Berlin Games (2 page)

W
ITH ITS GRAND
classical façade, the town hall in Barcelona makes a suitable setting for momentous decisions. Gathered there on the morning of Sunday, 26 April 1931, were twenty men, all of whom had breakfasted well and were ready to discuss the most important matter on the agenda of their two-day meeting–the venue for the 1936 Olympic Games. The men were members of the International Olympic Committee, and this, their twenty-eighth annual meeting, was chaired by the committee's president, the fifty-five-year-old Count Henri de Baillet-Latour. The Belgian had been a member of the IOC since 1903, just nine years after it had been created to establish the first of the modern Olympic Games in Greece in 1896. A former diplomat and a keen horseman, Baillet-Latour had successfully organised the 1920 Olympics in Antwerp, a feat that had been regarded as extraordinary as he had only a year to accomplish it in a country that had been ravaged by war. Tall, with balding white hair and a large but trim moustache bristling under a long nose, Baillet-Latour commanded much respect from his fellow members of the IOC.

Also present were three men who hoped to gain much from the meeting. Their names were State Excellency Dr Theodor Lewald, Dr Karl Ritter von Halt and the Count de Vallellano. Lewald and von Halt were both German members of the IOC, and they felt confident that Berlin, after years of lobbying, would be awarded the prize. Nevertheless, Vallellano, a representative of the Spanish Olympic Committee and a powerful financier with his own palace in Madrid, was hopeful that the IOC members would award the 1936 Games to Barcelona.

Although Berlin and Barcelona were the two front-runners for the prize, there were two other potential candidates for host city–Budapest
and Rome. After an introduction by Baillet-Latour, the first members to speak were two Italian members of the IOC, General Carlo Montu and Count Bonacossa. To the relief of the Germans and the Spaniard, they told the meeting that 1936 was not the right time for Rome to host the Games, but they begged the committee to consider the city at some future date. The next to speak was the Hungarian, Senator Jules de Muzsa, who instead of lobbying for his capital spoke in favour of Berlin, much to the delight of Lewald and von Halt.

Lewald then addressed the meeting. For him, that Sunday morning was the potential culmination of nearly two decades of intense effort to get the Games staged in Germany. A member of the IOC since 1924, Lewald had also been head of the German Organising Committee that had been planning the 1916 Olympics, which were awarded to Berlin at Stockholm in 1912. The Germans had set to work immediately, and had constructed a magnificent stadium outside Berlin that had been dedicated by the Kaiser in 1913. Surprisingly, the outbreak of war in 1914 did little to damage the chances of the Games being held in Germany. ‘In olden times it happened that it was not possible to celebrate the Games, but they did not for this reason cease to exist,' Baron Pierre de Coubertin, the founder of the modern Olympics and the then president of the IOC, declared in the spring of 1915. In April, the Germans announced that the Games would simply be delayed until the end of the war, a decision agreed by the IOC.

On the 22nd of that month, however, a grey-green cloud was observed by 8,000 French colonial soldiers entrenched north of Ypres in northern France. The cloud was in fact a truly terrifying weapon. It was chlorine gas, and its sinister, billowing appearance caused the soldiers to flee. The Germans, wary of their own gas, failed to capitalise on the French retreat and the gap in the line was quickly reinforced by Allied troops. The deployment of those first few tons of chlorine changed the nature of the war, however, and soon poison gas was used on both sides. As a result of the war losing its ‘gentlemanliness', Coubertin finally felt obliged to cancel the Games.

After the war ended, Lewald was to encounter more disappointments, as Germany was forbidden from taking part in the Games of 1920 and 1924. Nevertheless, along with Dr Carl Diem, his sidekick on the German Olympic Committee, he persisted in lobbying the
IOC, whose new head, Baillet-Latour, was more amenable to their approaches. Lewald's efforts paid off. In 1928, Germany once more competed in the Olympics. Her performance at Amsterdam was stunning; the country came second only to the United States in the tally of medals. With eight gold medals, seven silver and fourteen bronze, Germany had firmly re-established herself as an Olympic power. Naturally, Lewald was determined to capitalise on the German success. In May 1930, the IOC held its congress in Berlin. Setting the tone for the gathering, President Hindenburg declared that ‘physical culture must be a life habit'. But the meeting was more of a showcase for Lewald than the ageing president. If Lewald could sufficiently impress the visiting Olympic dignitaries, then there was a good chance that Berlin might soon host the Games. Lewald was mercenary, even reminding the delegates that it was thanks to the work of German scholars that so much was known about classical Olympism. Rooted in antiquity, Germany was the natural home for the Games, he claimed.

Lewald drew on the same themes at the meeting that Sunday morning in April 1931. As a former under-secretary of state, the seventy-year-old Lewald was used to the sophisticated parley of the committee room. He made the case for Berlin impressively, with no need to draw on the smooth charm of his colleague, the handsome financier and war hero von Halt. Lewald said that Berlin deserved the Games, not least because it had been denied them in 1916, and also because Berlin, being in the heart of Europe, would attract far more visitors than Barcelona. The Count de Vallellano then made the case for Barcelona, and Baillet-Latour called for the votes to be cast.

There was a problem, however, a problem that should have been dealt with sooner. The attendees present did not even constitute half the membership of the IOC, which was nearly sixty strong. In the days before jet aircraft, such a poor showing was by no means uncommon, but with such an important decision at stake, it was decided to wait for the votes of absent members to be mailed or sent by telegram to the IOC headquarters in Lausanne. The votes that had already been cast were sealed. Now there was nothing the IOC could do but wait.

Lewald and his team had to kick their heels for nearly three agonising weeks. At last, on Wednesday, 13 May, the final count was held in the Swiss lakeside town. In the presence of the vice-president of
the IOC, Baron Godfroy de Blonay, and the magistrate of Lausanne, Mr Paul Perret, the envelopes were opened. Eight IOC members, dissatisfied by both cities, abstained. Sixteen votes were cast for Barcelona. Berlin received a commanding forty-three votes, which represented three-quarters of those available. It was a triumphant victory not only for Lewald but also for Germany. The vote signified that thirteen years after the war, she was ready to be readmitted to the pantheon of ‘respectable' nations.

It is easy to underestimate how desperately Germany wanted to be regarded as a civilised country. Since the legal establishment of the Weimar Republic in August 1919, the grip of democracy in Germany was anything but strong. For the twelve years leading up to her being awarded the Olympics, the country suffered a succession of left-wing and right-wing putsches and economic crises. In March 1920, when the new national government was less than year old, a group of far-right paramilitaries–members of the infamous Freikorps–seized Berlin and installed Wolfgang Kapp, a right-wing journalist, as Chancellor. The legitimate government called for a general strike, and within four days the Kapp putsch had failed. It was the left's turn next, and the Ruhr soon fell under the command of a 50,000-strong ‘Red Army'. This was quashed by an amalgam of the regular army and Freikorps units.

On the evening of Thursday, 8 November 1923, yet another putsch was mounted, this time by the fledgling Nazi Party. Under the command of their firebrand thirty-four-year-old leader, Adolf Hitler, and General Erich Ludendorff, the Nazis attempted to seize power in Munich by storming the Buergerbräukeller, where Gustav von Kahr, the Bavarian commissar, was addressing a crowd of 3,000. The Beer Hall Putsch was a failure. Far from being the ‘national revolution' that Hitler announced when he mounted the stage, the attempted coup disintegrated into violent farce. After a night of confusion, Ludendorff decided the following morning that the Nazis should do something proactive and march–although quite where, no one knew. When the column of around two thousand neared the Defence Ministry, shots were fired, resulting in the deaths of four policemen and fourteen insurgents. Hitler was captured and subsequently sentenced to five years in Lansdberg Prison, where, assisted by Rudolf Hess, he wrote
Mein Kampf
.

It was not just political turbulence which threatened the integrity of the Weimar Republic. In 1923, the government defaulted on its reparations payments, demanded by the Treaty of Versailles, and as a result the French and Belgians occupied the Ruhr in January. A series of strikes further damaged the economy, and in order to pay the striking workers their benefits the government decided to print currency. The now infamous hyper-inflation took hold, and by November of that year it required 4,200,000,000,000 marks to buy one dollar. At the beginning of the year the exchange rate had been 4.2 marks to the dollar. Nevertheless, after a revaluation, the situation was brought under control, and until 1929 Germany enjoyed a relatively stable six years.

In 1930, however, Germany was hit by the Great Depression. The political result was a resurgence of extremist parties, and in the election of September 1930 the Nazis became the second-largest party in the Reichstag, holding 107 seats, or 18.3 per cent of the vote. Hitler, who had been released from prison just over a year after the Beer Hall Putsch, ruled his party by means of the
Fuehrerprinzip
, which demanded absolute loyalty to him as leader. His style of leadership appealed not just to established Nazis, but also to the masses of farmers, veterans and members of the middle class who had voted for him. Furthermore, the party's emphasis on ritual, the wearing of uniforms and elaborate ceremony, elevated the image of the party above that of merely another manifestation of the lunatic fringe. To many Germans, the appeal of Nazism lay in its look, which suggested in an almost cultist fashion the virtues of discipline, order and strength.

By the time Theodor Lewald had learned that Berlin had secured the Olympics, 4 million Germans were unemployed. Nevertheless, despite the country reeling punch-drunk from crisis to crisis, Lewald and Diem were not discouraged. Lewald was fortunate to have the vigorous forty-eight-year-old Diem as his colleague. Initially a sporting journalist, Diem had captained the German team that had competed at the Stockholm Olympics of 1912. In 1920, with the backing of Lewald, he founded a university–the Deutsche Hochschule fuer Leibesuebungen–dedicated to the study of sport. What was remarkable was that Diem had no formal education, and yet he was soon to be regarded as a formidable scholar. With his intellectual and organisa
tional abilities, he was a natural choice to become the secretary of the German Olympic Committee.

Like Lewald, Diem was an enthusiastic supporter of Baron Pierre de Coubertin, the founder of the modern Olympics. ‘It will be my most ardent desire to arrange the Olympic Games of 1936 in the spirit as desired by their originator,' he wrote to Coubertin in October 1931. At the age of sixty-eight, Coubertin was living in Lausanne, where he could reflect on his achievement of founding what had become the most successful international sporting event the world had seen. A French educationist and historian, Coubertin believed that sport not only promoted a healthy body but also provided much moral enrichment, a view he had arrived at after observing the British. ‘Since ancient Greece has passed away,' he wrote, ‘the Anglo-Saxon race is the only one that fully appreciates the moral influence of physical culture and gives to this branch of educational science the attention that it deserves.'

Two Anglo-Saxons in particular had influenced Coubertin's thinking. One was Thomas Arnold, the famous headmaster of the British boys' school, Rugby. Although Arnold had died over twenty years before Coubertin's birth, his legacy of combining sport with religion to create boys of ‘character' greatly appealed to Coubertin, who saw the success of schools like Rugby as being vital to the formation of the British Empire. The other Anglo-Saxon was William Brookes, the driving force behind the annual ‘Olympian Games' held in Much Wenlock in Shropshire since 1850. A forerunner to the modern Olympics, Brookes's ‘Olympics' was a village fête that had transmogrified into a significant athletic pageant that attracted much international attention. One of the characteristics of the Shropshire games was their use of ritual and ceremony–laurels were awarded by women to the victors, specially composed music was played, flags with ancient Greek mottoes were hoisted; the Greek king had even donated a silver cup to be awarded at the Games. Although Coubertin never saw the Games, he visited Much Wenlock in October 1890, and he and Brookes struck up a friendship of sorts. Whether Brookes's games alone gave Coubertin the idea for a modern Olympics is unclear, but there is no doubt that he owed a debt to the Englishman. After his visit, Coubertin wrote, ‘If the Olympic Games, that Modern
Greece has not yet been able to revive, still survived today, it is due, not to a Greek, but to Dr W. P. Brookes.'

Four years after his visit to Much Wenlock, in June 1894, Coubertin convened an international congress at the Sorbonne in Paris. It was there that he proposed the revival of the Games, which would draw upon the ancient Greek Olympic ideals of amateurism and fair play. Using a mixture of charm and lavish entertainment, Coubertin convinced a collection of sportsmen and sports educationists of the merits of his idea. The congress decided that the Games should be held every four years, with the first scheduled to take place in Greece in 1896.

On 6 April of that year, the first Olympic Games of the Modern Era were opened in the newly restored Panathenaic Stadium in Athens. Eighty thousand crowded into the stadium, including King George I of Greece, who started the Games with the unashamedly patriotic words: ‘I declare the opening of the first international Olympic Games in Athens. Long live the Nation. Long live the Greek people.' The king had neglected to mention that the representatives of twelve other nations were waiting to compete, having come from as far afield as Australia and the United States to help make the Games a success.