Berlin Games (7 page)

The BOA was in no rush to reply. On 8 July, exactly eight weeks after the archbishop had written his letter, Evan Hunter informed Temple that writing to Hitler was ‘outside the province' of the BOA. Abrahams' words had not been heeded, further confirmation of Aberdare's tokenism. Had he and the BOA been genuinely concerned about the plight of the Jews in Germany–and indeed the Olympic charter–then they would have backed any move that applied pressure to the Nazi regime.

Meanwhile, Gretel Bergmann was doing her best to train under the eyes of the Nazis. Having won an Olympic trial at Ulm in June, in July 1935 she found herself back at Ettlingen training camp in the Black Forest. The camp was used for training a select group of Jews, a fact advertised by Tschammer und Osten. In August, a brief interview in the
New York Times
with the Reich's sports leader captured the phoniness of the training. When the correspondent asked what opportunities Jews who lived far from Ettlingen had of training there, Tschammer und Osten replied, ‘They can become members of athletic clubs that have not excluded non-Aryans.' The correspondent responded by asking how such clubs could exist in Germany. Tschammer und Osten initially refused to answer, but the correspondent pressed him. Eventually, the flummoxed Nazi spectacularly passed the buck: ‘If you do not believe me you can ask Count Baillet-Latour […] who will tell you that everything is all right with the Olympiad and that the Germans are fulfilling all their promises that were made concerning facilities for Jewish athletes.'

Bergmann considered herself warily fortunate to be able to train at what was an idyllic island, with its views across the Rhine to Vogesen. ‘We felt that we had suddenly been lifted from our everyday spheres of life and carried to a sportsman's paradise,' gushed one anonymous attendee in a propaganda article about the camp. Bergmann recognised that the Jews' attendance was simply a gesture, but the athletes tried to
have as good a time as possible. The same anonymous writer tells of how, in the evening after a hard day's training, ‘songs were sung accompanied by stamping, some of them drawn out and others short and lively; the tones of an accordion were heard, and below in the Rhine valley the first lights appeared'. The writer describes how, on another evening, during a pause between the songs, the athletes gazed out across the twilit hilltops, a view that caused one of them to remark, ‘And they say we are not at home here.' Apparently, ‘no one answered either affirmatively or negatively, since there was nothing to deny and affirmation was not necessary'. Germany was indeed their home, just as much their home as that of those who were persecuting them.

Bergmann found herself at Ettlingen again in the autumn, but on this occasion she was the only Jew. Her room-mate was a seventeen-year-old high jumper called Dora, who Bergmann found a little strange. Dora never joined the other girls in the shower, instead always shutting herself into a room with a bath. Bergmann wondered about Dora's modesty, but she kept her musings to herself, because ‘a Jewish girl could not afford to say anything derogatory about an Aryan'. Bergmann was right not to ask too many questions about Dora, as she had been secretly appointed by the Nazis to rival her. That was not Dora's only secret, however. There was something else about her that Bergmann would not discover for another thirty years.

In California, Helene Mayer also found herself wrestling with the Nazi regime. After learning of her expulsion from the Offenbach Fencing Club in April 1933, and the cessation of her government sponsorship in June, Helene did her best to continue her studies blithely. She graduated from Scripps in May 1934, knowing that her dream of joining the German Foreign Office would remain just that. Fortunately, she was offered a teaching post at the exclusive all-female Mills College in the foothills of Oakland on the eastern shore of San Francisco Bay. When she arrived in the autumn, Mayer made an immediate impact. Her fencing skills impressed everybody, and her tall, chic presence around the campus was hard to miss. One of her friends remembered Mayer being ‘more fun than a barrel of monkeys', a young woman who loved to go to parties and to dance with men–so long as the men were taller than she. In the spring of the following year, Mayer appears to have had a week-long affair with a German naval officer serving on the
light cruiser
Karlsruhe III
, which was docked in San Francisco. The officer would have been taking a terrible risk consorting with a Jew, but no doubt the distance from home made him jettison caution. Mayer not only danced and slept with men, but she also fenced against them. In competition after competition she beat countless fencers of the opposite sex. At one event, an observer noted: ‘Any mental hazard the men may have felt at lunging towards a woman soon disappeared when they met her skillful foil.'

The spectre of the forthcoming Games still taunted her, however. Would she be allowed to compete? Or would she indeed want to? In an interview with a Mills College magazine in May 1935, she admitted that it would be an ‘honour' if Germany invited her to participate. As a former Olympic champion, she should not have regarded it as an ‘honour'–it was merely her due. It soon became clear that her loyalty to her sport and her personal ambition were greater than her loyalty to her Jewish ancestry. In August, the
American Hebrew
asked her a series of questions: ‘Did you receive and accept reported invitations to participate in the Olympics for Germany? Do you think in light of continued discrimination, America and other countries should withdraw? Do you regard yourself as a refugee from Germany? Did you know Nazi papers repeatedly and tendentiously reported your suicide?' Mayer told the paper that she had not received an invitation from Germany. She then said that she was ‘unable to answer your second question' and that she did not consider herself a refugee. She added that she was ‘amused' by the suicide rumours.

Mayer's unwillingness to comment directly on the boycott movement may well have been because her family still lived in Germany, and could be punished if she made anti-Nazi remarks from the safety of California. Like Bergmann, she seemingly had little room to manoeuvre, although so far she had yet to be coerced back to Germany. There were those who maintained, however, that Mayer had been invited back to Germany, and that she was secretly stalling in order to try to improve conditions for her family. In September, Gustavus Kirby wrote to Avery Brundage, stating that he had heard that Mayer ‘has been not only invited but urged to return to Germany but that she has refused or is reticent to do so by reason of the fact that her
brother, who is a physician, has been treated so badly by the Hitler government that he is now reduced to cleaning out hallways in an apartment house'. If Mayer was stalling in order to help her family, then she was playing a dangerous game. The Nazis were not just another male fencer who thought he could make easy work of this ‘blonde girl'.

Someone who certainly thought he could get the better of the Nazis was General Charles Sherrill of the IOC. In the late summer of 1935, he visited Germany, where he met Hitler himself in Munich at midday on 24 August. Although Sherrill was visiting the Chancellor to talk about the issue of Jewish participation, it is evident from the letter he wrote to Franklin Roosevelt some two weeks later that he was both charmed and bamboozled by Hitler. Sherrill recalled the meeting in oozing detail, his description as breathy as that of an enraptured teenager:

It comes as no surprise to discover that Sherrill was thrilled to be invited to the Nuremberg Rally the following month.

Sherrill did not relate the precise nature of his conversation with Hitler to Roosevelt, but did so later in a letter to Marguerite Lehand, Roosevelt's secretary. At the end of the meeting, Sherrill had tentatively brought up the question of Jewish participation in the Games. ‘Explosion! Was shocked to find he knew nothing of June 1933 pro-Jew letter from his own Ministerium des Inneren [Ministry of the Interior] which I secured for Int. Olympic Com. and is flatly opposite to dreadful
new
anti-Jew move he had just said he projected.' This exchange reveals the hollowness of the promises made by Lewald and Tschammer und Osten. Men like Brundage–and indeed Sherrill–had been hoodwinked, taking the Nazis at face value. Sherrill then tried appealing to Hitler's better nature–which was surely a very small part of his character. The General had presented Hitler with a book on Bismarck and Mussolini, and Sherrill gauchely asked the Chancellor, ‘What would Bismarck, master of foreigners' psychology, do today?' Hitler didn't reply.

A few days later, however, Sherrill experienced what he felt to be a significant breakthrough. At a lunch in Berlin with Tschammer und Osten, an official said that he had shown a copy of the June 1933 letter to Hitler, and that the Fuehrer had said that he would ‘fulfill its terms for German Jews, and that the
new
move against them was dropped–
thank
God!' Sherrill's delight clearly reveals that he trusted Hitler's words.

That misplaced trust would be shattered at the Nuremberg Rally in mid-September. It was here that punitive new racial laws were announced–the infamous Nuremberg Laws–which prevented marriage between Jews and Gentiles. That alone must have flabbergasted Sherrill, but the passing of the ‘Reich Citizenship Law' must have made him realise that his efforts were in vain. Under these new laws, Jews, half-Jews and even quarter-Jews were stripped of their German citizenship, which meant they had no rights whatsoever. In sporting terms, this meant that they would no longer be able to represent their country, as they no longer were part of any country. Sherrill described his four days in Nuremberg as ‘very difficult'. He spent his time constantly negotiating with Tschammer und Osten, who eventually
agreed that a Jewish athlete could join the German team. Sherrill declared himself to be satisfied: ‘I went to Germany for the purpose of getting at least one Jew on the German Olympic team, and I feel that my job is finished.' This was untruthful. Sherrill had wanted to do more than secure one Jew his or her place, but because he knew his mission had failed, fobbed off by another show of tokenism, he felt he had to present his efforts as successful.

But Sherrill was to go further with his lies. ‘I would have no more business discussing that [anti-Jewish obstacles in sport] in Germany than if the Germans attempted to discuss the Negro situation in the American South or the treatment of the Japanese in California.' Sherrill's meetings with Hitler and Tschammer und Osten had been precisely an attempt to discuss the ‘Jewish question' in sport. What was he doing in Germany if not that? Swapping pleasantries with Hitler about Bismarck? Sherrill had been astutely played by the Nazis, and the general, rather than losing face, had decided to modify his stance. It would have been more honourable of him to have admitted failure and to have supported the boycott movement, but instead he found himself on the same side as anti-Semites such as Brundage, Edstrøm and Baillet-Latour.

The special Jewish athlete singled out by the Nazis would be Helene Mayer. After Sherrill's meeting there followed an almost bewildering succession of exchanges between the fencer and the Nazi sporting authorities. On 25 September, Lewald stated that he was posting a ‘personal invitation' to Mayer to attend the Olympic trials in February. ‘We hope she will come over,' he exhorted. ‘Believe me, we wish more than anybody in America that we had some Jewish athletes of Olympic calibre. But we have none, and I believe no one in America would want us to put a second-rate athlete on our team just because he is Jewish. That certainly isn't the Olympic spirit.' Lewald was lying. Gretel Bergmann, for one, was of Olympic calibre. His bandying of the ‘Olympic spirit' was ironic, to say the least.

The following day, von Tschammer und Osten released a statement he had made to Sherrill, in which he invited both Mayer and Bergmann. The statement contained letters he said were being sent to the two women, which he claimed were ‘evidence that Germany is
acting entirely within the spirit of the Olympic statutes'. The letter to Mayer read, in part:

Tschammer und Osten offered no reasons as to why Mayer would be prevented from taking part. Clearly the Reich Sports Minister was not in a strong enough position to be able to guarantee Mayer freedom from his fellow Nazis' attempts to eradicate Jews from public life. Mayer denied receiving any communication from Tschammer und Osten or Lewald. By the end of the month, it was claimed that Mayer had been publicly invited by the Germans on four occasions, but each time she had not actually received an invitation.