Berlin Games (10 page)

Despite the success of the match and the BOA's resolution, Hunter was jittery. In a subsequent letter, he enclosed a copy of the Association's latest minutes concerning participation, but insisted that Brundage keep them secret. Hunter was not explicit as to why they had to be kept ‘strictly confidential', although he cautioned that ‘we are not out of danger yet'. Unfortunately, the contents of the minutes can only be speculated at, as they were either deliberately destroyed or lost in a later flood at the BOA headquarters. Brundage's copy is not to be found in his collection in the United States. In Britain, portions of the Harold Abrahams collection from around this period are closed to researchers. Hunter was chiefly worried about attacks coming from three camps–‘Church bodies', ‘the labour people' and
‘some Press'. His tactic was to ‘keep quiet and to work away without publicity'. No doubt there was something in the minutes that would have enraged one or more of those camps. It is quite possible that the BOA may have made some form of clandestine deal with Tschammer und Osten, Lewald and Diem while they were in Britain. Whatever the truth, it is clear that Hunter wanted to hide something. Unfortunately for him, the following months would be anything but quiet.

On Friday, 6 December, while he was in London, Carl Diem wrote in his diary: ‘Today, the American Olympic Committee is meeting in New York to decide the question of its participation in the Olympic Games.' Perhaps it was nervousness which compelled Diem to make this uncharacteristic error–he of course meant the AAU. Although the British were being compliant, Diem knew that the Americans were divided. Despite Brundage's assurances that he could deliver the correct result, the vote was anything but predictable. Brundage was nervous as well, arriving in New York from Chicago a day earlier than expected. There was much lobbying to do in the wide corridors of the Hotel Commodore. Brundage was nevertheless outwardly bullish, saying that even if the vote went against him, neither the AOC nor the IOC would be moved.

Jeremiah Mahoney convened the executive committee of fifteen delegates that Friday afternoon. Their task was to vote on the resolution that called for the AAU to refuse to send its members to Berlin. Their vote would not be final–but its result would be a useful indicator for the two hundred or so delegates who would have the final say. The meeting was short, but bitter. Brundage said that the AAU had no business deliberating on a matter that was the business only of the AOC. Mahoney abruptly overruled him. Some of Brundage's placemen, in the form of the AAU's foreign relations committee, joined the meeting and stated that it was not for the executive committee to decide on participation, but for them to do so. Mahoney overruled them as well. A vote was then taken. Seven delegates voted against the resolution to boycott the Games. There was one abstention, leaving six votes cast in favour. Brundage was delighted, and declared that the resolution had been defeated, squashed before it had even been put to the rest of the AAU. Mahoney was too wily for that,
and said that he as chair would now vote. This made the vote seven against seven. The seven anti-boycotters shouted, ‘Tammany methods! Tammany methods!' but Mahoney had his way. It was agreed that the resolution should be put to the remaining delegates ‘without recommendation'. The next day's meeting was bound to be a stormy one.

The two hundred delegates assembled at nine o'clock the following morning. Prior to the meeting, a gentleman's agreement had been reached, in which each side allowed the other two hours to state its case. The meeting descended into chaos, however, with insults and accusations of ‘parliamentary trickery' being hurled to and fro across the floor. Amendments and counter-amendments were tabled, and by the end of the session no clear decision had been reached. It was remarkable that a tone of relative civility reigned during that evening's dinner, at which the delegates deliberately chose not to discuss the Olympic issue.

At 9.30 on the morning of Sunday 8th, the delegates reconvened. Five hours of speeches ensued, before it was eventually agreed to vote on an amended resolution that incorporated a provision for a three-man investigative team to be sent to Germany. This was the key vote. If the AAU voted against participation, the boycotters would have won a crucial battle. Brundage's ‘Plan B' would have to come into effect, and with the majority of the AAU against him, it would have been hard for the AOC to ignore their wishes without looking arrogant and out of touch.

The count came in. The quirkiness of AAU voting methodology meant that there were quarter-votes to cast. Out of 114 votes, 55.75 were cast for the resolution, 58.25 voted against it. With a mere 2.5 votes between the factions, it could scarcely have been closer. Nevertheless, despite the margin, it was a clear result, a result that saw Mahoney resign. ‘I bow to the will of the majority,' he said, ‘but I could not in good conscience carry it out. When conditions change in Germany, the evidence will change my views.' He was replaced by none other than a beaming Avery Brundage. He had delivered what Baillet-Latour and Edstrøm had wanted. With Jahncke's position on the IOC now looking fragile, Brundage must have thought that his ascension was imminent.

A few days later, he received a letter from the Olympic president. ‘I congratulate you very sincerely on the issue of your struggle with
the Mahoney group,' Baillet-Latour wrote. ‘You have fighted [
sic
] like a lion and deserve great praise for your achievement. I realise that you have not reached yet the end of your troubles. The money is still to be found. But you have saved the principle and succeeded in having the sporting spirit defeating the politic aims of our enemies.' A satisfied Brundage wrote back to Baillet-Latour in the new year. It was evident that he saw his victory not just in sporting terms. ‘It became far more than a matter of sport,' he wrote, ‘it was really a test case on a national issue.'

Brundage was right. The American sports world had not only believed the Nazis, but it had appeased them, a stance that was being adopted by the worlds of politics and diplomacy. For Hitler, the Olympics were another game of bluff, another game that he had won. The next stage of the game would be played out at a couple of small villages in the Bavarian mountains.

T
HE OLYMPIC YEAR
was greeted by the
Reich Sports Journal
in typical Nazi militaristic fashion. ‘How much goodwill, how much time, hard work and personal sacrifice on the part of thousands of Germans and friends of the German people have been necessary in the past year to–yes, to fight the battle that we now have behind us and to prepare for the coming decisive warfare of the new year.' The journal was referring not only to preparation for the Summer Olympics, but also for the imminent Winter Olympics, which were due to open at Garmisch-Partenkirchen on 6 February. The citizens of ‘Ga-Pa' were preparing themselves for an almighty invasion of athletes and visitors, and by early January the villages were already festooned with countless swastikas and Olympic flags.

The preparation involved more than just hanging up bunting, however. A new ski-jump had been built, which boasted a 142-foot tower that overlooked a new 15,000-capacity stadium. The two entrances to the stadium were flanked by two huge pillars, on the faces of which were mounted 25-feet high Greek figures, one of which was holding the German eagle in her left hand–a sculptural blend of Olympism and Nazism. A new 10,000-seater ice stadium had also been constructed, its surface artificially frozen so it could be used all year round. Everything had been tested in 1935 for the national championships, and all the facilities had performed admirably. There was only one thing that was lacking, one thing that no amount of organisation could produce–snow.

If the German Olympic Committee feared one thing more than a boycott, then it was the foehn, a warm wind that habitually visited Garmisch, erasing its slopes of snow. At the beginning of January, the foehn had been doing its unwelcome work, and the resort was beset
by a warm drizzle. The slopes, far from being covered with several feet of beautifully compacted snow, were adorned with brown-grey runs of slush. The GOC feared a repeat of the 1932 Winter Olympics held at Lake Placid, New York, in which the weather had been so warm that it looked as if the Games would have to be abandoned. Some thought the Winter Games were in fact cursed–those held at Chamonix in 1924 were often described as a ‘swimming contest'.

While the Germans were worrying about the weather, the Americans were worrying about money. With the cost of sending the US team to the Summer Games estimated at around $350,000, there was little money left to finance a vast winter team. As it was, the team was some seventy strong, and all of them had to be put up in the Husar Hotel and the Post House Hotel for around $35 ($464 in 2005) for dinner, bed and breakfast. Perhaps aware of the steepness of the price, the German Organising Committee hand-wringingly attempted to mollify the Americans by claiming that it was ‘a special pleasure for us to choose the hotels for your Olympic team and that no other nation will be better lodged'.

Economies were required, and the AOC decided that the less able athletes on the team would have to pay their own way. One of them was Albert Lincoln ‘Link' Washburn, who was entered for the Combined Downhill and Slalom. The twenty-four-year-old Washburn had been brought up in New Hampshire, and had spent much of his boyhood skiing in the White Mountains around Hanover. In September, Washburn received a letter from the AOC, informing him that it was ‘unable to advance any money towards your expenses', but that he would be allowed to join the team if he could pay his way to and from Germany. The cost would be $400, some $5,350 in 2005. Fortunately, Washburn's family had the money–his father had been a distinguished diplomat–and he was able to tell the AOC that he could go. Economies had also been made with the uniforms. When Robert Livermore, one of Washburn's fellow skiers, received his uniform, he remarked in his diary that it was ‘quite useless for skiing'. It consisted of ‘light blue knickerbockers of a cheap gabardine, blue sweat shirts with USA on the front, turtle-neck jerseys, a cap that looks like a New Hampshire farmer's, and a skater's headpiece!' Livermore did, however, approve of the ‘very fine' greatcoats, which were from the US Naval
Academy and emblazoned with an Olympic shield on the breast pocket. Avery Brundage did not care for them, and thought they made the athletes resemble ‘street-car conductors'.

The AOC had other worries as well. With the fallout from the bad-tempered AAU convention still in the air, the AOC was concerned that some of its athletes might not show the Germans the right amount of respect when they were in Garmisch. On 6 January, Gustavus Kirby, the AOC's treasurer, wrote to Carl Diem telling him that he had heard from an anonymous source that ‘there will be some who will be out both to make trouble and bring themselves notoriety–some one, let us say, who would jump up in a public place and cry out “Down with the Nazis” or “To Hell With Hitler” '. Kirby anticipated that if such an event did happen, and if the offending athlete were thrown into prison, then he would be made a martyr by the pro-boycott movement. He also warned Diem against any German ‘over-radical elements' at Garmisch insulting the Jewish members of the American team, because that too would help the boycotters. Kirby ended the letter by asking Diem to convey his best wishes to his ‘good friends' Lewald and ‘von Holst'.

If the budget for the American team was tight, for the British it was even tighter. In fact, the Winter Games were costing the BOA almost nothing, as it was not paying any expenses to athletes whatsoever. It was felt that Britons who were capable of competing were clearly already rich enough to travel, as they wouldn't have been able to learn their sports in Britain. The secretary of the BOA, Evan Hunter, held a pretty low opinion of the event, a view he shared with Brundage in December, when he told him: ‘I wish there were no winter sports on the Olympics.' For the British, they were almost an inconvenience, and Hunter hoped that he didn't have to go. Nevertheless, he did have to, a decision that was clearly taken at the last moment, as he had no hotel booked. ‘The hotels are absolutely packed,' he wrote to Brundage on 16 January, ‘but of course they must find me a bed somewhere.' He also proudly told the American that he had purchased a new plus-four suit, ‘which I am sure if friend Hitler sees he will immediately produce an iron cross from his hip pocket and present it to me!!'

The Olympians started to arrive in Garmisch a good two to three weeks before the Games. Many were struck by the picture-postcard
prettiness of the place. ‘There is a touch of comic opera in all things Upper Bavarian,' wrote one correspondent. ‘The chromatic towns in the valleys, the Werdenfelser Alps that are almost majestic but somehow not quite large enough to provide a sense of Alpine solemnity, are all part of a slightly fantastic picture.' Garmisch itself was a maze of pretty timbered buildings, its cosy coffee houses luring tourists with a calorific selection of torte and strudel. The one element that everybody noticed was the abundance of swastika flags, which hung from every pole, lamp-post and balcony. The athletes had little time to take in the sights, however. Despite the lack of snow, they managed to practise on some of the higher slopes. The Americans and the British soon found themselves to be hopelessly outclassed by the Scandinavians. While the likes of Robert Livermore were working out just how to ski over bumps, the Norwegian Ruud brothers, Sigmund and Birger, were dazzling them with their skills. ‘Those two are amazing in their ability, to stand up on impossible bumps at high speed,' Livermore wrote on 20 January. ‘Hunter [Edgar H. Hunter, an American skier] made a really good “boner” when Birger came hurtling down from the gully, across the little bridge, and jumped through the air off a bump, landing on his side. Instead of crumpling like an ordinary runner, he bounced back into position and ended up in a jump-turn on his feet.'

Birger Ruud was one of the most impressive alpine sportsmen of the last century, and at Garmisch he would compete in both the Combined Downhill and Slalom and the jumping, for which he had won the gold medal at Lake Placid. Livermore found himself in a practice race alongside the Norwegian and described the experience as somewhat depressing.

Out of the 32 runners, Livermore came 24th. He was by no means the worst of the Americans–four of his teammates came 26th, 28th, 29th and 30th. It was no surprise to find that Livermore regarded it as ‘a bad day for the American team, but I think very good medicine'.

While the athletes trained, there were others who were also warming up. Despite a warning from Gustavus Kirby that the Germans were not to use the Winter Olympics to promote the Nazi regime, Walther Funk, the state secretary under Goebbels at the Propaganda Ministry, ignored him. At a reception for several hundred members of the press in Garmisch on 4 February, Funk laid into the foreign journalists for not presenting the ‘true' side of Nazi Germany. ‘Use this opportunity', he demanded, ‘to learn the truth about Germany. The Reich Government's press bureau will place at your disposal trained aides and guides.' The regime insisted that it had nothing to hide. Visitors were even welcome at Dachau concentration camp, ‘where they will be convinced that we are detaining nothing but gangsters', said Adolf Wagner, the Bavarian minister of the interior. In case there was any doubt that the Nazis regarded the Games as a vehicle for self-promotion, Funk declared that ‘when the new Olympic era is to dawn in the world, Germany must be its centre'.

This was brazen stuff. No doubt one of the offending journalists Funk had in mind was the distinguished William Shirer, the Berlin bureau chief of the American Universal News Service. A few days before, Shirer had been telephoned by Wilfred Bade, a zealous young Nazi in charge of the foreign press at the Propaganda Ministry who was also a member of the organising committee for the Winter Olympics. Bade upbraided Shirer for writing a story concerning the removal of anti-Jewish signs during the Games, which Shirer described as simply a method of hiding what was really happening to the Jews. Bade accused Shirer of lying, which Shirer naturally denied. By noon, the Nazi airwaves were beasting the American, denouncing him as a ‘dirty Jew' (he was neither), and claiming that he wanted to scupper the Winter Games. Shirer repeatedly tried to call Bade, who was constantly ‘out'. By nine o'clock that evening, an apoplectic Shirer stormed over to the ministry to find Bade sitting at his desk. The journalist insisted on an apology, a request that went down badly. ‘He started to roar at me,' Shirer recalled. ‘I roared back, though in
moments of excitement I lose what German I speak and probably was most incoherent.' The slanging match grew so loud that a pair of concerned underlings interrupted them. Bade shooed them out, and the shouting recommenced. The meeting ended in the same tone in which it started, and by the time Shirer got down to Garmisch, he was to find himself a marked man.

Shirer was right about the signs, of course. The Nazis had not, however, managed to remove all of them. Some were noticed by none other than Count Baillet-Latour as he drove to Garmisch to open the Games. The IOC president was furious, and as soon as he arrived he asked to see Hitler. The German leader was adamant that he would not change German policy just to suit Olympic protocol, but Baillet-Latour was equally stubborn and threatened to cancel both the Winter and Summer Olympics. ‘Hitler began to talk glibly,' observed one bystander, ‘exciting himself more and more while staring at a corner of the ceiling. Soon he seemed oblivious to the presence of his companion and it was almost as though he was in a trance.' The two men both went silent for a few minutes. It was Hitler who broke it, by shouting out, ‘You will be satisfied! The orders will be given.' He then stormed out of the room. Although Baillet-Latour was content, the conversation should have made him wary of Hitler's promises. Nevertheless, Baillet-Latour had executed a deft piece of brinkmanship. There was no way Hitler could have suffered a cancellation of the Games at such a late stage–the loss of Nazi face would have been incalculable.

On 5 February, the day before the Games opened, snow began to fall. The Nazis' luck was in–the dreaded foehn had gone. The opening ceremony was held in a near-blizzard, although this did not stop some fifty to sixty thousand assembling for the ceremony, either crowding into the stadium or thronging outside it. Although many were excited by the ten days' sport that lay ahead of them, most of the crowd were more thrilled by the imminent arrival of the star of the show–Adolf Hitler. The spectators could hear the cheers greeting Hitler, quiet at first, and then increasing in volume, as his train from Munich approached. ‘You could hear the “
Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil!
” coming up the valley when he arrived,' Albert Washburn recalled. For the few American visitors, it was hard not to get caught up in the
excitement–Washburn even stuck his arm out. His wife, Tahoe Washburn, did the same. ‘Just hearing the sound gave you gooseflesh,' she said. ‘A million people all yelling “Heil Hitler!” I had my own hand up going “
Sieg Heil!
” and I had to force it back down!' The Fuehrer, hatless and wearing a somewhat battered old trench coat, had overshadowed the event before it had started.

Hitler did not come alone. He brought with him Nazi heavyweights such as Goering, Goebbels, that most vicious of anti-Semites Julius Streicher, Minister of the Interior Frick, and Minister of War Field Marshal Werner von Blomberg. Not one of these men would be alive a decade later. Goering would poison himself in his cell in Nuremberg during the war crimes trial, in which Streicher and Frick were tried and subsequently executed. Blomberg, who was exiled during the war, was detained at Nuremberg to serve as a witness, yet he died of natural causes while there. Hitler and Goebbels would famously take their own lives in the
Fuehrerbunker
during the battle for Berlin. With the possible exception of Blomberg, the men who now joined Baillet-Latour at 10.50 that morning were criminals, men who needed the Games to give their new regime legitimacy.