Berlin Games (8 page)

On 26 October, it looked as though the situation had been resolved–Mayer had indeed received and accepted a formal invitation from the Germans. Her reply to Lewald was bizarrely affectionate: ‘Sickness delayed answering you and Tschammer. Acceptance left yesterday. Love. H.' To papers like the
American Hebrew
, Mayer was the victim of Nazi arm-twisting, the threats to her family implicit. ‘There are those who will condemn Miss Helene Mayer accepting the[…] invitation to compete for the Reich under the swastika. […She] will offer the probability that she will win honours of the Fatherland and shame Hitler himself, with the admission that he is wronging the Jews of Germany.'

Like any good fencer, Mayer now sought to strike while she had her opponent on the back foot. Aware that it would be impossible for the Nazis to withdraw their invitation, Mayer told the Germans on 4 November that she demanded full citizenship rights. This sent Lewald into a flurry; he maintained that Mayer had accepted the invitation without any such stipulations. Mayer held her position, and once more insisted that she be granted full citizenship. This was daring, to say the least. In order to formalise the process, she even
approached the German consul-general in San Francisco, who reported his discussion with Mayer to the embassy in Washington on 18 November. ‘She declares she is free of any religion,' Consul Hinrich wrote, ‘and that she has never been in touch with the synagogue community […] She further explained to me that she feels all the more bitter about her present situation because she does not want to have anything to do with Jewish circles and that she regards herself in no way as Jewish nor does she want to be regarded as Jewish by others.'

This had the ring of truth. Mayer had not been brought up as a Jew, and her identification with the Jewish faith had been non-existent. Culturally, as well as anatomically, she had ‘mendelled' into an Aryan. There was, however, something distasteful about her brusque disavowal of her heritage. Unlike Bergmann, who was keen to compete to show Hitler that his racial policies were bunkum, Mayer's ambition was purely personal. Her plea to the consul was clearly convincing, because he recommended that Mayer's citizenship be granted immediately. Hinrich cautioned his superiors that in the event of Mayer being denied it, then her ‘impulsive temperament' might see her make remarks ‘which will do us unnecessary harm considering the typical, prominent big spread of the American press'.

Mayer's appeal paid off. On 26 November, the
New York Times
reported that the Germans ‘had assured the famous fencer she would be considered a full German citizen despite her Jewish blood'. In what was becoming a familiar scenario, however, Mayer declared that no one had contacted her directly, and once more she rescinded her acceptance. A few days later matters were finally resolved when a telegram arrived from Mayer's mother, which informed her that her brothers had been made citizens of the Reich, the implication being that their sister had as well. Although she had no way of confirming this, or whether her mother had been coerced into issuing a false statement, Mayer decided this was good enough. She was on her way home.

 

‘The Jewish proposal to boycott the Games of the Eleventh Olympiad which I thought was safely buried last year, has come to life again and the situation is very serious indeed.' So wrote Avery Brundage
to Count Baillet-Latour on 24 September 1935. The AOC president's
bête noire
was the recently appointed president of the AAU, Jeremiah Mahoney. According to Brundage, Mahoney had been elected on a Jewish, pro-boycott ticket, and he was now using his position to stop the United States team from sailing to Berlin the following summer. By now Brundage was adamant that the boycott movement was purely a sinister Jewish plot. Like all anti-Semites, he saw Shylockian conspiracy everywhere he looked. ‘Articles appearing in the metropolitan press are almost entirely anti-Nazi. The picture of conditions in Germany obtained from reading our newspapers is entirely different from that gained by an inspection of that country. The great Jewish merchant advertisers may have something to do with this.'

Brundage claimed that, to compound his woes, because of his insistence that amateur sport and the Olympics were ‘above political, racial and religious considerations', he was ‘being denounced and threatened with great violence'. Brundage would repeat ad nauseam the view that sport was above all, not just for the next year, but also for the rest of his life. This may well have been sincere, but it exposed his dreadful political naivety. Brundage certainly had the strength of character and the determination to be a politician, but his pig-headedness and the lack of sophistication of his views made him a political neophyte. He was too ready to see the world in bipolar terms, a world in which Jews and communists were out to get him.

Brundage's chief worry was the forthcoming AAU convention in December in New York. He informed Baillet-Latour that the delegates were being ‘deluged' with propaganda from the boycott movement. According to Brundage, they were being threatened with all manner of tactics–‘the same tactics which they profess to deplore in Germany, are being adopted to gain their end'. The difference between aggressive lobbying and locking someone up in Dachau is a great one, but as Brundage never saw a concentration camp on his tour of Germany, perhaps it is understandable that he alone could discern some equivalence.

Brundage feared that the AAU would vote against participation. ‘If such a resolution were adopted solely with the idea of striking a blow at Hitler and the Nazis, it would, in my opinion, wreck the AAU.' He
was not willing to admit what sort of damage would be wrought on Nazi Germany–he was more concerned with the fate of a sporting body than that of a murderous regime. Brundage cannot be excused his respect for the Nazis on the grounds that to damn him would be to fall prey to the historian's fallacy of ‘presentism', in which the antecedent is judged by the consequent. Although the gas chambers were yet to start up, the maimings, the murders and the measures were already taking place, reported by newspapers worldwide.

If the AAU voted against participation, then Brundage was prepared. He asked Baillet-Latour whether it would be possible for the AOC to certify the athletes to go to the Games and not the AAU. Although this appears arcane, Brundage was effectively prepared to write off the wishes of the United States' largest and most powerful sporting body–a body he himself had headed for six years–in order to get a team to Berlin. Baillet-Latour was to agree with Brundage, and declared that it was the job of the national Olympic committee of each country to certify its sportsmen, and not the relevant national sporting federations of which athletes were members.

Despite his ‘Plan B', Brundage was not going to give in to the boycott movement. On 27 September he wrote to the key members on the AOC, telling them it was their ‘duty' to ‘expose those who would use the Olympic Games as a weapon to take a swipe at Hitler'. Almost ominously, Brundage said that it was time ‘we took an aggressive stand, and you will hear more from me anon on this subject'. Baillet-Latour also rallied the American members of the IOC for the forthcoming clash. In October he wrote to Garland, Sherrill and Jahncke, stressing, like Brundage, that it was their ‘duty' to support the Berlin Games. He also reassured them that all was well in Germany.

Baillet-Latour had forgotten that there was no such thing as a free press in Nazi Germany. As well as taking Tschammer und Osten at his word,
he then compared the situation of the Jews in Germany with that of African-Americans. Although African-Americans–and indeed Jews–suffered from all manner of vile prejudice in the United States of the 1930s, that prejudice was not enacted into federal law.

With one exception, Baillet-Latour was preaching to the converted. On 16 October William Garland declared to Baillet-Latour that he agreed with the IOC president ‘absolutely in all you have said'. The California-based Garland claimed that he was ‘well informed' regarding the position of Tschammer und Osten and the German Olympic Committee, and had no doubt that the whole boycott movement was simply a result of Jewish and Catholic propaganda. Garland reiterated his position a few days later in another letter to Baillet-Latour, when he stated that the American press was ‘full of innuendoes, lies, vituperations, insinuations and malice […] reports would make it appear that Hitler has nothing else to do but persecute the Jews and the Catholics'.

The one IOC member who would not fall in with Baillet-Latour's demands was Ernest Lee Jahncke, who with Jeremiah Mahoney of the AAU would form a redoubtable opposition against the likes of Brundage and those who wanted to go to Berlin. It was Mahoney who fired the first major salvo, which was aimed at Lewald. In a letter written on 20 October Mahoney reminded Lewald that the German, because of his Jewish ancestry, was a ‘hostage' of his government, and that he was being used as a screen to conceal the Nazis' violations of the Olympic ideals. He then called on Lewald to resign, because

The letter continued for some twenty pages. As might have been expected from a former judge, it was coherent and well argued. Mahoney could not see how Lewald could deny his four principal charges: that Jews were being excluded from participation on grounds of race; that the conditions for Jews made it impossible for them to participate; that the German government had injected race, religion and politics into the Olympics; and that the reason for Jewish
underperformance was a lack of training facilities. Mahoney also asked why, if the Games were organised by the IOC, the German Olympic Committee had to continually seek consent for its actions from the Nazi government. More questions followed, all of which were pertinent and hard hitting. Why did Hitler's face appear on the German Olympic calendar? Why was all athletic training under the aegis of the Reich's sports minister? Why had Jewish athletes been barred from any club associated with the Reich Association for Physical Culture? Why were Catholic and Protestant sports clubs made to ally with the Hitler Youth? Why did winners of any sports contest in Germany have to master Nazi ideology before being declared victors? Why would no visitors to the Olympics be allowed to stay in the homes of Jews? Why were there anti-Semitic placards up all over Germany, and why could Lewald not get them removed? Would Lewald agree that the provision of six weeks' worth of training for the few Jews allowed was not sufficient to bring athletes up to an Olympic standard? How could Lewald reconcile the recently passed Nuremberg Laws with his agreement to stick to the Olympic code? Mahoney finally ended the letter with an encapsulation of his views:

Lewald's response was considerably shorter than Mahoney's accusatory letter–a mere page and a half. He answered not one of Mahoney's questions, and instead sought refuge in the fact that he, Tschammer und Osten, Avery Brundage and the three American IOC members were ‘entirely satisfied with our attitude and preparation'. This arrogance hardly constituted a defence. Not only was it absurdly unlikely that either Tschammer und Osten or Lewald
himself would admit to being dissatisfied, but Lewald was also incorrectly assuming Jahncke's complicity. He dismissed Mahoney in a letter to Coubertin, saying that the former judge was a ‘fanatical Catholic of Irish origin, who wished to become the governor of the state of New York and who lives in a quarter of New York in which a majority of the inhabitants are Jews and Communists'. Like Brundage, Lewald could not see the ‘agitation' as anything more than a Jewish-Catholic plot, assisted by the ‘Jewish newspapers' in the United States, which spread ‘lies' that were ‘too stupid to be believed, even by the most credulous'.

An enraged Brundage took his case directly to the American people. The American Olympic Committee released a hefty booklet entitled
Fair Play for American Athletes
, which set out the case for sending a team to Germany. In the introduction, Brundage posed the question ‘Shall the American athlete be made to be a martyr to a cause not his own?' This was a barely covert implication that the boycott movement was to do with Jews and not ‘real' Americans. To his credit, Brundage reminded the public that this issue was not just in the political ether, but it has something that affected what he called ‘the Forgotten Man–America's Olympic Athlete'. Brundage said it was his ‘duty' to the ‘vigorous youth' to ensure they were his–and other officials'–primary considerations. A boycott of the Olympics would thwart many youthful ambitions, and it was not Brundage's job to do that.