Berlin Games (11 page)

In case there was any doubt that this was going to be a Nazi spectacle, the band struck up not only ‘Deutschland über Alles' but also the Horst Wessel Song. With its lyrics including the verse

 

The flag high, ranks closed,

The SA marches with silent solid steps.

Comrades shot by the Red Front and reaction

March in spirit with us in our ranks.

 

it was hardly the most Olympic of songs. At exactly eleven o'clock, the music stopped and the ceremony proper began. As is custom, the Greeks were the first team to enter the stadium, quickly followed by the Australians, whose participants were outnumbered two to one by their officials. In all, twenty-eight nations filed past Hitler and his cronies, and all dipped their flags to him except for the United States and Italy, whose flags are dipped only for their own heads of state. Most nations gave the Olympic salute, which sent the crowd wild, as many supposed the salute to have been the fascist salute. The difference between the two is slight. Whereas the Nazi version of the fascist salute
calls for the right arm to be raised upward and thrust forward, with the Olympic salute the same arm is raised upward and extended nearly all the way to the side. In practice, however, with different people adopting differing angles for both types of salute, the difference can become negligible. Therefore, when the British marched past Hitler and gave him the Olympic salute, they were disturbed to hear the loudspeakers announce, ‘The British greet the German Fuehrer with the German salute!' (Not all the British team attended the ceremony, however. Arnold Lunn and his son Peter, who was competing in the Combined Downhill and Slalom, stayed away from it. Arnold Lunn was to claim that only the British officials saluted Hitler, but the ‘teams cut him dead'.) The Americans and the Dutch, fearful of similar misinterpretation, merely gave an eyes-right. ‘As it turned out,' wrote Robert Livermore, ‘we were not given enough practice in this gesture, and I believe we were all pretty sloppy in our untutored military bearing. The result was that the stands thought we were doing nothing.' The one person in the stadium who certainly gave the fascist salute was Hitler himself, who raised his arm to every flag that went past.

The procession took half an hour, after which Karl von Halt gave a brief speech and invited his leader to open the Games. ‘I hereby declare', said Hitler over the loudspeakers, ‘these Fourth Winter Olympic Games of the year 1936, held in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, open.' The band struck up, and on the side of the mountain the Olympic flame was lit, accompanied by the boom of a field gun. Then the flag-bearers formed a semicircle and the German skier Willi Bogner swore the Olympic oath, but only after he had saluted the swastika flag that he held in his left hand. During the proceedings the weather began to deteriorate, and Clarita Heath, an American skier, started to curse the poor kit the US ladies had been given. Luckily, chivalrous help was at hand. ‘As we stood there getting colder and colder in our light windjackets,' she recalled, ‘one member of the men's squad removed his handsome blue overcoat with the enameled buttons and placed it over my shoulders.'

Once more the nations marched around the stadium, and Hitler beamed when the team from Austria–Hitler's homeland–saluted him not with an Olympic salute, but with an emphatically Nazi one. ‘The faces turned upward toward him seemed to say it was no formal
courtesy,' wrote one observer. ‘Those faces–or most of them–said as plainly as faces could say anything, “Our Fuehrer”.' Hitler was seen to lean forward and look wistfully towards the mountains, no doubt in the direction of Austria. The significance of the gesture was noted not only by the German Chancellor, and for the next few days the future of Austria would be the talk of many.

The other talk of Garmisch was the twenty-three-year-old Norwegian figure skater Sonja Henie. A petite 5 foot 3 inches, Henie was more than the bubbly childish blonde that many men took her for. She had entered her first Olympics in 1924 when she was just eleven. Although she had no success that year, at St Moritz in 1928 she took gold, a feat that she repeated four years later at Lake Placid. She had also won nine consecutive ice skating championships, a record that remains unbroken. By 1936, then, Henie's star dominated the world of winter sports. A friend of royalty, Henie was like a monarch herself at Garmisch, skating in sheer white satin, her infectious charm and astonishing athleticism wooing the crowds. She seemed certain to take gold for a third time.

What Henie had not reckoned on was the presence of a fifteen-year-old girl from England. Cecilia Colledge may have lacked Henie's sophistication, but she was no less attractive or skilful. She had taken up the sport after watching Henie win her second world title in London in 1928. Colledge competed at Lake Placid in 1932, a few months younger than Henie had been at Chamonix in 1924. Technically, Colledge could do more advanced moves than Henie, and the more informed observers of the skating scene felt that Queen Sonja's crown might soon be snatched by this English upstart. Out of the twenty-three competitors, Colledge was unfortunately drawn to skate second. In subsequent Olympics, the favourites would be always held to the end, thereby giving the spectacle a great finale. Colledge's position meant that she was skating while spectators were still arriving, and the bustling in the stands no doubt distracted her. Wearing a black armband to commemorate the recent death of King George V, Colledge skated brilliantly, however, thrilling the 11,000-strong crowd with her performance. She also attracted the attention of many of the leading Nazis, particularly Goering, who, it was said, ‘could not keep his eyes off her'. And
then she fell. It was not a bad fall, but it was still an error. Until that moment, her performance had been faultless, breathtaking. Nevertheless, she had impressed the crowd, and at the end of her routine she was given a massive ovation. The judges were impressed too, and awarded her enough points to bring her total to a commanding 418.1. It seemed that the fall had hardly counted against her. Would it be enough to beat Henie?

The crowd had to wait until the end, as Henie was drawn last. As the light faded, the spotlights were switched on, making Henie appear even more like a jewel on the ice. (For subsequent Olympics, it was determined that the lighting had to be the same for all competitors.) Hitler sat captivated, admiring this specimen of Aryan womanhood. Henie, despite looking uncharacteristically nervous, disappointed neither the Fuehrer nor the rest of the stadium. In fact, she gave the performance of her life, her routine ending with a spectacular jump which was arrested by a split. The cheering did not start immediately, but when it did it was as loud as it had been for Colledge. The Ice Queen had lost none of her sparkle. There was a collective holding of breath while the judges deliberated. A few minutes later, the points appeared. Henie's score leaped to 424.5–a mere 6.4 ahead of Colledge. Henie had won the gold, but only just. The gap between Colledge's silver medal and the bronze was nearly four times greater. Henie's success was cheered loudly, no more so than by Hitler, who was keen to be photographed with the winner. Henie was only too happy to oblige. In fact, she was very willing to be photographed with the Fuehrer, and had been on numerous occasions.

The other stars in the ice skating stadium were Maxie Herber and Ernst Baier, who were tipped to win gold in the pairs figure skating. Their natural talents were abetted by the Reich Sport Commission, which provided them with enough resources to train them and yet not to sour their amateur status. Music was specially composed for their routine, so that for the first time the skaters' movements and the music combined to produce a display of perfect synchronicity. Yet, just as Henie had her potential nemesis in the form of Colledge, Baier and Herber had the Pausins from Austria, a fifteen-year-old girl and her sixteen-year-old brother, whose routine was the antithesis of that of the German pair. The Pausin siblings swept around the rink to Strauss's
‘Tales from the Vienna Woods', their movements seemingly spontaneous and off the cuff. It was a routine of much gusto and jollity, and it saw the spectators baying at the judges to give them as many points as possible. The judges sat firm, however, and awarded the Pausins 11.4 points to Herber and Baier's 11.5. The crowd, even though it was largely German, hissed and booed the result. The reaction did nothing to dampen Herber's feelings of joy. ‘It was fantastic,' she remembered, ‘I was so happy.' Herber recalled attending a medal-winners' lunch with Hitler and shaking his hand. After the Games, she set up home with Baier in Garmisch, and the couple dominated the World and European Championships up to the war.

Up on the slopes, the competition was no less exciting. In the Combined Downhill and Slalom, the Americans and the British found themselves trying to keep up with the Germans and the Scandinavians. Robert Livermore recalled his somewhat shaky progress down the fearsome Neuner downhill course. He had been rendered especially nervous by the fact that one of his teammates had crashed into the very first tree, and had spent minutes extricating himself. Livermore's own progress was hardly any less chaotic.

Livermore had literally suffered pride before a fall. After taking a good thirty seconds to extricate himself from his bushy spruce, he skied the rest of the course well and clocked up a time of 6:04, which was certainly quicker than Washburn's 6:30. Times like these, however, would not see the Americans troubling the podium. Birger Ruud's time was 4:47, well over a minute faster than any American. At least the
Americans did a whole lot better than the four Turks. The Turk who had started before Livermore was Nazim Aslanbigo, who made it down in a sedate 13:56. Hot on his bindings were fellow countrymen Ülker Pamir with 14:18 and Mahmut Sevket with 14:29. The slowest Turk was Resat Erces, who took a staggering 22 minutes and 44 seconds to get down. One can only assume that he either got lost or walked.

The British fared marginally better than the Americans. Peter Lunn found the pressure of his distinguished parentage hard to bear. To make matters worse, his father Arnold was even the manager of the British team at Garmisch. In his practice runs, Lunn had taken a very fast line down the Neuner, but during the race itself he decided to adopt a more cautious approach. ‘I did not take the same line in the race,' he recalled, ‘because, overawed by the Olympic name, I felt I must not risk a heavy crash and a discreditable performance. I skied so carefully that this became the only major downhill in which I did not fall.'

Lunn got down in 5:35, and after his two slalom runs he ended up in 12th place, two places ahead of his fellow Briton, James Palmer-Tomkinson. The highest-placed American was Dick Durrance, who came 10th, while Robert Livermore came 23rd. Albert Washburn was disqualified for his second slalom run, and was unplaced, but is listed in the official report in 38th place. The Turks were all unplaced. Only two attempted the slalom, and both were disqualified in the first round. Birger Ruud, although he had the quickest downhill time, incurred a six-second penalty for missing a gate on his first slalom run, which meant that he came fourth. The Germans Franz Pfnuer and Gustav Lantschner took gold and silver respectively, while Emile Allais of France took bronze.

The German women did just as well in the Combined Downhill and Slalom as their male counterparts. The gold was won by the finest female skier of the 1930s, Christel Cranz. Before the Olympics, she already held numerous World Championship titles, and it looked as if the Olympic gold would be an easy picking for her. ‘I was on top form at that time,' Cranz recalled, ‘and almost believed myself unbeatable.' On the downhill part of the event, however, disaster struck: ‘A small bump, just like ones I had skied over thousands of times on every downhill course in the world, a lump of ice on it, a wobble for one
hundredth of a second–and I couldn't recover, a back flip–and I had fallen, was lying in a deep pit, in the soft new snow, scrabbling around like a beetle on its back.' It took Cranz fifty seconds to dig herself out and get back on course. She hurtled down, desperately trying to make up lost time, knowing that her attempt was surely futile. Her time of 5:23.4 meant that she came in nineteen seconds after the winner, Laila Schau-Nilsen of Norway, and found herself in sixth position. ‘It seemed all over,' she recalled. ‘No hope of a gold medal for Germany.' Everybody knew that it was impossible for Cranz to make up those crucial nineteen seconds in the two slalom runs, but she pushed herself as she had never done before, skiing beyond the limits of her ability. It was, she wrote, ‘do or die'. She completed the first run in an astonishing seventy-two seconds, four seconds ahead of her fellow German, Käthe Grasegger, and fourteen seconds faster than Schau-Nilsen, who had incurred a six-second penalty for missing a gate. In her second run, Cranz made it in seventy seconds, astonishing herself as well as Grasegger and Schau-Nilsen, who were both over seven seconds slower. Cranz had pulled off what had seemed impossible and had won the gold, victorious in what she described as her ‘greatest battle'. Grasegger and Schau-Nilsen won silver and bronze respectively.