Berlin Games (5 page)

The British stance may have seemed like fence-sitting, but it was anything but. On New Year's Day, 1934, Lord Aberdare wrote to Lewald, demanding to know whether the German government was ‘keeping the spirit of its promise' and whether the Jews were being ‘reinstated to their previous positions in the world of sport in Germany'. Furthermore, he enquired as to the fate of four specific Jewish sportsmen, all of whom had lost their positions–the championship tennis player Daniel Prenn; Dr Nussbaum of Munich, a water-polo referee; J. Stern of Berlin, the secretary of the International Diving Committee; and Walther Binner, the honorary secretary of the Deutscher Schwimm Verband. Aberdare demanded a reply by 2 February, the date of the next BOA meeting.

Lewald had to take notice of Aberdare's letter. The British were important for the Olympics, as at that time Britain was seen as the cradle of world sports. It was in Britain that the notion of ‘fair play' was established, and it was from Britain that so many sports originated. If Britain did not go to the Games, then many other nations would follow suit. If both the United States and Britain boycotted the Games, then the event would surely have been scuppered. Lewald's reply was strident. After claiming that the three German members of
the IOC and Tschammer und Osten were ‘desirous' to conform with the Vienna meeting, he went on the attack, saying that the fate of the sportsmen Aberdare wrote about was of no consequence in respect of the Germans' promise. ‘I do not feel obliged to reply in detail to these questions,' he wrote. ‘As they are, however, typical for quite wrong informations of the British Olympic Council, I shall do so.' Lewald then dealt with each of the Jewish sportsmen in turn, claiming that Nussbaum had resigned voluntarily and that Stern had been corrupt. Binner was not Jewish, so that should not concern them, and as tennis was not an Olympic sport, the fate of Prenn was irrelevant. Lewald's claims were groundless, and in order to mask their weakness he waved the problem away as an irrelevance.

This last sentence was extraordinarily callous. Lewald's argument appeared to be that because Jews played only a minority role in sporting life, then their feelings could be ignored. In fact, it was hardly surprising that German Jews had not excelled in sports, because, by Lewald's own admission
in that same letter
, ‘quite a great number of German Athletic Clubs […] followed since their foundation–40 or 50 years ago–the principle not to accept Jewish members'.

Lewald's tactic paid off, however. On 5 February Aberdare adopted a far more conciliatory tone, and thanked Lewald for taking the trouble to deal with each of the sportsmen in turn. Aberdare said that, as a result he felt sure ‘that my confidential utterance to the B.O. Council has improved the situation enormously'. As the BOA's minutes no longer exist, the precise nature of Aberdare's utterance can only be guessed at, but it would be fair to assume that it would have been based on the information in Lewald's letter, and would therefore have attempted to placate any doubters on the council. For the time being, the Nazis could rest easy. There would be no more talk of boycott, at least not for a while.

 

One name that Lord Aberdare should have included in his New Year's Day letter to Lewald was that of a fencer called Helene Mayer, who was regarded as one of the most impressive athletes in the world. At the age of seventeen, she won gold at the 1928 Olympics in Amsterdam. At the Los Angeles Games, she came fifth, but that was seen as an uncharacteristically poor performance. What few knew at the time was that two hours before the finals she was informed that her boyfriend had been one of the sixty-nine men who had drowned when the German navy schooner the
Niobe
was accidentally sunk. At 5 foot 10 inches, weighing 150 pounds and with long golden hair, the imposing Mayer was nicknamed the Golden ‘He' (pronounced ‘Hay') by the German public. ‘The whole world loves her!' gushed one commentator. ‘The most stark contrasts come together in a strangely unopposed way in this blonde girl–sinews and grace, energy and naiveté, gruffness and elegance.' She was, to many, the embodiment of all the ‘Aryan' virtues, a potential poster girl for any Nazi propagandist wishing to find the ideal Germanic woman. There was a problem with the Golden He, however, a problem very much like that suffered by Lewald: her father, a prominent doctor, was a Jew.

Before the Nazis came to power, neither Mayer nor her ranks of fans regarded her Jewish heritage as an issue. Although her birth certificate identified her as
Israelitischen
, neither Mayer nor her family were practising Jews. She grew up in Offenbach am Main, a genteel suburb of Frankfurt, and her childhood was dominated by sport rather than by faith. Hours were spent fencing with her older brother, Eugen, and with Offenbach being the home of fencing in Germany, Mayer's talents were noticed when she was as young as ten. In 1923, at the age of thirteen, she won the German National Youth Championship. The following year she came second in the senior championship, and in 1925 she won it, as she would do for the next six years.

Mayer went to the Schiller School in Frankfurt, where her classmates remembered her with some affection. Despite being a figure of international renown, Mayer seemed to have adopted few airs and graces. ‘What was striking was that her success in sports did not make her snooty or arrogant,' one classmate remembered. ‘When she occasionally did tell us something about her other life that distinguished
her from us, she talked about it in a very matter-of-fact way.' Mayer's other distinguishing feature was of course her Jewishness. Her father was determined not to allow it to become an issue, however, so when Mayer started school he wrote to the headmaster requesting that his daughter be excused participation in Jewish religious instruction.

Mayer's winning of the gold at Amsterdam in 1928 naturally made her a star, not just at school, but throughout Germany. Although the praises poured on her were justifiably fulsome, some were tinged with references to her Jewishness. In September, Mayer's headmaster received a letter from a professor enquiring as to her faith. The headmaster replied that although his student was indeed of the Jewish faith, that ‘says nothing about her race affiliation, because one look at a picture of Helene Mayer shows every knowledgeable person where things stand. As is sometimes the case, she mendels completely to the aryan side'. (‘Mendels' was a reference to Gregor Mendel, the plant geneticist, who suggested that offspring adopted the characteristics of the dominant genes within their parents, rather than inheriting a simple fifty-fifty split.) It is easy to detect a sense of satisfaction in the headmaster's words that Mayer's ‘mendelling' went ‘Aryan'. It is unlikely that he would have had commissioned a portrait of his star pupil to hang in the school's entrance had she looked closer to the anti-Semitic stereotype.

After the Los Angeles Games, Mayer did not return to Germany with her teammates. Instead, she took up a position at Scripps College in California to study foreign languages for two years. With a mere 200 students, Scripps was an exclusive place, an impression reinforced by its bucolic campus nestling beneath the San Gabriel Mountains. Mayer fitted in well there, setting up a fencing club, which was a great success. ‘She has persuaded the whole college to follow her own love of this sport, which is indeed as much art as sport,' commented a school magazine.

Hitler's coming to power had little impact on Mayer's life in California. Although she was once heard to have described the new Chancellor as ‘mad, completely mad', Mayer continued her studies and her fencing without any outward shows of concern. According to her fellow students, she made little mention of the persecutions in Germany, although she did acknowledge that her half-Jewishness was problematic. In April 1933, however, Mayer's idyllic bubble was
burst. She was expelled by the Offenbach Fencing Club. The club hid behind an insulting piece of legalese to sugar the pill: ‘Hereupon they [the Mayers] are not suspended, but they are no longer registered as members.' Mayer kept the news to herself, hoping the trouble would blow over. Worse was to come, however. In June her sponsorship from the German government was withdrawn on ‘racial grounds'. Fortunately, Scripps had both the will and the funds to allow her to stay on. All Mayer could do was to keep her head down and hope that the situation in Germany would improve.

 

By the late spring of 1934 Count Baillet-Latour seemed happy with the way the Germans were behaving. At the IOC convention in Athens in May, Lewald and von Halt convinced their fellow members that the promises made at Vienna were being kept. On 26 May Baillet-Latour cabled Brundage to inform him that ‘Lewald [and] Halt have in my opinion settled Jewish question quite satisfactorily […] Hope German invitation shall be accepted now'. His opinion was shared by the IOC's vice-president, Sigfrid Edstrøm, who wrote to Brundage from Italy on 29 May. He began by telling Brundage that the Jewish issue was irrelevant for many of the competing nations: ‘It is only the USA and Great Britain that are concerned [with the Jews]. In these countries, the Jews are very strong and utilise the might that the Ol. Games carry for their own political purposes.' This was a refrain from a letter that Edstrøm had written to Brundage the previous December, in which he had said that ‘the day may come when you will have to stop the activities of the Jews. They are intelligent and unscrupulous. Many of my friends are Jews, so you must not think I am against them, but they must be kept within certain limits.' The suggestion that the move to boycott the Games was a Zionist plot was being sown in Brundage's mind. Edstrøm went on to claim that ‘German Jews of both sexes are invited to prepare themselves for the Games and take part if they can qualify'. It was a big ‘if'. No longer allowed to be members of clubs, Jews were denied the facilities and coaches that were available to non-Jewish athletes.

Edstrøm then went on to address a subject very dear to Brundage–membership of the IOC. As head of the American Olympic Committee, Brundage was not automatically a member of the powerful international committee, a position he desperately sought. Apart from
General Sherrill, the other two American members of the IOC were Colonel William May Garland and Commodore Ernest Lee Jahncke, a former assistant secretary of the navy. An outsider in terms of the sporting establishment, Jahncke was not much liked by many of his fellow IOC members. They were desperate to oust him and replace him with someone far more fitting–Brundage. ‘As regards the third member of Int. Ol. Com. for the USA,' Edstrøm wrote, ‘your election is clear as soon as Jahncke resigns. He has paid his dues and took part in the meeting at Los Angeles. Being thus a member in good standing nothing can be done at present. We shall have to wait.'

The Swede was not clear as to why Jahncke might wish to resign, or what could be done to him. Nevertheless, Brundage knew that if he wanted to succeed him, then he would have to do exactly as the president and the vice-president wished. With the two men looking benevolently on Germany, Brundage decided that he would change his opinion to coincide with theirs. It was nothing more than toadying. From this moment on, Brundage would do everything in his power to ensure that his masters were satisfied, and the best way he could do that was to ensure American participation at Berlin. Had Brundage not been so personally ambitious, then a boycott would have been, if not inevitable, certainly more likely. Nevertheless, the road to Berlin was long, and it was to be heavy going.

Brundage's first task was to go to Germany at the behest of the American Olympic Association, a decision that had been taken in February. His mission was to examine the conditions of Jewish sportsmen and women, and to report back with a recommendation as to what course of action the Association should take. Even before he left in July, Brundage left people in little doubt what decision he would reach. ‘The German committee is making every effort to provide the finest facilities and plans to reproduce the Los Angeles Olympic village,' he wrote in an issue of the
Olympic News
. ‘We should see in the youth at Berlin the forebears of a race of free, independent thinkers accustomed to the democracy of sport; a race disdainful of sharp practice, tolerant of the rights of others and practicing the Golden Rule because it believes in it.'

Before Brundage arrived in Germany, he attended the International Association of Athletics Federations' meeting in Stockholm
in August. There, at Edstrøm's villa outside Stockholm, Vestoraäs, he saw Carl Diem, whom he had met before in 1929 when Diem and Lewald were on a five-week tour of the United States. There then followed a lunch in Stockholm with Lewald, Diem, von Halt and Justus W. Meyerhof, a Jewish member of the Berlin Sports Club and the IAAF. Meyerhof appeared to have behaved himself, as Diem was delighted by the way the lunch had gone. ‘We showed Brundage documents indicating that the Jews are able to participate freely in sports and to train for the Olympic team,' he wrote. ‘Meyerhof told us that he had offered to resign from the Berlin Sports Club but that the resignation had not been accepted. I was seldom as proud of my club as at that moment. Brundage was visibly impressed.' That night, Brundage and his wife had dinner in one of the small cosy dining rooms in the Gyldene Freden restaurant in Stockholm with Diem, von Halt and Edstrøm and his wife. After the women withdrew, Diem was toasted handsomely by Brundage and Edstrøm.

Brundage arrived in Germany at Konigsberg in East Prussia on 12 September. His tour lasted little less than a week, and predictably he was presented with a sanitised version of Nazi Germany. He met Jewish sports leaders, who, under the watchful eyes of Nazi handlers, assured Brundage that conditions were not as the foreign newspapers were suggesting. Brundage was further handicapped by his inability to speak German, so any inferences that the Jewish sportsmen may have made would have been blocked out by the Nazis' interpreters. Brundage also met his old friend von Halt, who assured him that there were no obstacles to Jews making the Olympic team, a pledge echoed by von Tschammer und Osten, with whom the American got on well. By the end of the week, Brundage not only felt content that the Jews were getting a fair deal, but he was also dazzled by the seeming prosperity and order of the new Germany. ‘America could learn much from Germany,' he was to say in a speech eighteen months later. ‘She is efficient and hard working and has spirit.' The notes for the same speech also reveal how deeply Brundage was impressed by the Nazis leadership: