Berlin Games (28 page)

Nothing could have prepared the Americans for their reception in Berlin. In contrast to the quietness of the British welcome, the Americans were once more fêted by thousands of their hosts, who had crammed on to the platforms of the Zoo Station and the streets outside. Wearing their Olympic uniforms, the team was taken aback by the enthusiasm of the crowd and the abundance of swastika and Olympic flags. Outside the station, they were loaded on to open-top cars and charabancs, and driven to the City Hall. ‘It was like a Broadway parade,' Marty Glickman wrote to his parents. ‘Men who had been with former Olympic teams said that this was by far the greatest reception ever given to an Olympic team.' The Berliners were heeding the words of
Der Angriff
, which had instructed them to be ‘more charming than the Parisians, more easygoing that the Viennese, more vivacious than the Romans, more cosmopolitan than London, and more practical than New York'. Once again, Velma Dunn was noticing the differences between the Germans and the Americans. ‘There certainly was no resentment against America shown,' she wrote. ‘The people here seem so genuine. They wear absolutely no lipstick or makeup. Most of them wear their hair in a big knot at the back of their heads.' Charles Leonard was somewhat disappointed by the
junge Frauen
. ‘Some of us sat on the rolled back tops to answer the cheers of the multitude–also to see and wave to the pretty girls of which there are few. Most of those we saw were plain–no rouge or lipstick with straight hair and wearing low heels. Plump too.'

Nevertheless, the reception for the African-American athletes was not that rosy. Iris Cummings recalled an altercation at the station. ‘We were in a long line of people,' she said, ‘and they [her fellow American
athletes] had the girls in a group, and our basketball players and other tall men got in the way and circled around us a few times.' At first, Cummings was unsure of why she and the other female athletes were being protected, but she soon found out. ‘There was hassle between the German police and our negro boys. That's what our teammates told us, but we couldn't tell. I heard there was a heap big meeting about it, and it got to Avery Brundage who went to the German committee and he said that we would go home if they didn't put a stop to this.' However, Cummings's story does seem a little unlikely. Had there been such a scene at the station, then the American press would certainly have picked up on it, and a scandal would have ensued.

At the welcoming drinks at the City Hall, each team member was presented with a book about the new Germany, intended as propaganda, although their effect was somewhat diminished by the fact that they were not written in English. ‘They have lovely pictures,' Dunn noted, ‘but I don't have any idea what they are about.' The book featured pictures, including one of a benign-looking Hitler digging into some sand and cement, accompanied by the caption: ‘It was necessary to rebuild Germany from her very foundations. As a first step, employment had to be provided for millions of diligent workers who had been unwillingly condemned to idleness. The Fuehrer, as the first worker among his people, opened the employment campaign.' The athletes would also have been able to see a book of photographs of Berlin by Heinrich Hoffman, which featured an introduction in English written by Goebbels. There was no doubt that the propaganda minister and the Gauleiter of Berlin saw the Games as an opportunity to promote the regime.

If proof were required that the Nazis were using the Games as a showcase for the ‘joys' of Nazism, then here it was.

After the reception at the City Hall, the male athletes were driven to the Olympic village, which lay near the village of Doeberitz, some 20 miles west of Berlin's centre, and 10 miles west of the Olympic Stadium. Not one of them was unimpressed by the 136-acre site, which featured some 140 single-storey houses, each of which accommodated around twenty athletes. The village, which included a practice track and a swimming pool, was set in rolling parkland, complete with specially planted firs, silver birch, larch and pines. Every comfort and convenience the athletes could require was attended to–even a lakeside sauna was provided. There was also an assembly hall–the Hindenburg House–at which entertainments were staged, although Charles Leonard described them as ‘rather poor vaudeville–little talking as the audience is not bilingual'. ‘Athletes', he added, ‘are not particularly adept at languages or else they might be teachers.' The Hindenburg House was, however, a good place for the athletes to socialise in and to observe each other's national characteristics. Dhyan Chand, the captain of the Indian hockey team, captured the multinational flavour of evenings at the Hindenburg House.

Some of the entertainments laid on by the Germans at the village were rather more edifying, however. João Havelange, who was swimming in the 400 and 1,500 metres freestyle for Brazil, recalled how the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra would play at the village. ‘The orchestra came at least three times,' he recalled, ‘with at least some seven hundred musicians. It was a dream for me to listen to them.' It is unlikely that the orchestra would have been so large, but the logistics involved in transporting an orchestra at all are great enough to suggest that the Germans wanted to make the athletes' time at the village as pleasant as possible.

The Germans also found another means of promoting their country, by naming each house after a German town or city, featuring paintings
and photographs of the town on its walls. The Australians were bemused to find they occupied a house called ‘Worms', and the British now occupied the Rhineland cities–Emden, Durisberg, Krefeld, Aachen, Düsseldorf and Solingen. Whether they had been placed there in ironic reference to the events in March is not known, but there can be little doubt that had the Germans placed their athletes in these houses, there would have been some form of protest. The Germans were sensitive enough, however, to keep the village free of swastikas.

‘The Olympic village was really a sight to behold,' Lou Zamperini recalled. ‘They had everything there. They had wild animals running over the grounds […] They had green grass mowed like a golf course. The buildings we lived in were like motels. There were no bathtubs, only showers. I think Hitler had all the bathtubs taken out of Germany because he didn't feel that they were sanitary. So we had showers.' Zamperini also commented on how pristine the place was. If an athlete dropped an apple core or a banana skin to the ground, a German would run over and swiftly deposit it in a bin. There was plenty of food, provided by a huge household block that boasted forty different kitchens specialising in cuisines from all over the world. The variety of food offered was staggering, ranging from
empanada à la creole
for the Argentinians, macaroni for the Greeks, cabbage dishes for the Poles, black beans for the Mexicans, raw eggs for the Luxembourgers, blueberry consommé for the Finns, steaks for nearly every nation, and for the British, Horlicks. According to Alfred Proksch, a pole vaulter from Austria, the Germans even provided kosher food for the Jewish athletes, but there is no record of this in the official Olympic Report. Most of the athletes found the food highly satisfactory, except for the Indians, for whom the German version of curry, according to Dhyan Chand, ‘could not satisfy our palates'. ‘We were unanimous in the opinion that it was very difficult to cater for Indians abroad,' he wrote. ‘There is not only divergence in the choice of dishes and their mode of preparation, but also in the choice of meat.'

What every athlete from every nation noticed was the plethora of men in uniform. Each team had an army officer assigned to it, who was able to speak the relevant language and attend to the needs of the athletes. The officers integrated closely with the teams, even eating with them and accompanying them to practices, which gave rise to
some suspicions. ‘I think our escorts are a bunch of spies,' wrote Charles Leonard, ‘who report to the German team their observations, including our times, styles in fencing and so on.' Leonard had no evidence to support what he suspected, but he was not the only athlete who thought the Germans were using their positions as hosts to give themselves an advantage. Martin Bristow recalled how his team was deprived of an important piece of kit. ‘Our boat went by train,' he said, ‘but there was a delay in its arriving. It was said that the Germans held up the boat deliberately so we couldn't train.' The British cyclist Harry Hill said the British team's bicycles and clothes were also delayed by twenty-four hours, which cost them a vital day's training on a course they had never ridden on. It is more likely that the British were simply the victims of bad luck rather than singularly unsporting play. Suspicions directed at the host nation are a staple of any Olympics, and the XIth Olympiad was to be no exception.

As well as the army officers, several other types of men in uniform walked around the village, and were quick to salute the athletes with a ‘
Heil Hitler!
' Many of the visitors found this highly amusing, and saluted back sloppily with a jocular ‘
Heil Adolf!
' or, in the case of the British, with a ‘
Heil
King Edward!' The Germans took this mickey-taking in good measure–‘nobody got mad', said Zamperini. Also dressed in uniform were members of the Honorary Youth Service, which consisted of 185 boys and seventy girls who were there to help the athletes with small matters such as how to post letters home, as well as to guide them around the city and its attractions. ‘They have all been in training for two years and have learned English fluently,' Velma Dunn wrote to her mother, ‘and have been taught the American mannerisms and customs. They are a lovely group of girls. They meet us at breakfast time and are near us until after dinner at night.' Dunn was right to take the girls at face value. If the SS Main Security Office had had its way, then the boys and girls would have been used as agents to monitor the athletes, and also to try to indoctrinate them politically. The Gestapo rejected the plan, as it was felt that the best means of diffusing political propaganda was for the Youth Service to be as apolitical as possible.

There was a dark side to the village, however. The commandant was Captain Wolfgang Fuerstner, a brilliant young army officer, who
had designed the village, transforming it from a drab army barracks into a place many of the athletes did not wish to leave. Fuertsner was also responsible for the formation of the Honorary Youth Service. Just before the Games, however, it was discovered that Fuerstner had a problem similar to that of Lewald–he was partly Jewish. He was immediately stripped of his citizenship and demoted to assistant commandant–sacking him would have created a scandal the Nazis could have ill afforded. As a result, Fuerstner knew that he was living on borrowed time as an army officer–after the Games he would surely be dismissed, a fate that he found hard to face, as he loved the army.

While the male athletes enjoyed the luxuriousness of the village, their female counterparts were housed in the relatively austere ‘Friesian House', which was only a block away from the stadium. The reason for the sexual segregation and the Friesian House's proximity to the stadium was because the organising committee felt that ‘after long and intense training, women are very highly strung immediately before difficult contests'. The large red-brick house was administered by the fearsome figure of Baroness Johanna von Wangenheim, who Iris Cummings remembered as being very tall, with grey hair gathered in braids. Although the committee claimed that the house was as good as any first-class hotel in the city, its occupants were rather less complimentary. ‘It was pretty plain,' said Cummings. ‘There were no pictures or anything, but it was adequate.' The athletes shared twin rooms, complete with basic furniture such as cupboards and chairs. The beds, however, left something to be desired. ‘The beds are very peculiar,' wrote Velma Dunn, who was rooming with Cummings. ‘Everything had been so nice that when we went to bed last night we expected soft beds. We jump in and they are as hard as rocks. I guess that is the German custom. We have two pillows. The top one feels like hard straw and the other is very soft.' Dunn also moaned about the bedding, which had a tendency to slip off frequently during the night.

The overall effect, then, was spartan rather than luxurious, an impression particularly reinforced by the quality of the food. ‘We got boiled potatoes and cabbage!' said Cummings. ‘This was before they flew some food out for us. We maybe got a few beets, and everything was boiled. As Californians, we were so spoiled, as we lived off fruit and orange juice. There were some rather vociferous complaints from
Dorothy Poynton, and she was shouting off because she couldn't get the food she wanted. I didn't care for it, but I ate it.' Americans such as Poynton, who had won silver at Amsterdam and gold at Los Angeles for diving, were more fussy than their European counterparts. Halet Çambel, a nineteen-year-old Turkish fencer, recalled that the women ‘had very good breakfasts, with grapefruit'. Domnitsa Lanitis, a twenty-two-year-old Greek sprinter, bemoaned the lack of Greek food, but said that ‘the food was good' and ‘everything was comfortable'. Dorothy Odam, a sixteen-year-old British high jumper, also thought the food rather good. ‘Perhaps I had such plain food at home,' she said. ‘I had a nanny who cooked so plainly, and the food at the Friesian House seemed rather nice. I wasn't used to anything better.' The Americans did like some of the food, however. Velma Dunn recalled wolfing down Melba toast with lots of butter. ‘I remember thinking that butter must be cheap,' she recalled, ‘because there was lots of it.' In fact, butter was anything but cheap. The liberal quantity given to the athletes was nothing more than an example of propaganda. Butter cost 1.60 Reichsmarks per pound ($8.48 or nearly £5 in present-day terms). Like eggs, butter had been hoarded in order to convince visitors that such foodstuffs were in plentiful supply. While the visitors to Berlin enjoyed unlimited butter, the Berliners had to make do with lard and margarine, which was privately referred to as ‘Hitler-butter'.