Berlin Games (46 page)

A crowd of 20,000 Germans and just fifty Indians had assembled in the newly built hockey stadium. The day was humid and sticky, conditions that suited the Indians better than the Germans. Nevertheless, to Chand the home team appeared very confident, which created more anxiety in the Indians. Chand was wrong–the German team was anything but confident. ‘As the Indians finished off their opponents effortlessly we suffered a noticeable lack of faith in our own ability,' Alfred Gerdes recalled. ‘This atmosphere carried over to the team itself. This was deeply regrettable, for only a self-confident team is in a position to surpass itself.' When the whistle blew, both teams were somewhat shaky, and the play was scrappy and uneven.

‘India shook off her nervousness first,' Masood recalled. The team started making short and effective passes, which rattled the Germans, who decided to adopt the same tactic. Throughout the tournament, they had played with their usual ‘hit hard and far' tactic, which had served them well, their results being almost as good as India's during the Games. It was a mystery to the Indians why the Germans should suddenly start playing in a style to which they were unaccustomed. The switch seemed to work, however, and the Germans seemed
equally matched with their opponents, wowing the crowd with their undercuts and lifts, while the Indians drew much applause with their brilliant half-volleys and sensational long shots. By the interval the game was anybody's, as the Indians were leading only 1–0.

In the second half, the Germans collapsed. They were simply unable to keep up with the Indians' astonishing energy and skill. ‘With unbelievable variety this wonder team carried out attack upon attack with unprecedented energy,' wrote Gerdes. ‘The forwards were to be found at the front and at the back and fought for every ball with full commitment. It could not possibly go well for our team in its current state if the Indians were able to maintain this tempo.' Unfortunately for the Germans, they were able to maintain it. Soon, the Indians had scored three more goals, and a savage defeat looked likely. Some little German face was saved when the team scored a goal, but it was to be the only goal scored against India in the Olympics that year. Before the final whistle, the visitors managed another four goals, bringing the score to a humiliating 8–1. The Germans felt devastated, as Alfred Gerdes recalled. ‘For five weeks nothing but sport–and on top of this the vast pressure of the Olympic Games–had left our team, without our really being aware of it, tired, worn down and having had enough of sport.'

 

The hockey players were not the only Germans who had had enough. Even on 8 August, Goebbels was moaning in his diary, ‘Today the Olympics have been going on for a week. Hopefully they will end soon.' The Games finally did end on the evening of Sunday 16th with a closing ceremony held in the early evening. The event was described by the propaganda minister as being ‘rather dry'. ‘Very protocol driven,' he wrote. ‘This must be tightened up, made more effective.' This last comment showed just how proprietorial the Nazis felt about the Games. Still, after the flags had come down and the flame had gone out, Goebbels admitted to being ‘deeply moved and rather melancholy'. Henry Channon was also in the stadium. After the crowd had listened to the umpteenth rendition of ‘Deutschland über Alles', ‘there was a shout, a speech or two, night fell, and the Olympic Games, the great German display of power, and bid for recognition, were over'.

T
HE EXODUS FROM
Berlin started quickly. On the Monday morning after the closing ceremony, every train, bus, plane and taxi was full, and heavy traffic lined the roads out of the city. The one person who was not stuck in a jam was Hitler himself, who immediately decamped to his mountain retreat at Berchtesgaden. His minister of propaganda allowed himself his first few days off in weeks, and was able to enjoy the fine weather that occurred as soon as the Games were over. By the middle of the week, the city was deserted. ‘Berlin is practically empty,' Goebbels wrote. ‘Where have all the people gone? Sad lonely feeling.' Describing himself as ‘very chuffed to be at rest', Goebbels spent much of his time gleefully perusing the overseas newspapers, which were unanimous in their praise for the XIth Olympiad. He would particularly have enjoyed the article in the
New York Times
by Frederick Birchall that was headlined ‘Olympics Leave Glow of Pride in Reich'. Birchall noted how the Germans, anxious to impress their visitors, had been ‘happy and amiable beyond reckoning'. As a result, ‘they are back in the fold of nations who have “arrived” '.

Birchall was not completely convinced. He did note that the ‘black spots have been covered', but he ended by expressing the hope that the effects of the so-called Olympic Pause would remain. The pause,
such as it was, ended swiftly. On the evening of Friday, 21 August, Captain Wolfgang Fuerstner, the partly Jewish officer who had masterminded the Olympic village, excused himself from an Olympic farewell dinner, citing ill health. He returned home, put a gun to his head and shot himself. He was unable to live with his impending dismissal from the army. According to the authorities, Fuerstner was killed when his car hit a tree.

During that first week after the Games, the Berliners, who had spent the past fortnight doing their best to be friendly to their visitors, suddenly showed their true faces. One who witnessed it was Domnitsa Lanitis, who had stayed on in Berlin for a few days after the Games. ‘One day, I was on a tram,' she recalled, ‘with a Greek lady–Mrs Spanidou–and her daughter. However, Mrs Spanidou was rather fat, and she was pushing against people as she tried to get past them. The Germans began to moan at her when she tried to get past. “Now that the Games are over,” she said to them, “I can see your politeness has finished.” It was clear that the Germans had been told to be nice to us.' Clearly, a tussle on a tram can happen in any city at any time, but the departing athletes noticed some far more sinister undertones. Adolph Kiefer saw one when he was on a coach on the way to the airport to fly to Holland. ‘One of our party took some pictures of the airport,' Kiefer said, ‘and this big guy came along, took his camera, removed the film, and handed the camera back to him, saying, “We don't take pictures of airports”. When we took off, we weren't allowed to look out of the windows and we had to shut our blinds.'

Despite their bragging to Charles Lindbergh, the Germans were clearly attempting to conceal their ever growing Luftwaffe. It had been impossible to do so over the entire Olympic fortnight, however, especially when some of the four thousand athletes were rather more nosy than was good for them. Archie Williams and his fellow American athlete, the miler Gene Venzke, were both interested in planes, and one day at the Olympic village they decided to take a look at the nearby airport. ‘We crawled under this fence,' Williams recalled, ‘and someone yells, “Halt!” Well, it was
Hogan's Heroes
time. We got the hell out of there. Then we saw this plane go by–whoosh! I'd never seen a plane that fast before.' Williams asked one of the Germans what sort of plane it was, and he was told it was a mail plane. The 400
metres runner was unconvinced. ‘Well, shit, that was an ME-109 […] And they were supposed to be flying gliders. That was the fastest “glider” in the world.' It was not just the air force which was being built up. On 24 August, just one week after the Games, Hitler extended the length of conscripted military service from one year to two, which had the effect of increasing the size of the army from 600,000 to 800,000–the same size as it had been at the outset of the First World War.

In the immediate aftermath of the Games, however, public attention in Britain and the United States was more focused on the performance of their athletes. Despite the impact of Jesse Owens, Germany was undeniably the victor of the Games, winning a total of 89 medals, of which 33 were gold. The United States came second, with 56 medals, of which 24 were gold. The British came tenth with just 14 medals, of which a mere four were gold. The British performance was considered dire. A letter to the
Daily Telegraph
from a Reverend F. Brompton Harvey of Leicestershire summed up the national mood: ‘The failure of Englishmen in the Olympic Games should give a jolt to our national complacency. England is admittedly the Mother Country of sport; yet the pick of her athletes […] have been outclassed.' Harold Abrahams thought that such complaints were unfair. The gold medal winner argued that the difference between winning gold and bronze or silver was so slight that ‘any argument as to a nation's prowess based on mere victories is apt to be somewhat fallacious'. In fact, Abrahams questioned the very desirability of the German approach, which insisted on victories. ‘There are those who would urge us to make a similar effort,' he wrote, ‘but not only do I doubt whether we could manufacture the psychological background necessary for such a drive, but even if we could, I have even more serious doubts as to whether it would be desirable.' Part of the reason for Britain's failure was that her athletes were still truly amateurs, many of whom, like Bill Roberts, had full-time jobs. Germany had coddled their athletes, given them time off work, and had all but paid some of them. As Sir Robert Vansittart acidly commented, ‘One does not feel much amateur spirit in the air, but rather a jealously-guarded political demonstration.'

Avery Brundage's reaction to the American showing was to call for a similar programme of nationwide physical training to that seen in
Germany. Although he was broadly pleased with the athletes' performance, Brundage suggested that the United States had a lot to learn from the Germans, with their ‘perfect national organisation, the intensive training and the almost supernatural determination to win'. ‘If we want to hold our own,' he said, ‘we will have to begin to train in the same intensive way and on a national scale. We must cease to be a group of athletic clubs and must become a national organisation.' It was not just the Germans' sporting prowess which Brundage admired, however. ‘We can learn much from Germany,' he said in a speech a few weeks later. ‘We too, if we wish to preserve our institutions, must stamp out communism. We too must take steps to arrest the decline of patriotism […] Germany had progressed as a nation out of her discouragement of five years ago into a new spirit of confidence in herself.'

The Nazis were of course delighted with the German showing.
Der Angriff
was exultant: ‘If one may be permitted to speak of intoxication from joy, then every German may be said to have reeled from happiness. It is an odd but familiar experience and once again we have discovered after sturdy struggles what reserves are contained within us.' The German performance naturally pleased Hitler, who saw the Games as proof that Germany was once more a strong nation. What was more, the results could be improved on; a few years later, he called for the formation of ‘Reich Schools' that would be ‘inspired with the principles of National Socialism'.

Furthermore, Hitler's opinion of the Olympics had now completed its inversion. A festival he once regarded as a ‘an invention of Jews and Freemasons', and which ‘could not possibly be put on in a Reich ruled by National Socialists', was now something he wanted to Germanise. In the spring of 1937, Hitler visited Albert Speer in his
Berlin offices to look at a model of a new stadium that would seat 400,000 spectators. While Hitler inspected it, Speer told him he was concerned that the athletic field in the projected stadium did not have the correct Olympic proportions. Hitler dismissed Speer's worry. ‘No matter,' he said. ‘In 1940 the Olympic Games will take place in Tokyo. But thereafter they will take place in Germany for all time to come, in this stadium. And then we will determine the measurements of the athletic field.'

One issue arising from the Games that the Nazis found hard to explain was the success of the American black athletes. The solution was found in a pseudo-scientific claim that with an abnormally large ‘animal' heel-bone, the blacks were bound to be faster. Therefore, as the blacks were in fact animals and not humans, the Americans had cheated–they might as well have entered racehorses. Such thinking was not confined to Germany. On 22 August,
The Economist
noted that ‘persons of Aryan sympathies in England have written to the Press suggesting that negroes should be excluded from the Olympic Games on the ground of their “physical abnormality” '.
The Spectator
regarded the ‘wonderful negroes' as the heroes of the Games, observing that ‘the real trouble is that the success of the Japanese and negroes throws doubt, even in German minds, on the supremacy of the white races'.

Nevertheless, to Nazi minds, the Olympics proved the efficacy of their system of government. If the Games were a political litmus test, then the result was a triumph for fascism. fascist Germany had beaten the liberal United States. Fascist Italy had beaten the liberal France. Totalitarian Japan had beaten the liberal Britain. As the
Deutsche Volkwirkschaft
pointed out: ‘The preparations rested on the totality of the nationalist art of government and its fundamental idea of the community of the whole people. The world stands in honest admiration before this work because it has totalitarian character. Without unitary will, that which today has astonished the world would have been impossible. It is the supreme achievement of the totalitarian state.' For the time being, this ‘unitary will' was being harnessed to produce gold medals. What diplomats such as Sir Robert Vansittart feared was how it was going to be used in the future. ‘These tense, intense people are going to make us look a C3 nation if we elect to continue haphazard,' he wrote, ‘and they will want to do something with this stored
energy […] These people are the most formidable proposition that has ever been formulated; they are in strict training now, not for the Olympic Games, but for breaking some other and emphatically unsporting world records, and perhaps the world as well.'

Thomas Wolfe would have agreed with Vansittart's presentiments. For the novelist, Germany did not send a team to the Olympics; rather the entire country acted as the team. ‘The whole united power of Germany's enormous organising and disciplining genius went into their effort,' he wrote in his notebook in the autumn of 1936. ‘No one really knows how strong America is: we are a loose-jointed, shambling, and disengaged people. But from the effort of these games some idea may be gained of Germany's strength. It was an enormous strength, and it was collected in a single stroke as compact as the blow of a fist.'

Such sentiments were shared by only a very few athletes. The victorious Godfrey Brown, for example, showed very little ‘honest admiration' for the XIth Olympiad. ‘The fact is that some of us went to Berlin with a mistaken idea–that we were going to watch or take part in a sports meeting,' he wrote. ‘Instead, we were treated to a piece of political propaganda […] On the last day we were inflicted with the sight of thousands of gross, flabby Germans, so-called Hitler Youth, clad in nothing but shorts and performing ridiculous evolutions on the grass. We cried, “Sweep on, you fat and greasy citizens,” and made a dash for the first train home.'

Charles Leonard's opinion was less splenetic. ‘I wouldn't say the Games were hijacked by the Nazis,' he said, ‘but they were used for propaganda purposes. They were determined that the German nation should capitalise on this good feeling that they were out to generate. I talked to a German woman at the embassy in Berlin, and she said, “Frankly we're trying to make a good impression in Berlin”. She didn't say, “We are trying to redeem our bad reputation from the last war”, but that's what she meant. They did very well.' Leonard also noticed numerous manifestations of the ‘unitary will' during his visit.