Berlin Games (9 page)

Brundage's views on the boycott were shared by many athletes in the United States and the rest of the world. Adolph Kiefer, who as the holder of the world record for the 100 metres backstroke was guaranteed a place on the team, recalled how ‘although all us athletes were in favour of going, the only discussion took place by those not in the know. It was an opposition largely built by the press'. It would be convenient to dismiss Kiefer's views as those of a seventeen-year-old, but seven decades later he maintained that not to have gone would have been ‘a terrible mistake'. Kiefer, like many athletes, saw the Olympics as above everything else. ‘The Olympics represent the world,' he said. Another American athlete, pentathlete Charles Leonard, claimed he had ‘no concept' of a boycott. ‘All of us were just going over to compete,' he said. ‘We paid no attention to political aspects.' Swimmer Velma Dunn admitted that she didn't ‘pay much attention to it'. In
Britain, a similar feeling of political apathy reigned among the potential Olympians. Pole vaulter Dick Webster recalled the boycott debate in Britain ‘very slightly'. ‘There were one or two people who had
consciences
,' he said. ‘There were always a few of these. But there weren't that many.' Rower Martin Bristow maintained that the issue of a boycott ‘never came up'. ‘As young people, we weren't politically interested. If you were, you were probably someone radical like [Anthony] Blunt.' In Australia, swimmer Percy Oliver said that he could not ‘recall any boycott movement'. In Greece, hurdler Domnitsa Lanitis said that the Greeks, although they didn't like Nazism, could ‘not even think of not going–after all, the Games came from Greece'. In Turkey, female fencer Halet Çambel, whose mother was an active communist, said, ‘we all knew what was going on in Germany. There were many Jewish and Socialist refugees in Turkey, and we heard what they said.' Nevertheless, this was not enough to stop her going to Berlin. ‘I didn't think of not going,' she said. ‘There was not a political problem in going to the Olympics.'

The reason for this apathy probably lies in the words of Martin Bristow. It is easy to assume that political apathy among those in their early twenties is a modern malaise, yet apathy appears to have been just as widespread–if not more so–among the young of the 1930s. One was either apathetic or a radical, and there were very few radicals. The athletes above did not come from backgrounds in which people took an interest in world affairs. Except for the radicals, political engagement, if it comes at all, arrives a little later in life. For many of these young athletes, the priority was not worrying about the fate of a few Jews in a foreign land, but to get on the Olympic team. A twenty-year-old in 1935 worrying about the rights of minorities in Nazi Germany would have been a rare thing. He would have been accused of being sanctimonious, or he may well have been Jewish.

Nevertheless, the pressure to boycott continued, not just from the AAU, but from non-sporting institutions such as colleges and labour unions. Many would have agreed with the words expressed by sports writer John Kieran in the
New York Times
:

In October, Baillet-Latour decided to regain the initiative and visited Germany, where he had a meeting with Hitler. The German leader soothed the ruffled Olympic chief, by assuring him that Jews were being given a fair chance. In order to prove quite how highly the Nazis regarded the Olympics, however, Hitler agreed to Baillet-Latour's request that anti-Semitic signs should be removed during the Games. This was quite a concession for Hitler, as he had been adamant that they should stay. Back in April, Fritz Wiedemann, one of Hitler's adjutants, reported to Martin Bormann: ‘I've told the Fuehrer about the reservations over these signs on account of the Olympics. Nothing has changed in the Fuehrer's decision that there is no objection to these signs.' Baillet-Latour regarded this climb-down as a significant triumph, and was cockahoop when he told Brundage of it. ‘It is a success,' he reported on 17 November, ‘because this has nothing to do with sport itself and the IOC had no right to require it.' Baillet-Latour was seemingly aware of his own double standards. On the one hand, the Olympics were not supposed to be a political matter, and yet he had made a request that was overtly political. When the request was agreed to, Baillet-Latour was happy to take the credit, albeit with a kind of faux sheepishness.

In the same letter, Baillet-Latour told Brundage that the boycott campaign was ‘weakening'. The count felt himself to be a world leader, on a par with Hitler and Roosevelt. He had just pulled off a great coup, and had shown the world that the Olympics were truly a force for good. He could point to the fact that Jews were on the German Olympic team, and that the Germans had reversed some of their anti-Semitic measures–all at the bidding of the mighty IOC. Never mind that this was tokenism, and that the signs would be hidden only for the duration of the Games. Never mind that the half-handful
of Jewish athletes who were notionally on the Olympic team were there for appearance's sake. As far as Baillet-Latour was concerned, what he saw was indeed good, despite the passing of the Nuremberg Laws, despite the numerous pieces of evidence that showed that Jews were being denied participation not just in sports, but in society at large.

Baillet-Latour's confidence was shattered just a few days later. On the evening of Thursday, 21 November Madison Square Park in New York City was filled with 10,000 anti-Nazi demonstrators. The peaceful protesters listened to some twenty speakers in the cold, and broke up at around nine o'clock. On the same day, 138 leading Protestant clergymen and educationists issued a statement demanding a boycott of the Olympics. Any claims that the boycott movement was merely a ‘Jewish-Communist plot' could no longer be taken seriously.

Now it was the turn of Ernest Lee Jahncke to strike. On 25 November he wrote from his home in New Orleans to Count Baillet-Latour. The letter was just as damaging as that written by Mahoney to Lewald. Jahncke reminded Baillet-Latour that he was the only American member of the IOC who was of German descent, and that he was ‘proud of that origin'. He then informed the count that he would not do as he had been asked the month before; in fact, he would ‘do just the opposite of what you so confidently ask of me'.

One can only imagine the near-apoplexy Baillet-Latour must have suffered reading this at his desk in the Olympic headquarters in
Lausanne. But there was worse to come. Less specifically than Mahoney, Jahncke outlined the evidence that the Nazis were breaking the Olympic code by denying the Jews a fair chance to compete. Baillet-Latour would have been used to such charges, however. It was not until the final paragraph that Jahncke delivered his body blow. ‘Let me beseech you to seize your opportunity to take your rightful place in the history of the Olympics alongside of de Coubertin instead of Hitler. De Coubertin rescued the Olympic idea from the remote past. You have the opportunity to rescue it from the immediate present and safeguard it for posterity.' This was too much for Baillet-Latour to bear. The cheek, to mention the name of the Christ-like de Coubertin in this way! What made matters worse was that Jahncke had released his letter to the press simultaneously. This enabled Brundage to immediately dispatch a telegram to Brussels which counselled: ‘Jahncke statement most unfortunate. He has no official connection American sport. Suggest strong answer from you.'

Baillet-Latour was not to reply, however, until after the crucial AAU vote over participation was taken in early December. Instead of responding to Jahncke's specific allegations, he instead wrote that he had been reassured about the Germans' behaviour by an impressive list of IOC members and officials, presidents and officials of international sporting federations, high authorities in many countries, as well as the German Jewish sporting associations. Naturally, Baillet-Latour was unable to name any of these officials and authorities, and neither would he tell Jahncke which German Jewish sporting associations he had spoken to (even if he had, they were hardly likely to be able to give a true picture). Baillet-Latour was most splenetic over Jahncke's mention of Coubertin: ‘The light manner in which you have taken for granted all those various reports is enlightened [
sic
] by the liberty you have taken in quoting even Baron de Coubertin […]. In doing so, you have gone over the limit, because the Baron that you rightly praise has on this important question the same opinion as all the Members of the IOC.' In fact, Coubertin's enthusiasm for the Games was certainly not a given. In October, Lewald had written to Coubertin asking whether he could make a public statement against the boycotters, a request to which Coubertin did not appear to accede. If anybody was taking Coubertin's name in vain it was
Baillet-Latour, who ended his letter to Jahncke by demanding the American's resignation.

As December and the AAU convention approached, the British were carefully watching events on the other side of the Atlantic. At the British Olympic Association committee meeting on 3 December, Harold Abrahams spoke in favour of participation, arguing that it was up to the IOC to withdraw from the Games and not the British. Abrahams believed that participation would help to tie Germany into the community of nations. If the Games were boycotted, Abrahams suggested, then Germany might well turn more belligerent. This was a classic piece of appeasement. Abrahams also thought that it was in the best interests of British sport for Britain to attend the Games. In this respect, he was similar to Brundage, who appeared more worried about the impact of a boycott on sport rather than the potential bolstering of the Nazi regime that might be engendered by attending the Games.

Not all former British Olympians were in concord with Abrahams, however. Philip Noel-Baker, who captained the British Olympic team at Antwerp in 1920 and Paris in 1924, wrote to the
Manchester Guardian
, stating that the BOA should make its own mind up:

Noel-Baker's opinion was supported by the publication of a photograph in the
Manchester Guardian
of a sign in Germany which read ‘Jews Forbidden'. Of course, such signs were commonplace around Germany, but what made this sign significant was that it could be found in the Bavarian villages of Garmisch-Partenkirchen, which were hosting the forthcoming Winter Olympics.

The sign naturally enraged Jewish communities all over the world, nowhere more so than in Britain. Neville Laski, president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, wrote to Harold Abrahams, protesting at
the BOA's continued support of the Games. ‘It passes the bounds of the knowledge which I possess to understand how any national or international Olympic committee, in view of the existence of this notice, could think for one moment of holding the Games in Berlin. […] I should like to understand how the Committees […] reconcile their continued association with the Games in Berlin with the statutes upon which the Games are founded.'

Laski's appeal fell on stony ground. On the evening of 6 December, the same day on which the AAU delegates were meeting at the Hotel Commodore in New York City, the BOA formally accepted the German invitation to attend the Games. As Evan Hunter, the secretary of the BOA, told Brundage in a short letter written the day before Hunter sailed to Australia, the association ‘accepted the invitation absolutely unconditionally'. The confidence of the members was no doubt boosted by the recent playing of a football match between England and Germany in Tottenham in North London. Ten thousand Germans attended the match, in what was–and still is–an area of the city inhabited by many Jews. Despite fears of sieg-heiling German fans inflaming the locals, the game passed peacefully, and even Germany's losing by three goals to nil did nothing to bring about the anticipated rioting. Among the 10,000 Germans were none other than Tschammer und Osten, Lewald and Diem, for whom a dinner was held at the Victoria Hotel the following evening by the Anglo-German Fellowship, a group composed largely of British society figures who admired Nazi Germany.