Andrew Nagorski - Hitlerland

Despite the impassioned opposition to the Berlin games by Jeremiah Mahoney, the president of the American Athletic Union, and several other sports officials back in the United States, the Brundage-Sherrill view narrowly prevailed. Hull was largely unmoved by the pleas from his diplomats in Berlin and Vienna, and Roosevelt remained studiously silent on the controversy. As David Clay Large wrote in his authoritative study Nazi Games: The Olympics of 1936 : “A consummate politician, FDR certainly understood that throwing his weight behind either position carried more risks than taking no position at all.” Besides, Large continued, his administration was already perceived as too “Jew friendly,” and even Judge Samuel I. Rosenman, one of his Jewish advisors, warned him against supporting a boycott.

When the games got under way, they were every bit the triumphant pageant that both their proponents and opponents had predicted. Wolfe offered this vivid description in You Can’t Go Home Again :

The daily spectacle was breath-taking in its beauty and magnificence. The stadium was a tournament of color that caught the throat; the massed splendor of the banners made the gaudy decorations of America’s great parades, presidential inaugurations, and World’s Fairs seem like shoddy carnivals in comparison. And for the duration of the Olympics, Berlin itself was transformed into a kind of annex to the stadium… the whole town was a thrilling pageantry of royal banners… banners fifty feet in height, such as might have graced the battle tent of some great emperor.

All of which served as the stage for every triumphant appearance of the modern emperor. “At last he came—and something like a wind across a field of grass was shaken through that crowd, and from afar the tide rolled up with him, and in it was the voice, the hope, the prayer of the land,” Wolfe continued. As Hitler arrived, standing stiffly in a shining car, he raised his hand “palm upward, not in Nazi-wise salute, but straight-up, in a gesture of blessing such as the Buddha or Messiahs use.”

It wasn’t only Hitler’s followers who were impressed. “Berlin is now a handsome, hustling place to be at home in,” the New Yorker ’s Janet Flanner wrote. “The past year has been closer to physical prosperity and farther from political nervousness than any Germany has known since the war, and its capital city shows it.” Everything was done to convey exactly that impression to the foreign visitors. Rudi Josten, a German staffer in the Associated Press bureau, recalled the abrupt revival of many of the attractions of the Weimar era. “Everything was free and all dance halls were reopened,” he said. “They played American music and whatnot. Anyway, everybody thought: ‘Well, so Hitler can’t be so bad.’” The Nazis even allowed 7,000 previously banned prostitutes to ply their trade once again in the German capital.

Whether it was on the streets or in what passed for the new high society, the visitors were given every opportunity to revel. “A glittering swirl of Olympic receptions,” Fromm wrote in her diary. “The foreigners are spoiled, pampered, flattered, and beguiled.” Shirer was depressed by the degree to which the visitors were taken in by the lavish show. “I’m afraid the Nazis have succeeded with their propaganda,” he noted as the games were ending.

Carla de Vries, an older American woman, was so caught up in the fervor that she managed to elude Hitler’s bodyguards and kiss Der Führer on the cheek during his visit to the swimming stadium. Swimmer Eleanor Holm Jarrett, the twenty-two-year-old wife of bandleader Art Jarrett and a gold medalist at the 1928 Los Angeles Olympics, had already partied so hard on the transatlantic crossing that Brundage had her dropped from the team. She remained in Berlin anyway, convincing Hearst’s International News Service to give her an assignment to report on the festivities. She did her job enthusiastically, showing up at receptions hosted by top Nazi leaders. When Goering gave her a silver swastika pin, she happily wore it on her chest for everyone to see.

But none of this was enough to completely satisfy Hitler. Fromm recorded in her diary that he applauded German winners in “an orgasmic frenzy of shrieks, clappings, and contortions,” but that he displayed a “disgusting” lack of sportsmanship when others emerged victorious—especially Jesse Owens and his fellow black American athletes. “It was unfair of the United States to send these flatfooted specimens to compete with the noble products of Germany,” he complained. “I am going to vote against Negro participation in the future.”

When Owens scored one of his victories, Wolfe was sitting in the diplomatic box with Martha Dodd. He let out “a war whoop,” Martha recalled, which didn’t go unnoticed by the Nazi leader, who was also in attendance. “Hitler twisted in his seat, looked down, attempting to locate the miscreant, and frowned angrily.” In fact, the German leader was ignoring some of the guidelines of his own regime. A Nazi directive to the German press had warned that “Negroes should not be insensitively reported… Negroes are American citizens and must be treated with respect as Americans.”

Although such instructions were inspired by cynical calculation that an appearance of respectful reporting could fool the world into believing that the Nazi movement was based on tolerance, the irony was that many Germans were genuinely enthusiastic about the black American stars, especially Owens. Cheers went up in the Olympic Stadium whenever he appeared. The black American sociologist and historian W. E. B. DuBois, who spent nearly six months on a fellowship in Germany in 1935 and 1936, wrote: “Jesse Owens ran before the astonished eyes of the world. He was lauded and pictured and interviewed. He can scarcely take a step without being begged for his ‘autogramme.’ He is without doubt the most popular single athlete in the Olympic Games of 1936.” And while Hitler and other top Nazis bitterly complained about the black American Olympians, some of those athletes were invited by ordinary German citizens for coffee or dinner.

Little wonder that Owens and his black teammates returned from Germany with less bitterness than many of their countrymen expected—especially since these athletes all too often would see no change in the discrimination they faced at home. Richard Helms, the young United Press reporter in Berlin and future CIA chief, happened to be crossing the Atlantic on the Queen Mary with Owens after the games. In their conversations, the runner shrugged off all the stories about how Hitler had allegedly snubbed him. “Owens was a quiet, modest man,” Helms recalled. “He did not feel he had been insulted, as conventional reporting had it, when Hitler failed to award him the gold medal.”

Reflecting on his stay, DuBois elaborated on the reasons why black Americans would have mixed feelings about their experiences in Hitler’s Germany. “I have been treated with uniform courtesy and consideration,” he reported. “It would have been impossible for me to have spent a similarly long time in any part of the United States, without some, if not frequent cases of personal insult or discrimination. I cannot record a single instance here.”

He observed that Germany felt “contented and prosperous” under its new rulers, but also that it was “silent, nervous, suppressed” and all opposition was banned. He certainly noticed the “campaign of race prejudice carried on openly, continuously and determinedly against all non-Nordic races, but specifically against the Jews, which surpasses in vindictive cruelty and public insult anything I have ever seen.” The situation, he added, was “so complicated that one cannot express it without seeming to convict one’s self of deliberate misstatement.” All of which got him back to the Olympics, concluding that “the testimony of the casual, non-German-speaking visitor to the Olympic Games is worse than valueless in any direction.”