Andrew Nagorski - Hitlerland

Many of the American athletes, black or white, gave little or no thought to such considerations. They were there for the competition—and, just like the spectators, out for a good time. In at least one case, this led to a German-American personal drama that played itself out almost as publicly as the races on the field.

Leni Riefenstahl, Hitler’s favorite film director, who had already immortalized the Nuremberg Nazi rallies in Triumph of the Will , was busy filming the games for what would become her second major work, Olympia. Fromm clearly detested the glamorous young director and former actress. “Wearing gray flannel slacks and a kind of jockey cap, [she] is obtrusively in evidence everywhere,” the Jewish reporter wrote in her diary. “On and off she sits down beside her Führer , a magazine-cover grin on her face and a halo of importance fixed firmly above her head.” It wasn’t the Nazi leader, however, who made Riefenstahl lose control of her emotions; it was the American decathlon winner Glenn Morris.

On the second day of the decathlon, the German champion Erwin Huber introduced Riefenstahl to Morris, who was lying on the grass resting with a towel over his head. “When Huber presented Morris to me, and we looked at one another, we both seemed transfixed,” the film director wrote in her autobiography, slipping into the tone of a sappy romance novel. “It was an incredible moment and I had never experienced anything like it. I tried to choke back the feelings surging up inside me…”

After Morris won the competition, breaking a world record, he stood with two other Americans on the podium for the medals ceremony. Riefenstahl watched, but was unable to film the ceremony because it was getting dark. As Morris came off the podium, he headed straight toward the film director. Here, her memoir goes from romance novel to bodice-ripper mode. “I held out my hand and congratulated him, but he grabbed me in his arms, tore off my blouse, and kissed my breasts, right in the middle of the stadium, in front of a hundred thousand spectators. A lunatic, I thought,” she wrote. “But I could not forget the wild look in his eyes…”

Riefenstahl claimed she tried to avoid Morris after that, but ended up encountering him again at the pole vault. “We couldn’t control our feelings,” she wrote, describing how they immediately became lovers in the midst of the Olympic events and her film shoots. “I had lost my head completely,” she confessed, and imagined he was the man she would marry. When Morris left to be feted for his triumphs in a New York ticker-tape parade, she was despondent. Then she read that he was engaged to an American teacher. He still wrote to Riefenstahl, and she still believed she loved him. Although she finally decided to break off their affair, she sent him her stills of him in action in Berlin, which helped him get the part of Tarzan in a Hollywood movie. Later, she learned he divorced in 1940 and died of alcohol and drug abuse in 1974.

By pointing out “his sad fate” in her memoir, Riefenstahl implied that Morris would have done better if he had stayed with her. In the midst of the pageantry of the Olympics, Hitler’s favorite film director had fanta-sized about a whole other life with the American who couldn’t have cared less what movement she was working for.

Truman Smith, who had been the first American official to meet Hitler, returned to Berlin in 1935 for a second tour, this time as the senior military attaché. It wasn’t until a couple of years later that he met the Nazi leader again, although he had observed him from afar on several occasions, including at the Olympics. At an official function at the Chancellery, Smith worked his way through the reception line and shook Hitler’s hand. Preparing to move on, he felt Hitler’s hand on his sleeve.

“Have I not seen you before?” Hitler asked.

“Yes, Mr. Chancellor, in Munich in 1922,” the startled attaché responded.

“Oh, yes, you introduced me to Hanfstaengl,” Hitler recalled.

It was a vivid demonstration that the German leader, like many skilled politicians, possessed an uncanny memory for significant faces and events in his life even after a long interval.

Returning to Berlin, Truman and his wife, Kay, were immediately struck by its transformation since the early 1920s. “Berlin was so familiar,” Kay wrote in her unpublished memoirs. “It was the same yet not the same. The streets, the buildings were all as I had known them. But now no more shabby fronts and broken fences. All was clean, freshly painted… It was as in a dream; all is familiar but changed… The crowds well dressed, the people looking well nourished, energetic.” Without any irony, she also observed: “Berlin was a very safe city at this time, as all the drunks, bums, homosexuals, etc. had been put in concentration camps.”

If such remarks betrayed her own prejudices, Kay wasn’t blind to what she characterized as “a certain tenseness” in the air, the product of a regime that was ready to target anyone. When she and Truman returned to the house one day, a servant told them that telephone repairmen had visited the house and insisted on “checking” their connections, despite her protestations that the phone was working well. After that, the Smiths made a habit of putting an overcoat over the phone to foil any listening devices, and postponing any sensitive conversations to when they took walks in the Grunewald, the forest on the outskirts of the city. The couple assumed that it wasn’t only the Nazis who could be spying on them. According to Kay, Truman tried to engineer the removal of an American secretary in his office, a longtime Berlin resident with strong leftist views who he suspected was giving information to the Russians.

Kay also pointed out parallels between the Nazis and the Communists. The Nazis, like the Communists, hoped to replace Christianity with another doctrine—what she identified as “the old Germanic religion,” but in reality was the idea that Nazism superseded all previous beliefs. According to one of Kay’s Catholic friends, a Nazi leader had ordered schoolchildren to replace the standard grace at meals with “Dear Jesus, stay away from us. We eat gladly without thee.” When Rochus von Rheinbabin, a German acquaintance from their first tour, arrived decked out in Nazi insignia, proudly boasting about his early membership in the party, Kay questioned him about the party’s beliefs. After he finished, she said, “But Rochus, what is then the difference between National Socialism and Communism?” Her German visitor threw up his hands. “Hush Katie,” he declared. “One may not say that.”

When Colonel Charles Bennett, the chief of the attaché section of the Military Intelligence Division of the War Department, had asked Smith to return to Germany, he was counting on his getting privileged access to the new regime. “Your past relationship with Hitler, [Minister of War and Army Commander-in-Chief Werner von] Blomberg, and others who are at the head of affairs in Germany, would enable you to do a service that no one else, however well qualified they might be in other respects, could do,” he wrote. Of course, Smith could no longer drop in on Hitler the way he first had in Munich; in fact, his brief encounter with him on the reception line was the only time he spoke to him directly again. But his extensive contacts from those earlier days gave him a tremendous advantage over the other military attachés in Berlin, more than justifying Bennett’s faith in him.

Unlike many of his counterparts in other embassies, Smith had no money in his office budget to pay for spies. What he did have was a long list of German officers he knew, some of whom he had met during his first tour in Germany or later when he was an instructor at the Infantry School at Fort Benning, Georgia, from 1928 to 1932. The assistant commandant of the Infantry School was George C. Marshall, then a lieutenant colonel, who treated Smith as an aide and translator when it came to dealing with visiting Germans.