Berlin Games (14 page)

The eyes of the world were on France. She had the strength to expel the Germans, but did she have the will? No one was more anxious than Hitler. Albert Speer, the Nazi Party's chief architect, travelled down to Munich with Hitler later that day. ‘The special train […] was charged, compartment after compartment, with the tense atmosphere that emanated from the Fuehrer's section,' Speer wrote. Hitler knew that just one French division would be enough to turf the Germans out of the Rhineland. France did nothing, however, and neither did Britain. ‘The reaction in the world was predicted,' wrote Goebbels that evening with a touch of retrospective certainty. ‘The Fuehrer is immensely happy […] The entry has gone according to plan […] The Fuehrer beams. England remains passive. France won't act alone. Italy is disappointed and America uninterested.' Goebbels' comments, although
terse, were correct. Hitler was later to claim that the forty-eight hours after the occupation were the most tense of his life. ‘We had no army worth mentioning,' he told Speer. ‘At that time it would not even have had the fighting strength to maintain itself against the Poles.'

The press reaction in Britain was just as Hitler would have hoped it to be. The
Observer
advised that the British should consider Hitler's move ‘in a spirit of sympathy and goodwill'. This was classic appeasement, but far short of the
Daily Mail
's zealous embracing of the German leader:

Even the left-leaning
Morning Post
agreed with the
Daily Mail
: ‘Herr Hitler may have performed a real service to the future peace of Europe by creating a situation which shows the futility of the whole sanctions policy.' The poet Robert Graves and Alan Hodge, a private secretary at the Ministry of Information, summed up the mood ironically in their 1940 book
The Long Week-end
: ‘The Germans weren't such bad people really, though they did have a mania about the Jews–those Olympic Winter Sports at Garmisch had been marvellously organised, and everyone had been so polite and hospitable.'

Meanwhile, all the anti-appeasers could do was to fume. Ralph Wigram, an official at the Foreign Office, came home to his small house in Lord North Street in Westminster one night in a mood of utter dejection. ‘[He] sat down in a corner of the room where he had never sat before,' his wife recalled in a letter to Churchill, ‘and said to me, “War is now
inevitable
, and it will be the most terrible war there has even been. I don't think I shall see it, but you will. Wait now for the bombs on this little house.” ' Both of Wigram's predictions were correct–war of course did come, and his house was indeed bombed.

In Germany, Phipps met Hitler, and found the dictator in an upbeat mood. As well as being cockahoop about the Rhineland, Hitler was
also particularly impressed by Mussolini's recent conquest of Abyssinia. ‘With dictators nothing succeeds like success,' Phipps wrote to Eden, ‘and Herr Hitler is clearly lost in admiration of Mussolini. Before long he may have visions of the Holy Roman Empire (plus a big colonial empire) of his own.' Later in the month, Vansittart wrote to his brother-in-law, telling him that he had foreseen Hitler's move, ‘but I admit I hardly expected to be justified so soon, for I had thought that Hitler would stay quiet until after the Olympic Games'.

So far, the Olympics had suited Hitler's purposes admirably. They had bought him time, and the Winter Games had given the opportunity not only to reflect, but to show the world that his regime was not how it was painted in the foreign press. The positive impression many gained of Germany at Garmisch made it easier for Europe to accept Hitler's occupation of the Rhineland. Had the Games been boycotted, then Hitler would not have had the nerve to enter the demilitarised zone, because countries that boycotted sports were not countries that would have tolerated a breach of Locarno. If Hitler had sat at Garmisch watching an Olympics that did not feature any American, British, French and Canadian athletes, would he have had the confidence to call their bluff? It is unlikely. The world of sport had the opportunity to show the world of diplomacy the way, and it had let it slip. The Games were now just six months away. War, some thought, might be even closer.

 

‘We don't want nigger money!' the fat man shouted.

Inside the car, the three black athletes from Ohio State University waited in fear. The owner of the Indianapolis diner from which they had just bought some coffee and eggs reached through the car window and grabbed the plate from the driver's hands. The breakfast spilled into his lap, staining his only suit. The athlete jumped out the car, spoiling for a fight. One of his teammates followed him, restraining his companion from getting into a punch-up a few hours before a race meeting.

‘No, Dave, no,' he implored him, ‘we'll get something from the next place.'

The driver, who was called David Albritton, relented, although he was furious not to have had the chance of getting even with the owner, who was walking away with the plate. The two men got back
into the 1914 Model-T Ford they had bought for $32.50. ‘I'm going to run my balls off today,' said the teammate who had restrained him. He did just that. At the Butler Indoor Relays, a meet open to all, even African-Americans, he won the 60-yard dash in 6.2 seconds, the 60-yard hurdles in 6.9 seconds, and jumped over 25 feet to win the long jump. The athlete's name was Jesse Owens. Albritton won the high jump by clearing just over 2 metres.

It was 23 March 1936, and the twenty-three-year-old Owens was accustomed to both winning and suffering racist abuse. He and his fellow black athletes had often found themselves in towns where the only place to eat was in the car, and the only place to sleep was at a dosshouse. Owens constantly had to wrench the pugnacious Albritton away from a brawl. Just a few days earlier, in Richmond, Indiana, he had had to stop his friend punching a restaurant owner who had refused them admission. ‘Now Pappa,' Owens had said, ‘just take it easy.' This had happened countless times over the past three years, although the two men were never as scared as they had been in Kokomo, Indiana, in 1933, when they pulled into town the day after a young black boy had been lynched. Apparently, some of the town's populace had picknicked underneath the tree bearing its ‘strange fruit'. What Owens and his friends was experiencing was somewhat similar to what the Jews were experiencing in Germany, a point that was made in
Der Angriff
, of all papers: ‘In the last analysis, we do not hang any Jews who misuse a German woman, but we try them according to law and justice. In Germany we do not lynch persons of another race.' The paper neglected to mention that Nazi ‘law and justice' hardly deserved to be described as such, and neither did it mention, for example, a pogrom held in July 1934 in Hirschberg, in which four Jews were shot while ‘trying to escape' from SS men. ‘[Their bodies] remained in the ditch until Monday noon,' said one eyewitness, ‘guarded by a few Storm Troopers. All four of them had been shot in exactly the same way: a revolver bullet through the jugular vein.'
Der Angriff
was quite right: persons of another race were indeed not lynched in Germany. They were shot.

The other difference was one of scale. Between 1933 and 1936 hundreds of Jews died at the hands of the Nazis in Germany, a significantly higher figure than the sixty-five African-Americans lynched in the
same period. In 1936 there were just eight lynchings. This is not to minimise the repugnance of lynching, but to illustrate that while extralegal racial murder was on the decrease in the United States, it was on the rise in Germany. To suggest that there was an equivalence, as General Sherrill had done the previous October with his talk of having ‘no more business' discussing Jews in Germany than a German would have discussing the ‘Negro situation' in the United States, was spurious. His view was little different to that of
Der Angriff
. Indeed, the number of blacks lynched after 1936 was never to rise higher than eight per year. Throughout the six years of war, twenty-three blacks were lynched in the USA. The figure for the number of Jews killed in German-occupied territories during that same period is well known.

Nevertheless, race relations in the United States were desperately bad, something Jesse Owens, born James Cleveland Owens on 12 September 1913 in Oakville, Alabama, knew all too well. Owens' grandparents had been slaves, and his father Henry was a sharecropper who tilled several acres of his white landlord's estate. Henry Owens was a simple man, who believed that if he looked at any book other than the Bible, then a family member would fall sick. Owens worked hard–like a slave, in fact–although he knew his labour would not, and indeed should not, elevate him. ‘It don't do a coloured man no good to get himself too high,' he once told Owens, ‘ 'Cause it's a helluva drop back to the bottom.' Owens' mother, Emma, gave birth to nine children, of whom Owens was the youngest. Growing up in a shack overcrowded with his siblings, Owens was not a healthy child, suffering from bronchial congestion and pneumonia. His mother, it was said, also removed several strange growths from his chest and legs with a knife.

Unsurprisingly, the family was extremely poor. Some of Owens' earliest memories concerned a lack of clothing. ‘I didn't have enough clothing at that time to cover my entire body,' he recalled. ‘The only time I remember being embarrassed was when I saw the neighbour girls and I didn't have enough clothing to cover my body […] I would run and hide.' It was not only Oakville's black families, however, which suffered from poverty. Around 950 of the town's 1,138 inhabitants were white, and many of them eked out a meagre existence on the land. Despite their mutual poverty, tensions between blacks and whites existed, largely because the whites regarded their colour as the
only means of elevating themselves above their equally poor black neighbours. Owens often found himself getting into scraps with white boys, the worst being when he was pinned to the ground and threatened with having their initials carved into his face. Luckily, Owens' older brothers came to his rescue. As a result, Owens found that the best form of defence was simply to be as pleasant as possible to everybody. It was this attitude which was to make him so popular in later years. ‘I try awfully hard for people to like me,' he once admitted.

Despite the poverty and the racism, life in Oakville had its pleasant side. The family was never short of food, and every autumn they killed a pig and smoked its meat. Owens and his brothers would go swimming in the village pond, and at night they would hunt possum and sit around campfires. Like any other child, Owens would play games like catch and hide-and-seek. If any game called for running away, however, then Owens could never be caught. ‘I always loved running,' Owens later recalled. ‘I wasn't very good at it, but I loved it because it was something you could do all by yourself, and under your own power.'

At some point after the First World War–the exact date is uncertain–the Owens family moved to Cleveland, Ohio. The reason for the family's move north is also unclear, but they were just eleven of 500,000 African-Americans who moved to northern cities between 1910 and 1920. Many who worked on the land found themselves being replaced by machinery, and the northern cities, with their promises of employment and better social conditions for blacks, were attractive prospects. Nevertheless, Cleveland was no paradise. Although there was no official racial segregation, it was nonetheless still there. The Ku Klux Klan was active as well, its membership some several thousand strong. One third of all those arrested were black, yet blacks accounted for just over 4 per cent of the population. Compared to Oakville, however, Cleveland was a cornucopia, and Owens senior and his three eldest sons found steady jobs at a steel mill. Even the young Owens found himself a job, working in a cobbler's.

Owens attended Bolton Elementary School, which is where he earned the name ‘Jesse'. Legend has it that when his teacher asked for his name, Owens replied ‘J. C. Owens' in his Southern drawl. When his teacher asked whether he had said ‘Jesse Owens', the young boy,
not wishing to contradict her, said that he had. The name stuck. After Bolton, Owens went to Fairmount Junior High School, where he met Ruth Solomon, with whom he fell in love. He also befriended David Albritton, who dated Ruth's sister, and the two boys formed a strong bond, based partly on their love of sports.

It was at Fairmount that Jesse met Charles Riley, to whom Owens would later credit much of his success. Riley was the school's PE teacher, a short, grey-haired Irishman. ‘I grew to admire and respect his words and his actions and everything else,' Owens recalled. Riley identified Owens' natural talent, and started coaching him an hour before school started. Soon, Owens was running the 100 yards in eleven seconds, an astonishingly quick time for a teenage boy. Riley, it was said, had to check that his stopwatch was not broken. In 1928, at the age of fifteen, Owens started breaking records on both the track and in the long jump pit, a habit that would endure. It was Riley who taught Owens his running style, instructing him to sprint as if ‘the ground was a burning fire'. Owens also learnt from Riley that not all whites were out to get him. ‘He was the first white man I really knew[…] he proved to me beyond all proof that a white man can understand–and love–a Negro.'

By the late 1920s, the Owens family was suffering from the effects of the Great Depression. Their experience was not of course unique, but their plight was not helped by the fact that Henry Owens was laid off from his job because he had been knocked down by a car. Owens' siblings left school to find work, and by 1930 Owens was the only child who remained in education. In that year, he enrolled at East Technical High School, a place that was more used to teaching vocational skills than reading and writing. In fact, Owens was never to learn to read well, despite his spoken fluency. He continued to impress on the track, however, his technique still being improved by Riley's coaching. By 1932, Owens was already being labelled in the local press as ‘a marvel'.