Berlin Games (16 page)

On 15 April 1936 Morris and Charlotte went to the Kansas Relays. It quickly became clear that all his training had paid off, because by the end of the first day Morris was leading the pack. In his last event, however, he pulled a muscle in his right leg, and he slept very little that night. Typically, the determined Morris did not let the injury affect his performance, and he came out the next day to win the discus and the hurdles. At the end of the decathlon, Morris found that not only had he won, he had smashed the American record with 7,576 points. Unless he performed spectacularly badly at the Olympic trials in June, then there was no doubt that he would be going to Berlin.

 

Another athlete for whom the Olympic trials seemed a formality was Eleanor Holm. The winner of the 100 metres backstroke at the Los Angeles Olympics when she was just eighteen, Holm was renowned not only for her swimming, but also for her looks and her body. ‘She has the most beautiful physique I have ever seen,' said the impresario Florenz Ziegfeld. Ziegfeld was right–Holm's body was indeed a head-turner, and she had a face to match. Her smile was infectious, and she had a look about her that suggested that there was more to her life than hours spent in training. In fact, New Yorker Holm was more likely to be found in a nightclub than a swimming pool. After the 1932 Games she married the bandleader Arthur Jarrett, and she toured the country singing in clubs. She looked sensational, dressed solely in a white bathing suit, a cowboy hat and a pair of high heels, singing ‘I'm an Old Cowhand (from the Rio Grande)'. ‘I had never done any singing before that,' Holm recalled, ‘but I was still on the sports pages, so I didn't have to sing that well. I always had a throaty voice.' Holm had also signed a $500-a-week deal with Warner Brothers, but by early 1936 she had played only a few bit parts. Hollywood wanted her to swim for the camera, but Holm refused, despite an offer of $750 a week, because she was all too aware that to do so would have violated her amateur status in the eyes of the all-powerful AAU.

If singing and acting did not come easily to Holm, then swimming most certainly did. ‘I was a water rat as a child,' she said, ‘I had no fear of water.' Holm's parents kept a holiday cottage on Long Beach, New York, and it was there that her mother taught her to swim. Holm was intrepid, and often she would swim too far out into the Atlantic, with the result that she would have to be rescued by a lifeguard. ‘On the way in he would bawl me out and say, “Don't do that again,” but he would also teach me how to swim on the way in. An hour later he'd be getting me out again. And he'd teach me on the way in again. I was no dope. I was getting free lessons.' Holm soon developed a fascination for the female divers of the Women's Swimming Association of New York, who would compete at the Olympic Pool at Long Beach. ‘I used to sit there goggle-eyed watching them,' she recalled. Holm joined the Association, much to her father's chagrin. Her ability astonished everybody, and at the age of thirteen she won her first national title in the backstroke. At the 1928 Olympics in Amsterdam, Holm came fifth, although she was not disappointed. ‘It didn't mean that much to me,' she said. ‘I don't think I had the competitive will to win in '28. I thought, “This is great. This is wonderful.” But when I saw that American flag go up, I got the spirit, and I said to myself, “Next time that's going to be for me.” '

Holm trained hard for the next four years, and she even earned herself a reputation as a goody-two-shoes. ‘I used to snitch on the girls if they kept me awake,' she recalled. ‘I'd say to the coaches, “Did you know she was out last night? She didn't get in until ten o'clock.” ' In view of her later behaviour, this was most uncharacteristic. When Holm won the gold medal at Los Angeles with a world record of 1:19.4, her demeanour changed, and she even took up smoking. Nights and early mornings in clubs also meant that Holm learned how to hold her drink, but no amount of carousing stopped her from training for the next Olympics. When she was singing with her husband at the Blackhawk club in Chicago, Holm would visit the Lakeshore Pool at three in the morning in order to train. All her efforts paid off, so much so that her confidence was supreme. ‘When I was preparing for the [Olympic] try-outs, I would do a terrible thing,' she recalled. ‘I used to walk into the locker room and light up a cigarette, and all of the girls would look at me and whisper, “How can she do that?
How can she smoke?” But I was just psyching them out, that's all.' Holm's oft-repeated quip to reporters of ‘I train on champagne and cigarettes', although an exaggeration, was not so far from the truth. As her teammate Velma Dunn recalled, ‘She could beat anybody else on the planet, even if she was plastered. She was a natural swimmer.'

It came as no surprise that Holm made the Olympic team–for her the try-outs were a formality. Nevertheless, her reputation had earned her at least one enemy, an enemy who was very powerful–Avery Brundage. ‘I was everything Avery Brundage hated,' said Holm. ‘I had a few dollars, and athletes were supposed to be poor. I worked in nightclubs, and athletes shouldn't do that. I was married. All of this was against his whole conception of what an athlete should be. It didn't matter to him that I held the world record.' Holm's and Brundage's paths were soon to cross, and when they did, the result would be explosive.

 

Another New Yorker who was to fall foul of Avery Brundage was Marty Glickman. Born in the Bronx on 14 August 1917, Glickman was the son of a cotton-goods salesman who had migrated from Romania. Although the Glickman family was Jewish, Glickman's father refused to allow the young Marty to speak Yiddish. ‘He wanted to be an American,' Glickman recalled, ‘so we only spoke English in our house.' Glickman's early childhood was one of playing games in the ‘concrete jungle' of the Bronx. ‘It was a happy, active life […] We played games on the street or in a little courtyard leading to the apartment house.' Glickman found that he was a faster runner than any of his friends, and he was soon nicknamed ‘the Fastest Kid on the Block'.

When Glickman was seven, the family moved to Brooklyn. Glickman continued to dazzle others with his speed, and by the time he went to high school he was on the baseball, basketball, track, swimming and football teams. In his junior and senior years, Glickman became the indoor and outdoor sprint champion of New York State, setting a state record in the outdoor 100-yard dash of 9.75 seconds. Nevertheless, times were tough for the Glickmans. During the Depression, Glickman's father lost his job, and when he started a new business, it went bankrupt. Embittered, he drank and gambled to excess, even frittering away Marty's bar mitzvah money. At one point,
the family was so hard up that even buying a pair of long-coveted five-dollar trainers was a drain on the household's budget. Glickman remembered getting the trainers as being ‘one of the great joys' of his life. As soon as he put them on, he ran all the way back home–some fifteen blocks.

In 1935, Glickman went to Syracuse University, New York, where his track career continued to prosper. His biggest rival was Ben Johnson, whom he faced in the 100 metres in the Metropolitan Championships in New York City in the late spring of 1936. When the gun went off, the two athletes rushed down the track, with Johnson in the lead. When they crossed the tape, Johnson had won, but when the two men turned round, they realised that they were the only ones who had raced–they had both made false starts. In the race proper, Glickman won. He beat Johnson again in the Olympic eastern regional finals in Boston. All that now stood in the way of Glickman becoming an Olympian was the final Olympic qualifiers to be held in July on Randalls Island underneath the Triborough Bridge in New York City. Glickman knew that to get to Berlin would require something special. He would be up against some of the fastest men on the planet–Owens, Peacock, Metcalfe, as well as the legendary Frank Wykoff and Foy Draper. There, he would also meet another Jewish athlete called Sam Stoller, with whom Glickman would be invariably linked to his dying day.

 

On 19 February 1936 Helene Mayer arrived back in Germany. She was hardly welcomed back with open arms. An edict from the Propaganda Ministry stipulated: ‘The press is asked not to report her arrival. The only exceptions are permissible in the newspapers of Hamburg, Bremen, and Offenbach, which may carry the news because of special local interest. Commentaries about her “non-Aryan” descent and her chances for an Olympic gold medal are undesirable.' Mayer settled in quietly back home, no doubt noticing the changes that had taken place in Germany over the past four years–the ‘Jews Forbidden' signs, the swastikas, the uniforms, the copies of
Der Angriff
affixed to public noticeboards. Forbidden from fencing at the Offenbach Club, Mayer trained in private, away from the eyes of her fans and journalists.

Meanwhile, her fellow Jew, Gretel Bergmann, was also in training. In March 1936 she was once again summoned to Ettlingen, where she found that she was treated ‘just like everybody else'. Despite the fact that hundreds had now been eliminated, however, Bergmann was still in doubt as to whether she would be selected for the team. She knew she was capable enough–after all, she was the best female high jumper in Germany–but she had no inkling as to what the Nazis had in mind for her. ‘I felt as if I were the main character in a mystery thriller,' she wrote, ‘with the plot's creators unwilling to give the slightest hint about the outcome until the last possible moment.' A hint arrived all too soon. In May, Bergmann was dismissed from her school six months before she finished her studies. It was a blow, but Bergmann was used to blows. At a small, regional athletics meeting in Stuttgart, she got her revenge by equalling the German record of 1.60 metres. ‘Had this happened under normal circumstances,' she noted, ‘the stadium would have been in an uproar; now I could hear only some very scattered applause.' To have applauded a Jew would have been a brave move indeed. Nevertheless, Bergmann felt fired up by her performance, seeing it as one in the eye for the Nazis. ‘ “Okay you lousy bastards, how did you like my performance?” ' she recalled thinking. ‘ “How did you like it that this so-called miserable Jew equalled the German record, that this Jew beat your best by 20 centimetres, that this Jew put a crack into your image of Aryan superiority and that there isn't a damn thing you can do about it?” ' Naturally, Bergmann kept such thoughts to herself. She returned home and waited, waited for a letter to come from the Nazis, as she knew it would. And then, one morning in mid-July, it arrived.

 

Unlike Gretel Bergmann, the German wrestler Werner Seelenbinder had already openly taunted the Nazis at a sports meeting. Seelenbinder was not a Jew, however, but a member of that other group of people that the regime despised almost as intensely–the communists. Seelenbinder's opportunity had come after he won the 1933 German middleweight wrestling championships, held shortly after Hitler had come to power. At the prize ceremony, the first three wrestlers were presented with their belts and trophies, at which point the band struck up ‘Deutschland über Alles'. As was now becoming customary, the
3,000-strong crowd rose to its feet, its arms shooting out in the fascist salute. Seelenbinder found his fellow competitors doing likewise, but he refused to salute, holding his trophy tightly and resolutely to his chest, his lips not moving. The crowd saw his action for what it was–an affront to Nazism.

The predictable knock on Seelenbinder's door came eight days later. The Gestapo took him to the dreaded Columbia House prison near Tempelhof airfield, where he was interrogated. The Gestapo would certainly have known that the twenty-nine-year-old Seelenbinder was a committed communist, as he had been a member of the KPD (the German Communist Party) since the late 1920s. Seelenbinder had competed in the 1928 and 1929 Spartakiads–workers' sports festivals–in Moscow, and it was there that the already left-wing young man became convinced that communism was the way forward. The son of an unemployed bricklayer, Seelenbinder had experienced his political dawning at the age of fourteen, when he took a job as a porter in a luxury hotel. He resented the wealthy guests, and resented even more having to kowtow to them, and he soon resigned to work in a factory as a joiner. He returned from Moscow preaching the communist gospel, and soon he and his fellow members of his workers' sports club in Berlin found themselves being harassed by the Nazis. Their hall was attacked twice by SA troops, and on one of these occasions Seelenbinder is said to have beaten off fourteen men single-handedly.

What the Gestapo did not discover about Seelenbinder was that he was employed as a courier for the Uhrig Group, an association of undercover Berlin communists under the leadership of Robert Uhrig, running messages between the group and the office of the Red Sports International in Denmark. Luckily, when he was interned in Columbia House, one of his captors was a wrestling fan, and put a sign on his door which read, ‘German champion. Do not treat him badly!' After a few days, Seelenbinder was released, although he was banned from his club, which made it impossible for him to enter the Olympics. Seelenbinder's fellow athletes rallied to his support, and soon pictures of the champion were appearing in wrestling clubs up and down the country. With wrestling competitions being won by those vastly inferior to Seelenbinder, Tschammer und Osten's department found itself under increasing pressure to reinstate his membership, which they
eventually did some eight days before the 1935 championships, believing that it would be impossible for him to win with such a short time to prepare.

Seelenbinder had been secretly in training, however, and once again he won the championship, much to the Nazis' disgust. He repeated the feat the following year, compounding Tschammer und Osten's anger, as he was now guaranteed a place on the Olympic team. At first, Seelenbinder wanted to boycott the Games, but his fellow members of the Uhrig Group convinced him that it would help their cause more if he competed and won a medal. Not only would Seelenbinder be able to do as he had done in 1933, refusing to salute when he was on the podium, but the group had another idea that would expose the cruelties of the Nazi regime to the world. After each event, the medal winners were to be interviewed on live radio. Seelenbinder could use this opportunity to reveal what was happening in Germany–the murders, the pogroms and the concentration camps. A number of technicians who worked on the radio station were members of the Uhrig Group, and they would ensure that the interview would be broadcast. Immediately afterwards, some Swedish sportsmen would attempt to get him to safety, although there would be no guarantee that the Gestapo would not get to him first. Seelenbinder agreed to the idea–knowing that if he were caught, then he would be executed. Nevertheless, he was determined to win–the Olympics would be his greatest chance to strike a blow against a regime he despised.