How Hitler won the Olympic Games/by Matthew Syed
by Matthew Syed
The Times UK
POPULAR MYTHOLOGY has it that the Berlin Olympic Games of 1936 ¡ª which
took place in the very stadium that will host tomorrow¡¯s World Cup final
¡ª provided the stage for Jesse Owens to deliver a hammer blow to the
concept of Aryan supremacy. The truth, as revealed by three admirable
books published to coincide with the 70th anniversary of the Games, is
darker, more textured and, ultimately, more intriguing.
Hitler¡¯s Olympics, by Anton Rippon, Berlin Games, by Guy Walters, and
Hitler¡¯s Olympics, by Christopher Hilton, together provide a panoramic
perspective of the most controversial s****ting event of the 20th
century. They reveal how the Nazi regime created a global propaganda
triumph in spite of the success of black athletes; how senior officials
in the International Olympic Committee (IOC) connived with the German
authorities to conceal the extent of Jewish persecution in the build-up
to the Games; and how the world¡¯s greatest athletes became unsuspecting
pawns in a high-stakes political game of breathtaking cynicism.
To look back, it seems almost inconceivable that the Olympics were
allowed to take place in a nation already on the road to Auschwitz. The
suppression of Jews extended across German society well before the Games
started, making a cruel mockery of the ambitions of the talented boys
and girls who dreamed of competing in the world¡¯s greatest s****ting
event.
On April 2, 1933, Jewish boxers and referees had been banned from
domestic champion****p bouts and all contracts involving Jewish promoters
were declared invalid. Twelve days later the German Tennis Federation
resolved that no Jew could be selected for the national team.
On April 25 the Reich S****ts Office implemented an Aryans-only policy in
all German s****ts organisations. On July 22 the All-German Chess
Convention excluded Jews from member****p. And so it went on.
The IOC argued that this kind of discrimination was contrary to the
Olympic Charter and demanded a change. Hitler, who initially derided the
Olympics as ¡°an invention of Jews and Freemasons¡±, had come to the view
¡ª after conversations with Joseph Goebbels ¡ª that the Games could be a
propaganda coup. So, in what was to become a familiar Nazi ploy, he paid
lip service to the demands while doing next to nothing in practic e.
The F¨¹hrer got away with this duplicity because of the collusion of
senior figures in the IOC. Theodor Lewald, the president of the German
Organising Committee and an IOC member (who himself had Jewish blood),
concealed the true state of conditions for Jewish athletes in Germany.
Avery Brundage, the president of the US Olympic Committee, who emerges
as an anti-Semite, turned a blind eye to the facts, enabling the Nazis
to use token Jewish participants to mask the brutal persecution. (It did
no harm to Brundage¡¯s career: he later became president of the IOC,
causing global outrage at the Munich Olympics 36 years later when he
failed to refer to 11 murdered Israeli team members in a memorial speech
delivered the very day after the terrorist atrocity.) Walters also
dramatically reveals how the Nazis bought the silence of Pierre de
Coubertin, the aristocratic founder of the modern Olympic movement. In a
chilling sequence of events, the Nazis offered the impecunious Baron
what amounted to hush money ¡ª which he accepted. From that moment the
German Organising Committee had no reason to fear a rebuke from the most
respected person in the Olympic movement.
Walters¡¯s is the strongest of the three books in terms of the
meticulousness of his research and the quality of his writing although
Rippon demonstrates a more astute grasp of the wider political
realities. A weakness in all three books, however, is that they are
inclined to deal with the issues somewhat s****adically, focusing on
political concerns in one chapter and s****ting events in the next,
rather embedding the core s****ting narrative in the wider political
reality ¡ª although this is a minor criticism.
Some of the most fascinating paragraphs reveal how black athletes were
among those arguing against a boycott. The likes of Owens justly drew
attention to the hypocrisy of the American establishment which was
pointing the finger at the Germans for their treatment of the Jews at a
time when racism was enshrined in US law (although the Jews ¡ª even at
that early stage ¡ª were enduring persecution of a kind that went far
beyond that suffered by black Americans).
The conventional wisdom that Hitler¡¯s theories were shattered by Owens¡¯s
triumphs is given short shrift by Walters. He reveals how Nazi
intellectuals responded with the assertion that, because negroes have
abnormally large ¡°animal¡± heel bones, they were bound to be faster.
Therefore, as the blacks were in fact animals and not human beings, the
Americans had cheated. This demonstrates, as so often, the remarkable
capacity of fanatics (racist or otherwise) to adapt the evidence to fit
their ideology.
Despite one¡¯s repugnance that the Games were allowed to go ahead in
Berlin, it would be unrealistic to suppose that a boycott would have had
anything more than a symbolic impact, given the prevailing climate of
appeasement. As Rippon argues in a characteristically hard-headed
*****sment: ¡°The bigger question is not why were the Olympics held in
Berlin, but why were Hitler¡¯s territorial ambitions allowed to proceed
unchallenged until war was inevitable? It is difficult to hold the
International Olympic Committee even the tiniest bit responsible for
that.¡±
The cruellest irony was that many of those who had come together in
friend****p for the Games would later become victims of the regime they
unwittingly helped to promote. As Walters notes in a heartrending final
chapter: ¡°At least twenty one members of the Polish Olympic team lost
their lives in the war, either in battle, in the resistance or, like the
fifth-placed 5,000 metres runner Jozef Noji, in a camp such as
Auschwitz.¡±
The Times UK
|
