgian team,' he wrote in his diary on 30 July, ‘two of whom sing
Home on the Range
, have a sense of humor and speak passingly good English.' He also noted that the Swedes were ‘a funny lot' who believed that the pentathlon medals were theirs by right, as they had won the event so many times. This was certainly true, as the Swedes had won gold in the modern pentathlon in every Games since 1912. The Dutch were ‘stolid, good fellows,' but the Swiss, Finns and French appeared to keep to themselves. Meanwhile the British were ‘of course sporting chaps'. With a few exceptions, nearly every competitor was a young army officer, and so the men had not only sport in common, but the military as well.

The first event in the pentathlon was the 5,000-metre cross-country riding, which took place on the morning of Sunday, 2 August. The competitors had walked the course just south of the village on the Friday morning, and had spent Saturday having what Leonard called a ‘strategy conference'. As none of the teams had brought their own horses, a draw was held for the forty-two horses that the Germans had supplied. Leonard drew the twelfth horse, a large, blazed-face bay, which he had a mere twenty minutes ‘to get to know' before the competition. Leonard found that the horse was good at jumping, easy to handle, but not particularly fast. Nevertheless, ‘he spoke horse language,' Leonard wrote, ‘
not
German'. The young lieutenant found the course not particularly difficult, with twenty hazards in total, many of which were fences, water jumps and water and ditches combined with fences. The terrain was varied, with a mixture of hills, sand and some swamp, none of which was absurdly tricky. It was more of a race than a cross-country, Leonard realised, albeit only after he had finished in fifteenth position with a time of 9:47. ‘I should have pushed my horse harder on the back stretch, but I jumped cleanly.' The winner was Italy's First Lieutenant Silvano Abba, who completed the course in 9:02.5, and in second came the
favourite, First Lieutenant Gotthardt Handrick from Germany, with a time of 9:09.6. Handrick had been lucky–riding was not his strongest sport, but he had drawn a good, fast horse, which Leonard regarded as probably being the best of the stable. ‘Breaks of the game,' he wrote. There was no suspicion–nor was there any evidence–that the Germans had cheated.

In the fencing the following day, the forty-two competitors all had to fence each other for a five-minute draw or a one-touch bout. It was an exhausting day, as epée fencing makes great demands not only on the physique, but also on the brain. The fencing started outside, but the rain forced the competitors into the grand cupola hall in the House of German Sport at the main Olympic complex. Leonard came tenth, winning twenty-two of his bouts, and had the pleasure of ‘sticking' Handrick, nicking him with a ‘squat shot'. ‘You should have seen his face,' Leonard wrote in a letter back home. Handrick, however, finished second in the fencing, and was beginning to look unbeatable. But Charles Leonard was about to play his strongest hand–the rapid-fire pistol shooting.