Berlin Games (6 page)

Brundage, a man of moderate tastes, also noted that Germany in the 1930s had suffered from ‘despair', ‘debt', ‘youth undernourished', ‘feverish gayety' and, worst of all, ‘night life'. It was hardly surprising that he should speak approvingly of the SS and the SA, who consisted of the ‘hardest young men', who were ‘apparently doing useful work and no leaf raking'. The Germans were ‘hospitable–courteous–good hearted–friendly people', and although they had their ‘political problems, so do we'. The Jews, he noted, were ‘leaders in communism', and it was only right that Germany should have ‘Germany for the Germans'. For Brundage, the new Germany must have seemed not just a Nazi Germany, but also an Olympic Germany, a place in which there were no rewards for those who could not go faster, higher or stronger.

It came as no shock that Brundage returned to the United States with the news that there was nothing in Nazi Germany that gave cause for a boycott. On 26 September the AOC met to discuss Brundage's report. It soon became clear that the meeting would go Brundage's way, as Gustavus Kirby, the drafter of two previous resolutions against participation, spoke in favour of the president. ‘I honestly believe that Germany will live up to her pledges,' he said. ‘Mr President, we have every right to believe from your report that Germany will not dare recede from the position she has taken.' General Sherrill went further, and stated that the pressure put on the Germans by the AAU and the AOC had in fact improved conditions for Jews in Germany. This was breathtakingly myopic, and proved that Sherrill had been completely hoodwinked. Unsurprisingly, the eighteen members of the AOC voted unanimously that the United States should not only go to Germany for the Summer Olympics, but also for the Winter Olympics, which were to be held in the Bavarian villages of Garmisch-Partenkirchen in February 1936. Lewald, naturally, was delighted. ‘Considering the importance of American sports,' he said, ‘the Olympics would not be complete without the Americans.' He then added that the ‘Jewish question' was ‘definitely settled, so far as sports were concerned'.

The opposition was not going to cave in quite so easily, however. That same day, Brundage had received a letter from Samuel Untermeyer, the president of the wordily named Non Sectarian
Anti-Nazi League to Champion Human Rights, which protested against the holding of the Games. ‘These games in Germany would violate the economic boycott and cultural isolation which the civilised world has been forced to employ against the brutalities of the current regime,' he wrote. ‘It will be impossible for any self-respecting Jew from any part of the world to enter Germany or to subject himself to the degradation that would be involved in his participating in the Olympiad […] either as a contestant or an observer.' Brundage himself was also openly criticised. Democrat Senator Edmund Celler stated that he had ‘prejudged the situation before he sailed […] The Reich Sports Commissars have snared and deluded him'.

 

Although Untermeyer's words were fine, they did not take into account the situation of a young German-Jewish woman living in Britain. Ever since she had arrived in October the previous year, Gretel Bergmann had found her new home to be somewhat less than ideal. The food was bland and terrible, the climate was miserable, and her small room in London was so cold that it was impossible to read in bed at night, because her hands froze. Nevertheless, it was not Germany, and Bergmann found it a delight ‘to be able to walk freely into a Lyons to sit over a cup of their sinfully delicious tea'. Such a simple pleasure would of course be denied to Bergmann back home in Ulm.

Bergmann desperately wanted to continue jumping, and as soon as the athletics season started, she found that the British winter had deprived her of none of her talents. At her school, the London Polytechnic, she was so superior to her competitors that she had to race and jump with a handicap. It made no difference–Bergmann kept winning. Her successes made her feel that her dream of joining the British Olympic team might yet be realised. Even though she knew that her nationality–although certainly not her talent–would be one bar over which she would probably never be able to jump, Bergmann was keen to send out a personal message to the Nazis: ‘Look, you bastards, this is what a Jew can do.' Bergmann's attitude was therefore diametrically opposed to that of Untermeyer–despite the risk of degradation, she actually wanted to use her body to show the Nazis that their racial policies were shams.

On 30 June 1934 Bergmann had her first chance to show the world just how good she was. The event was the British Championships, which were being held at Herne Hill in south-east London. At 32 degrees, it was almost unbearably hot, but Bergmann still made sure that she warmed up properly, aware that her father, who had come over from Germany on a business trip, was watching her. She had entered for two events, the shot put and the high jump, although poor organisation by the officials meant that she had to pull out of the shot put halfway through the event. By the time she arrived at the high jump the bar was already at 4 feet 5 inches (just under 1.35 metres). After a brief measuring out of her run-up, Bergmann ran up to the bar and soared over it, flabbergasting her fellow competitors.

After several rounds, the only two competitors remaining were Bergmann and Mary Milne, the winner of the event for the previous two years. Both easily jumped over 4 feet 10 inches, 4 feet 11 inches and 5 feet. At 5 feet 1 inch (a fraction under 1.55 metres), however, Milne muffed her first jump, and Bergmann did the same. At the second attempt, Milne once again knocked the bar down. Despite her best effort, Bergmann also knocked it down. Both women were clearly nervous, as they knew that the event would possibly be decided at the next jump. Once more, Milne ran up, leaped and grazed the bar, striking it just enough to send it to the ground.

If she got over the bar, then Bergmann would be the British champion. Trying to calm herself, she shook out her hands and feet. She then accelerated and launched herself into the air, her right leg first. It cleared the bar, but there was still the matter of her left leg to get over. She strained to lift up her heel, and that too left the bar untouched. She was over. She had won. ‘I could hear my father and my friends whoop and holler from the sidelines,' she recalled. ‘And, had there still been a doubt, Milne came over to congratulate me. Her handshake would not have melted an ice-cube!'

The euphoria of winning was to last only a few hours. Back at her father's hotel room, she was to learn that she was being ordered back to Germany to try for the Olympic team. She found the order almost impossible to comprehend. Hadn't she been thrown out of her athletic club only a year before? Her first reaction was to refuse the Nazi ‘offer', but her father soon explained the entirety of the situation. The
Nazis needed some token Jews in training to show the world that they were being given a fair chance to compete. If Bergmann did not return, then it would put her family in great danger. Veiled threats had been made, and although her father said that the choice was his daughter's, and hers alone, Bergmann knew that there was no choice. It was blackmail. She recalled how, on the trip back to Germany, she was violently sick while crossing the English Channel. ‘I felt that I was cleansing myself of some evil forces,' she wrote, ‘by dedicating each spurt of vomit to that symbol of hate, the swastika.'

 

Throughout the rest of 1934, the calls for a boycott were sporadic. By the time the AAU gathered in Miami in December for its convention, the mood was positively mellow, although a few delegates maintained that the matter was not closed. Avery Brundage even felt sufficiently relaxed to step down from presidency of an organisation he had headed for a record six years, handing over the office to a former justice of the New York Supreme Court, the fifty-six-year-old Jeremiah T. Mahoney. (Brundage still retained presidency of the American Olympic Association, however.) Allowing the appointment of Mahoney would prove to be a stupendous tactical error for Brundage, for the two men would clash violently over the course of the next eighteen months.

In Britain, the mood was a little more hostile. On 16 December Lord Aberdare wrote to Lewald, expressing his unhappiness ‘about the possibilities of there not being the Olympic atmosphere in Berlin by 1936 because of the action taken in Germany against the Jews'. Referring to the German behaviour as ‘uncivilised', Aberdare went on to lambast the Americans for passing resolutions in support of the Games too quickly and without consulting the British. He then went for the jugular. ‘I am sure you quite appreciate that even Great Britain could not have sent an Olympic team to Berlin if the Games had been 1934, because it could not be expected that Jews of the rest of the world […] would all accept to enter Germany of if they did that they would be able to give of their best because of their mental attitude in the midst of a German crowd.'

Despite Aberdare's stylistically poor prose (his English was perhaps worse than Lewald's), there was no doubt that this was fighting talk.
To Lewald, the letter would have been problematic, as there was nothing he could do to change the nature of the ‘German crowd'. The only way to do this would be to unseat the Nazis and to reverse centuries of ingrained anti-Semitism, both of which would be impossible, even for the wily Lewald. Aberdare offered Lewald a pathetically simple solution, however.

This was tokenism at its worst. Not only was Aberdare's demand utterly cynical, its compete insincerity was revealed by his use of inverted commas. Aberdare was merely looking for examples he could show to critics of the Games, examples that even he knew would be misleading. Although Lewald's reply has not been preserved, he doubtless would have pointed to the examples of Gretel Bergmann and others as athletes who were in ‘preparation'.

One Briton whose objection to the persecutions was sincere was William Temple, the Archbishop of York. On 14 May 1935 he wrote to the British Olympic Association, asking–somewhat naively–whether it could forward a letter to Hitler. The letter was written by the archbishop, but it was to purport to come from the BOA.

Temple's letter then suggested to Hitler that sport could either encourage friendly relations between countries or damage them.

The idea for the letter and much of its text was not Temple's, however, but that of Arnold Lunn, who had invented ski slalom racing
in 1922 and had organised the first world championship in Combined Downhill and Slalom in 1931. His father, Sir Henry Lunn, was a Methodist reverend and the founder of Lunn's Travel Agency, which would eventually become better known as Lunn Poly. In April, Arnold Lunn had written to Temple, telling him that he would be officiating at the Winter Olympics. ‘I feel curiously disinclined to accept hospitality at a banquet in Germany,' he wrote, ‘so long as men are imprisoned in concentration camps merely because they refuse to render unto Caesar the things which are God's.' Lunn suggested that the archbishop should write to the British Olympic Association, although he stopped short of recommending a call for a boycott. ‘There is nothing that the Germans at this moment would dislike more than a protest from British athletic bodies against the treatment of Christians in Germany.' In a later letter, Lunn told Temple that the Germans were ‘artlessly snobbish, and extremely anxious to be thought sporting'. He added, however, that it was ‘rather pathetic that none of them seem to mind being thought cruel, brutal, oppressive or unjust'.

One BOA member who supported Temple's letter was Harold Abrahams, the British 100 metres champion at the 1924 Paris Olympics, whose exploits were later to be depicted in the 1981 film
Chariots of Fire
. By now a renowned sports writer, the Jewish Abrahams presented a cogent argument in favour of writing to Hitler. After claiming that the letter might indeed cause Hitler to make some small concession, Abrahams addressed the broader, and more philosophical, point of the purpose of Olympism.

This encapsulated precisely what the Olympic Games were meant to be for. Abrahams was shrewd enough not to remind the BOA of his own faith; its members might well have seized upon it to dismiss the affair as purely a Jewish matter. Abrahams's argument showed that sport could indeed meddle in politics, and was in fact desirable if it could be used to promote good.