Beyond Belief (12 page)

In 1931 the International Olympic Committee (IOC) designated Germany as the site for the 1936 Games. The winter Games were to take place in Bavaria's Garmisch-Partenkirchen and the summer Games in Berlin. For the Germans the Games were both a propaganda and sporting event. The Nazis used them to enhance their international image and to convince visitors that the terrible things reported in the press were figments of correspondents' imaginations. Tourists and visiting reporters—there were over 1,500 of the latter at the Games—were so impressed by what they saw that many dismissed the stories of brutalities as exaggerated. The glowing press reports from the Olympic Games helped shed doubts on the earlier reports of persecution. As was so often the case during this period, truth was disdained as falsehood and fiction accepted as fact. Americans cite the 1936 Olympic Games as an event which, thanks to Jesse Owens's amazing achievements, disproved Hitler's “Aryan” theories. In truth, the victory was Hitler's. The Games were the ultimate propaganda triumph for him, a triumph facilitated by the press.

Within a few months after the Nazi assumption of power, America began to debate its participation in the Olympic Games. The press wondered whether Germany's domestic persecution was America's concern. The battle over the Games was, at least in part, a microcosm of the fight between interventionists and isolationists over how America should react, if at all, to developments in the Reich.

When the Nazis began to exclude Jews from various aspects of German life, they also barred them from the sports arena. In May 1933 the Reich sports commissar, Captain Hans Tschammer und Osten, explicitly declared that “German sports are for Aryans. German youth leadership is only for Aryans and not for Jews.”
¹
In June 1933, when the IOC met in Vienna, Brigadier General Charles H. Sherrill, a member of the American Olympic Committee (AOC) and the American representative to the IOC meeting, extracted a promise from the Germans that “as a principle . . . German Jews would not be excluded from German Olympic teams.”
²
Sherrill claimed that it had taken an arduous and “trying” effort to get the Germans to accede to this point.
³
In the following months Germany simultaneously discriminated against Jewish athletes and repeatedly pledged that all promises made to the IOC would be fulfilled. Despite the Reich's assurances to the contrary, Jews were slowly but deliberately excluded from a wide array of sports activities and training facilities. As early as April 1933
Newsweek
reported that “anti-Jewish feeling [had] spread through German sport.” This sentiment intensified as Jews were barred from international track and field matches, Germany's best amateur tennis player was dropped from competition, and the chairman of the German Sports Federation was fired because of his Jewish ancestry.
⁴

In the fall of 1934 AOC president Avery Brundage visited Germany and also obtained a German commitment that Jews would be included in Olympic tryouts. Richard Mandell, in his study of the Berlin Games, described Brundage as “one more important personage dazzled by the order, relative prosperity and joy that most travelers observed in Germany in those years.” Brundage's assurances that the spirit of the Olympic Games was being assiduously observed by Germany and that German Jews
wanted the competition to take place as planned convinced the AOC to accept the invitation to the Games.

Brundage and Sherrill both had strong pro-German feelings. Sherrill, who had served as Hoover's Ambassador to Turkey, was known among his colleagues in the State Department for his profascist views. Upon his return from a meeting with Hitler regarding the Games, he described him as an “undeniably great leader.” In 1935, in a speech before the Italian-American Chamber of Commerce, he expressed his admiration for Mussolini, a “man of courage in a world of pussyfooters.” Sherrill publicly expressed the opinion that Mussolini should come to the United States and eliminate the communists as he had in Italy.
⁵

Sherrill and Brundage portrayed the boycott movement as an insidious effort orchestrated by American Jews. Their claims that the “demand of prejudiced groups” threatened American participation were reiterated by various publications, including the
Literary Digest
, which attributed the boycott movement to “wealthy American Jews and Catholics.” Sherrill and Brundage also used scare tactics to prevent American Jews from supporting the movement. In 1933 Sherrill warned American Jews against organizing a boycott because it would “provoke antisemitic feeling” in the United States. On a number of different occasions during the Olympic debate Brundage and Sherrill repeated this thinly veiled prediction
qua
threat. On his return from Germany Sherrill warned the press that,

We are almost certain to have a wave of antisemitism among those who never before gave it a thought, and who may consider that about 5,000,000 Jews in this country are using the athletes representing 120,000,000 Americans to work out something to help the German Jews.
⁶

When Sherrill and Brundage were criticized for such statements, they responded by arguing that
they
were acting in Jews' best interests. Their behavior was reminiscent of a familiar tactic of “saving” Jews or any other minority group “in spite of themselves.” At best such behavior is paternalistic in nature; at worst it is prejudicial, and in this case it was antisemitic.

In the months that followed it became increasingly obvious that the situation was not improving. Participation in special pre-Games training programs was denied to Jewish athletes, and of the twenty-one Jews “nominated” for Olympic training camps,
none were ultimately “invited.” By May of 1935 Jews were excluded from the gardens of Bad Dürkheim, the swimming pools and baths of Schweinfurt, the municipal baths of Karlsruhe, Frie-burg Gladbach, and Dortmund. Even the streetcars of Magdeburg were closed to Jews.
⁷
Nonetheless, Brundage echoed German claims and emphatically reassured critics that Germany would abide by its “unqualified assurances of non-discrimination.” In August 1935 Brundage assured the press that he had heard nothing about discrimination against athletes of any race or religion since Germany had pledged to allow Jews to participate and that there were no “reports whatsoever official or otherwise that Germany has failed to give Jewish athletes a fair opportunity.”
⁸
As long as Germany abided by its promises, Brundage argued, then the AOC could not interfere in its internal political, religious, or racial affairs. Sherrill declared that it did not concern him “one bit the way the Jews in Germany are being treated, any more than lynchings in the South of our own country.”
⁹
The views of Sherrill and Brundage were buttressed by the claims of Frederick W. Rubien, secretary of the American Olympic Committee, that

Germans are not discriminating against Jews in their Olympic tryouts. The Jews are eliminated because they are not good enough as athletes. Why, there are not a dozen Jews in the world of Olympic caliber.
¹⁰

While Brundage, Rubien, and Sherrill were arguing that everything was fine, the
New York Times's
Fred Birchall was reporting a very different story. The headline constituted a sharp rebuttal to Brundage:

NAZI OLYMPIC VOW KEPT TECHNICALLY

In Theory Even Jews May Try For Team,
but All Except Hitlerites Are Handicapped.

In its reports to the State Department the American embassy also contradicted Brundage's claim that there were no reports “official or otherwise” that Germany was discriminating against Jewish athletes.
¹¹
By this time the Germans had managed by deft manipulation and sheer terror to transform the question of Jewish participation into a theoretical and not a practical matter. Many Jews who were potential competitors had left Germany because they
knew they would not be able to train in the manner demanded of an Olympic contender. Lacking financial means and communal support, two critical components of Olympic preparation, those who remained faced such substantial psychological and personal handicaps that qualifying for a berth on a team became a virtual impossibility.

Despite these developments, the press paid relatively sporadic attention to the question of American participation during the first two and half years of Nazi rule. It was only after the Berlin riots and the Nuremberg Laws that the issue of whether Americans should go to the Olympics acquired a new prominence. The debate about the Games now spilled over from the sports pages, where it was first raised, to the editorial pages, and from the meetings of the Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) to the Congressional floor.
¹²
The presence of an American team at the 1936 Olympic Games became a matter of national significance and remained so until the day the team set sail for Germany. In the twelve months preceding the Games reporters, columnists, sports writers, and editorial boards debated how an American presence at the Games would be interpreted and what was more likely to violate America's neutrality: boycotting or participating in the Games.

Those papers which opposed a boycott generally shared Brundage's view that what occurred in Germany, as deplorable as it might appear, was none of America's business and that it was not America's responsibility to approve or disapprove.
¹³
Moreover, they contended, since no country, including the United States, had a blemish-free record regarding minority groups, it was hypocritical to single Germany out for its treatment of Jews. Japan's treatment of China, the
Norfolk
(Virginia)
Pilot
believed, would rule it out of Olympic contention; Rome would be eliminated because of its Ethiopian escapade, London because of its treatment of Indian nationalists, Russia because of forced labor, Dublin for its religious riots, and the United States because of the lynching of blacks. It was not, the
Pilot
declared, “the function of the Olympic Games to distribute clean bills of political health. Too many glass houses are involved.”
¹⁴

When it learned that antisemitic signs had been posted in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, the site of the winter competition, the
Pilot
changed its stance and advocated a boycott because Germany
does not “seem to be in a position to guarantee the proper physical arrangements for the Olympic festivals.”
¹⁵
But the paper's fundamental position had not changed. It still believed that America should avoid anything which might force it to become entangled in Germany's affairs. The signs at the winter site indicated that Jews' safety could not be guaranteed. If something happened to an American Jew or if an American non-Jew was attacked in the course of some action against Jews, this country would be forced to respond. Therefore remaining at home was prudent and the best way to guarantee that America would not be forced to violate its neutrality.

Ultimately this noninterventionist position became one of the more frequently voiced arguments against participation. Irrespective of a paper's views about events in Germany, there was a possibility that something could occur during the Games which would severely strain American-German relations.
¹⁶
Some noninterventionists advocated a boycott because they feared that participation might necessitate involvement in German affairs, and some noninterventionists argued against a boycott because they feared a protest would,
ipso facto
, involve us in German matters. Although the practical considerations differed, the motivation was the same: ensure that America distance itself from a troublesome situation.

The Scripps-Howard chain's
New York World Telegram
expressed the views of those who advocated a boycott for noninterventionist reasons, when it acknowledged that, while it opposed “gestures” which could be interpreted as a protest because they were an “irritant” for an already difficult international situation, it believed it “imperative” that America not attend. It would be a practical mistake to do so because it would invite “bad friendship, embarrassing incidents and involvement in controversy.”
¹⁷
The
Boston Globe
counseled that holding the Olympics in Nazi Germany created a “risk” which was probably not worth taking.
¹⁸
The
Trenton Gazette
contended that the atmosphere in Germany was anything
but
conducive to promoting “friendship” and “sportsmanship” among nations.
¹⁹
These papers all feared that if an American Jewish competitor narrowly bested a German, the crowd might subject the American to abuse and obloquy, which in turn might necessitate an official American response. It was prudent, therefore, to stay on the sidelines rather than risk becoming embroiled in a potentially volatile situation.