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As debate stirs over China hosting the 2008 Olympic Games, U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum historian Susan Bachrach discusses a similar controversy that took place when Nazi Germany was slated to host the Games in 1936. Amid protests by athletes and others, Germany convinced the world that it was fit to hold the Olympics, and as Susan explains, used the Games to boost its image in the international community.
TRANSCRIPT:
JERRY FOWLER: Attention is beginning to focus on the fact that the 2008 Summer Olympics will be held in Beijing, China. There is certain to be growing controversy over China’s own dismal human rights record, including the continuing subjugation of Tibet, as well as its consistent diplomatic support for the Sudanese government. That support has helped shield Khartoum from international pressure over the catastrophe in Darfur.
Some 70 years ago, in 1936, the Olympics were also being hosted by a dynamic, powerful dictatorship; in that case, Nazi Germany. To learn more about that historical precedent, I am joined by my colleague Susan Bachrach. Susan is an historian with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and a number of years ago she curated an exhibition and authored a book about the Nazi Olympics of 1936. Susan, welcome to the program.
SUSAN BACHRACH: I am happy to be here.
JERRY FOWLER: As I mentioned Susan, the Nazis hosted the 1936 Olympics. How did Nazi Germany come to host the games in the first place?
SUSAN BACHRACH: Berlin was chosen at the site for the 1936 Summer Olympics in 1931 by the International Olympic Committee in procedures that they usually follow, and of course this was before Hitler took power in 1933, so there was some question in 1933 whether the world and the International Olympic Committee should proceed with their original plan.
JERRY FOWLER: I want to get to that in just a second, but there was actually as I understand it, something of a political component in selecting Germany in the first place in 1931, in those pre-Nazi years?
SUSAN BACHRACH: Correct; Germany had been a bit of a pariah in the Olympics world after World War I, as the power that certainly was blamed by the West for that war. It was a defeated power. Germany, as a consequence, was not invited to participate in the 1920 and 1924 Olympics in Paris and Antwerp. The country was invite in 1928, but Germany had originally been selected to host the 1916 Olympic Games that were cancelled because of the war, and so by returning to Germany in 1936, it was kind of a recognition first of all that Germany was being welcomed back into the Olympic fold and into the fold of the world community. It was also a way of acknowledging two of the leaders of the German Olympic movement who had already started to make plans for the 1916 Games that had been cancelled. They were very popular within the International Olympic Committee, Theodore Lewald and Carl Diem. That is part of the backdrop for the plan to go back to Berlin for the 1936 games, and of course, the International Olympic Committee had to choose the location of the games pretty far in advance because of the extensive preparations that were necessary.
JERRY FOWLER: They chose Germany in 1931 at a time when it was more or less democratic, the so-call Weimer years, and in 1933 the Nazis came to power and then started basically shutting down the political process. What was the international image of the Nazi regime in those early years, between 1933 and in the lead up to the Olympics?
SUSAN BACHRACH: I think there was pretty widespread knowledge—certainly in the United States—of what was going on in Nazi Germany in terms of the repression of the political opposition, the persecution of trade unionists for example, and members of left wing parties—all the way from liberal to social democrats to Communists—there were mass round-ups of party leaders who were imprisoned either in jails or prisons or in early concentration camps. It was also quite well know, the persecution of German Jews in that period, so quite a bit was known about what was happening.
JERRY FOWLER: Just to focus a little bit on the persecution of Jews, obviously everyone knows about the Holocaust which is the mass murder of Jews, but they did not start out right away murdering Jews; there was something of a build up.
SUSAN BACHRACH: Right; people knew about the boycott of Jewish businesses, and in early 1933 they knew about how Jews were expelled from civil service and what not; they knew about some other measures to segregate Jews from the rest of the population. After all, some German Jews were already reading the handwriting on the wall in the early years of the regime and leaving the country; people like Anne Frank’s family, for example, who moved to the neighboring Netherlands.
JERRY FOWLER: And Albert Einstein; didn’t he leave pretty early on?
SUSAN BACHRACH: Yes, I think he was already abroad and he remained abroad.
JERRY FOWLER: Germany, having been chosen to host the Olympics in part as a way to welcome it back into the international community of nations and then this regime having taken power which was problematic in the ways you have described, was there any move to retract the invitation to host the Olympics or not to participate in the Olympics?
SUSAN BACHRACH: Initially there was some doubt about whether the games would proceed. Even Avery Brundage, who was the President of the American Olympic Committee and who would remain a huge Olympic booster for many, many years—he became known as “The Games Must Go On” Brundage—even he said that if Nazi Germany did not respect the Olympic creed, the Olympic ideals that said that any athlete should participate regardless of color or class or creed, then it might be problematic. There was a lot of fear; actually, initially, that there would be a problem with the competition of African American athletes, and this was going to be the first year in which there was a quite sizeable contingent of African American athletes going to the games. There was also the information coming out of Germany that German Jewish athletes were not going to be allowed to compete and that Diem and Lewald, who I already mentioned, who had some Jewish family members, that they were not going to be allowed to continue to hold the positions that they had organizing the games. The International Olympic Committee was seeking assurances of this from Nazi Germany that they would allow Lewald and Diem to participate and that there would not be any bars against competition for individual athletes.
JERRY FOWLER: The Nazi government gave these assurances?
SUSAN BACHRACH: Brundage went on a very controlled tour of Germany in which he talked to people, and he was sufficiently reassured by that. They made some reassurances about Lewald and Diem, and they also made some other reassuring gestures. They included some very token athletes; one in the Winter Olympics, Rudi Ball, who is an ice skater, who is part Jewish, and Helen Mayer in the Summer Olympics who, I think her father was Jewish; token measures to assuage the fears, and this was enough to convince many people, not only in America but in some other countries where there is talk of a boycott to go forward. There were some very, very important boycott efforts in the United States, and I think that a lot of people do not realize that when it came down to the vote about participation, it was really extraordinarily close.
JERRY FOWLER: The vote by whom? The American Olympic Committee?
SUSAN BACHRACH: That would have been at the Amateur Athletic Union that was one of the deciding organizations in terms of participation, and it is generally accepted by scholars that Brundage was successful in maneuvering that vote to get the results that he wanted. I think the boycott, once the United States and the world went to the Games, the boycott was completely forgotten, but actually our research for the exhibition showed that there had been a very important protest, that there were individual athletes in the United States who decided that they would not compete in the trials that would qualify them to go to the Olympics, and so forth. There was even, one of the American members of the International Olympic Committee, Ernest Lee Yankee, who was the son of German Protestant immigrants to the United States was kicked off the International Olympic Committee for his public statement in opposition to the games, and he spoke about the Nazis’ sordid exploitation of the Games for the political and financial profit of the regime. That was the first time that someone had ever been expelled from the International Olympic Committee.
JERRY FOWLER: You have kind of touched on what was going to be my next question. How did the Nazi government view the games? What was the importance of hosting the Games to them?
SUSAN BACHRACH: They definitely thought as a means to an end; they were certainly not internationalists, far from it, and initially there was talk among Nazi zealots in Germany that Germany should not host the games after Hitler took power, but Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s minister of propaganda, very quickly convinced him that this would have immense propaganda value, both to consolidate internal domestic support, and in 1936 in Germany, Hitler was still consolidating internal support as well as to garner international prestige. Hosting this major international sporting event always confers upon the host country.
JERRY FOWLER: It had the effect, and it was part of their goal, to legitimize the regime both internally and externally.
SUSAN BACHRACH: Exactly.
JERRY FOWLER: Let us follow up a little bit on some of the conditions that you were talking about that the Nazis ostensibly agreed to. First, with regard to Lewald and Diem, did they continue to participate? What ultimately happened to them?
SUSAN BACHRACH: They did continue to participate. Diem, after the war actually, continued to have an important role in the world of German sports. He is actually considered one of the greatest sports historians of the 20th century. I think his own history though, actually, in terms of his relationship to the Nazi regime is a little more checkered than a lot of people realize. This has never been fully researched, but I actually think that he may have been himself a little tainted by some of his acts, not necessarily in terms of the Olympics, but other actions during the Nazi years. Lewald died soon after the war, but nothing happened to him during the war.
JERRY FOWLER: In terms of German Jewish athletes—I think you touched on this very briefly—were Jews allowed to participate on the German Olympic team?
SUSAN BACHRACH: It was done in a very special way. There were training camps for German athletes that were training to qualify; there are always qualifying events, and separate inferior training camps were set up for Jewish athletes. For example, we had an ironic picture in the exhibition that showed Jewish athletes clearing a potato field that was to be turned into a sports field. One of the leading German Jewish athletes; her name was Gretel Bergmann, and her father recognized that these were not good conditions for training, and so her family was able to send her to England to train there and to compete there freely. She did hope to compete in the 1936 Games; she thought she was going to be included on the team, but as she always says—and she has written a fascinating memoir about this—on the day that the American athletes’ ship sailed for Europe, she received a letter saying that she was not going to be allowed to participate on the team. In the end, she was not allowed to compete.
JERRY FOWLER: What about American Jewish athletes?
SUSAN BACHRACH: That is an interesting story. Again, I was very surprised to learn when we did research for the exhibition that there were a number of American Jewish athletes that would have probably qualified, based on what we know about their times for sprinting and the level of their competition—it is always hard to tell because there were these qualifying events—who refused to participate in them. There was somewhat of an organized effort to educate American athletes about what was going on in Nazi Germany. For example, there were two Harvard athletes whose story we told in the exhibit, and I tell in the book, who were approached by a rabbi, and after that meeting they decided that they simply would not participate in the trials. The names of those athletes were Milton Green and his roommate, Norman Connors. There was also a Tulane athlete, Herman Neugass, who was one of the country’s best sprinters; in fact, the Olympic track and field coach, Lawson Robertson, wrote a letter to Herman Neugass trying to convince him to compete in the trials, and he said, “I want to tell you that we take seven sprinters—that is three for the 100 meters and four for the short relay. I am quite certain that there are not seven people who can beat you,” but Neugass did not go. He had heard about the September 1935 Nuremberg Racial Laws that were directed at Jews. He wrote the New Orleans Times Picayune that he had been informed on what he believed to be unimpeachable authority that German pledges of non-discrimination among the athletes of that country had not been kept. He thought it was his duty not to participate in the Olympic Contest. There were also examples of Canadian athletes, and athletes from other countries. One of the more interesting Canadian athletes was Sammy Luftspring; I think he may still be alive actually. He was a boxer, and he wrote a remarkable letter to the Toronto Globe, very prescient, saying that the German government was treating its Jewish brothers and sisters worse than dogs. He even said that Germany would exterminate Jews if they had the opportunity. I think it is quite remarkable. During our research we even found examples of non-Jewish athletes. There was an American speed skater who decided not to compete in the Winter Olympics.
JERRY FOWLER: Which were also held in Germany?
SUSAN BACHRACH: Yes, in Garmisch and Partenkirchen. There was a very organized—and to some degree, successful—effort to convince athletes not to go, to educate them about what was going on. These athletes, of course, have been completely forgotten in history, but I think in some ways they were courageous. I do not think that the Olympic Games had quite the cache in 1936, from the athletes I talked to, including athletes that went; it was in the days before television and so forth. The Olympic Games were still relatively new. They hardly new what they were getting into; they were basically following the directions of their college coaches largely.
JERRY FOWLER: Many Americans, when they think back to the 1936 Olympics, they think about the great triumphs of Jesse Owens, the great African American runner. It is somewhat ironic, of course, since the Nazi regime was a racist regime, but at the same time, Jesse Owens and all African Americans were suffering from racism in America.
SUSAN BACHRACH: Yes, I think that if there is one thing that Americans remember about those Olympics, it is about Jesse Owens’ remarkable athletic feats, and these were great accomplishments. He won four gold medals—three individual golds in the 100, 200 meter and the long jump, and a team gold in the 4 by 100 relay—he became a model for later black American athletes such as Carl Lewis and Wilma Rudolph. He was extraordinarily popular even in Germany. He was really one of the great sports celebrities of that era, but it is ironic that he and his fellow African American Olympians came back to America and things really had not changed to the point that Mac Robinson, who was a sprinter and the brother of Jackie Robinson, the famous baseball player, he said, “At least in Germany we did not have to sit in the back of the bus.” The façade of hospitality was quite, quite successful, and this is another important point, the way that Nazi Germany was able to control perceptions about the Games by controlling the media and by press directives, and this was far from the opposite of a free press; there were even directives that respect should be shown to Negros in the press, that these were American citizens, they were guests of Germany; everything was done so as not to destroy this image of hospitality that Germany presented to the outside world.
JERRY FOWLER: Then it turned out that the 1936 Olympics were the last for twelve years.
SUSAN BACHRACH: That is right. After the games, which by the way—another thing I think a lot of Americans do not realize—is that if you are going to do a medal count, Germany won more medals in those games than the United States, even though the United States did dominate in track and field. It was universally acclaimed to be the most wonderfully organized Olympics to date, so that even original proponents of the boycott were just waxing elegant about Germany and thinking that maybe it had a change of heart, but of course, quickly after the Games, things returned to normal. There had been a lull in the anti-Jewish campaign that stopped; there had been a temporary lull in Nazi Germany’s ambitions for territorial aggrandizement, and of course, in March of 1938, German troops marched into Austria; in March of 1939 into the Czech land, and September 1st, 1939, German forces invaded Poland and that was the beginning of World War II. The Games, as you said, were interrupted for a number of years.
JERRY FOWLER: I have been speaking with my colleague Susan Bachrach, an historian at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum about the Nazi Olympics of 1936. Susan, thanks for taking the time to be with us.
SUSAN BACHRACH: Thank you; my pleasure.
