Berlin Games (37 page)

Son graciously thanked Harper for his success. ‘Much credit for my victory must go to Mr Harper of England,' he said. ‘Please say Mr Harper is very fine man for telling me about Zabala.' While Son was being lionised, the ‘very fine man' was to be found limping around the depths of the stadium looking for the British dressing room. He had asked twelve policemen where it was, but none could understand him. Nobody from the British team was available to escort him, despite the fact that Harper was exhausted. Eventually, a journalist from the Associated Press helped him, bemused to watch
the solitary Harper limp away, holding in his mouth, of all things, a cigarette.

Son knew that he had won a great victory, but the worst moment was about to come–the presentation of his gold medal. ‘It was an unbearable disgrace for me that I listened to “Kimigayo” [Japan's national anthem] on the honour platform, seeing the flag of the Rising-Sun on the flag-pole,' Son recalled fifty years later. ‘Unconsciously, I hung my head and wondered whether I was really a Japanese. If I were, what did the Japanese maltreatment against my fellow countrymen mean? Anyway, what on earth do the sun flag and “Kimigayo” mean, what do they symbolise?' Son was probably the unhappiest gold medal winner in the history of the Games. The wreath almost covered his eyes, which were moist with tears. Worse was to come. In the press interviews afterwards, Son tried telling the world that he was a Korean, but as his interpreter was Japanese his comments were never translated in full. At his own request, Son was to meet Hitler that day, determined to tell the Fuehrer about his situation. He could not, however, bring himself to raise the matter during the meeting. ‘What I was going to say was, “Mr Hitler, I am a man without a country”. But I held back. I don't think he would have understood anyway.' It is unlikely Hitler would have cared.

 

One man who was similarly desperate to tell the world about his country was Werner Seelenbinder. Although he now realised, because of the arrests, that he would never be able to make a broadcast in the event of his winning a medal, he knew that he could still protest plainly enough by not saluting at the medal ceremony. His path to the podium started at the Deutschland Hall just after eleven o'clock on the morning of Thursday, 6 August. Between then and 9 August, Seelenbinder would hopefully face six rounds. At Berlin, the bouts were scored by awarding ‘bad points'. Anyone who obtained five bad points was eliminated from the competition. The most points a losing wrestler could gain in a bout was three, which were incurred if he was defeated by a fall. Three points were also awarded if the three judges voted unanimously against the loser. Two points were given to the loser if the judges voted two to one for the victor. One point was awarded to the winning wrestler if he had only won on points, and
no points were awarded only if the winning wrestler had triumphed by throwing his opponent.

Seelenbinder did not feel as confident as he should have done, his nerves increased by the arrests made a few days earlier. In his first round he faced the square-jawed Edvins Bietags of Latvia, whom he knew he could beat. Nevertheless, exactly halfway through the twenty-minute bout the Latvian threw a shocked Seelenbinder. For the German, it was a disaster–he now only had to lose two more points and he would be out. The second round took place at seven o'clock the following morning, and Seelenbinder was determined to regain his form. He faced Argast of Switzerland, who felt the full desperate force of Seelenbinder. After just three minutes, Argast was thrown. Seelenbinder now advanced to the fourth round, having been allowed a let in round three. At 7 p.m. on 8 August, Seelenbinder literally wiped the floor with Foidl of Austria, throwing him in a mere thirty-five seconds. The first round was surely unrepresentative of Seelenbinder's mastery.

At eleven o'clock on the morning of Sunday, 9 August, the last four wrestlers faced each other. Bietags still had no points. Axel Cadier of Sweden, his jaw even more lantern-like than that of Bietags, had one point. Like Seelenbinder, August Neo of Estonia, his jaw reasonably lantern-like, was on three points. All four men were well matched, but a betting man would have placed his money on Seelenbinder, despite the disaster of the first round. The first bout took place between Bietags and Neo. It lasted the full twenty minutes, and at the end the judges awarded the victory to Bietags by a margin of two to one. Bietags now had two points; Neo had five, and was therefore ruled out.

It looked as if Seelenbinder's place on the podium was guaranteed. All he had to do was to defeat Axel Cadier to guarantee winning gold or silver. Matters would be made more complicated if Seelenbinder incurred any points by winning on a judge's decision, but given the way the German was wrestling, a victory with no points looked likely. Even if Seelenbinder lost with a judge's decision, then he would be on five points, like Neo. With the two men tied for bronze, they would face a play-off which Seelenbinder would undoubtedly win, as Neo was the weakest of the four. The worst thing that could happen
to Seelenbinder was to gain three points by being thrown or suffering a defeat at the hands of unanimous judges.

A podium place, that was all he required. Seelenbinder grappled hard with Cadier, but found the blond Swede tougher than he could have imagined. The two men wrestled hard on the 8-by-8-metre mat, lit up by bright spotlights, their every move analysed by the judges. Seelenbinder felt he did well, but the twenty-nine-year-old Cadier was a tough and experienced opponent. Little did the Swede know that for Seelenbinder there was more at stake than a medal. Neither of the men was able to throw the other, however, and after twenty minutes the bout ended. It would now be up to the judges. At their desks, the judges had three different coloured lights. A white light meant that the judge was neutral. A red light meant that the judge favoured the wrestler wearing red socks, a green light was a vote for the opponent with green socks. That day, appropriately enough, the communist Seelenbinder was wearing red socks. As he stood there, his huge torso glistening in the bright lights, he knew that the illumination of three small light bulbs held his fate. The lights came only on when all the judges had made their decision, in order not to let the judges who had made their minds up quickly affect the decisions of those who were more pensive. Seelenbinder held his breath. The lights came on. They were all of the same colour. It was green.

O
NLY IN DICTATORSHIPS
can a ‘Week of Laughter' be declared. For Nazi Germany, the eight days from Friday, 17 July were designated thus by the Labour Front. ‘The days will be days of jollity and cheerfulness,' the organisation ordered. ‘Prior to the strain of the Olympic weeks, Berliners should take stock of themselves, then with merry heart and friendly expressions on their faces receive their Olympic guests. None should miss this chance.' In order to jolly the Germans along, the British and Canadians had decided to show what was termed some ‘Olympic spirit' by returning a couple of war relics to the Reich. One was a piece of the Fokker triplane in which Manfred von Richtofen–the famous Red Baron–was shot down near the Somme on 21 April 1918. The other was the bell from the battlecruiser
Hindenburg
, which had been scuttled at Scapa Flow on 21 June 1919. Perhaps there was something a little cheeky in giving back pieces of wreckage that would only serve to remind the recipients of their defeat just eighteen years previously.

Those who visited Berlin during the Olympic fortnight found that the German capital was indeed a place of jollity and cheerfulness. It was a city
en fête
, one that retained much of the glamour of its Weimar days, described by one breathless travel writer as a ‘mecca for pleasure-seekers', with ‘its midnight path of dalliance [which] offers everything from the finest opera to the jazziest dance-bars'. Berlin's hot spots included the Eden Roof Garden with its distinguished, upmarket clientele, and the rather more racy Rio Rita, where telephones on the tables enabled visitors to indulge in flirtatious chatter with strangers. One of those who enjoyed such clubs was Eduard Falz-Fein, a twenty-three-year-old journalist for
L'Equipe
. ‘I enjoyed myself,' he recalled. ‘Every minute, there was something going on. I was a good-looking
boy, and the girls had a good time with me. I was bewildered by how many good-looking girls there were in Berlin. Every man in the world wanted to have a good-looking girl, but I didn't have to do anything, they just came to me. I took them to restaurants and nightclubs, and after that to bed. They were very good.'

Suffering from hangovers the following day, those who didn't want to attend the Games could consult the recently updated Baedeker guidebook, which had just been reissued and thoroughly Nazified. One of the highlights of the city was nothing less than the grave of the Nazi hero Horst Wessel himself. The Baedeker also told visitors to Germany that the Versailles Treaty was not a real peace treaty, but a ‘diktat which the defeated had to accept like a verdict'. As a counter to the Nazification of guides like the Baedeker, secret resistance groups had prepared subversive leaflets mocked up to look like tourist brochures. One, which found its way into the hands of a columnist on the
New Statesman
magazine, featured a map that marked all of Germany's concentration camps, as well as the locations where political murders had taken place. The columnist grimly wondered ‘how many heroic individuals will reach these places of torment for distributing this leaflet during the celebrations'.

What struck most of those visiting Berlin was not just the abundance of swastikas and Olympic rings, but also the overpowering sense of militarism. ‘I'll not forget the sight of those German storm troopers,' wrote Grantland Rice, ‘in their severely cut black uniforms, looking every inch the super race. You could see them in the streets, out at the jam-packed Reich Sportsfeld, at the Hofhaus. They didn't stroll, they marched, and gutturalised with the quiet, confident bearing that betokened their Cheshire cat scorn of “less endowed” mortals.' For Rice, Germany was, as it was for so many others, ‘painted in the garish hues of a nation well primed for war'. The novelist Thomas Wolfe also saw a portent of conflict in the uniforms. ‘[There were] long lines of Hitler's bodyguards, black-uniformed and leather-booted, the Schutz-Staffel men [the SS], stretching in unbroken lines from the Leader's residence in the Wilhelmstrasse up to the arches of the Brandenburger Tor; then suddenly the sharp command, and instantly, unforgettably, the liquid smack of ten thousand leather boots as they came together, with the sound of war.'

As much as the hosts enjoyed the novelty of having so many guests from all over the world, they soon began to tire of the visitors' obsession with one man. ‘There was one question on everyone's mind,' recalled Esther Wenzel, a twenty-year-old schoolteacher from Douglass, Kansas. ‘ “What do you think about Hitler?” That was the question we asked our German friends at the balls, dinners and entertainments. “Please don't talk about him,” we were told. “Are you a member of the Nazi Party?” we often asked someone. If the answer was negative, the reply was always a hushed “no” and “I don't want to talk about it”.'

Such abortive conversations were not uncommon. Alfred Gerdes, the German hockey player, had to constantly fend off questions about politics. ‘We always said, “Leave it out, that stuff, we don't want to hear anything about all that.”' Gerdes believed, however, that the visitors could detect what he thought. ‘They could feel it out of what I said,' he recalled. ‘I told them not exactly with words, but they could tell.' Not all the visitors, however, were so politically minded. Halet Çambel, the Turkish fencer, found her fellow female athletes at the Friesian House singularly uninterested. ‘The queer thing was that in the Friesian House there was no talk about politics,' she remembered. ‘I don't remember that anyone was aware of what was happening. The other girls were just interested in their training and how they were going to do.' Çambel said that the only reason she knew what was going on was that her mother had made friends with many German refugees in Turkey. In fact, many of the female athletes spent their time in Berlin shopping. ‘Several of the girls are having to buy trunks and suitcases to get their souvenirs home,' wrote Velma Dunn to her mother. It was during such shopping trips that Dorothy Odam recalled how ‘we were quite often stopped because Hitler was coming'. Whenever the Fuehrer drove past, the streets came to a standstill, which Odam at first though strange, until it occurred to her that the British would have done the same thing for King Edward.

One element of the regime that was not in evidence–at least not on the surface–was anti-Semitism. The American swimmer Adolph Kiefer had visited Germany in 1935, when he found the signs of measures being taken against Jews to be ‘very obvious'. ‘In 1936,' he said, ‘they played it down. We didn't see any armbands with Stars of David
on them during the Olympics.' Nevertheless, it was clear to some that the Jews, even though they were enjoying the benefits of an all too brief ‘Olympic pause', were still frightened. Halet Çambel recalled one conversation she had on a bus. ‘A very short dark man came up to me,' she said. ‘He asked me in Yiddish whether I was Jewish. I told him that I was on the Turkish Olympic team and that I was indeed Jewish, although I am not. I said it to give him courage. He was obviously happy to hear it, glad to hear that Jews were being allowed to visit. And then he went away.' Not all signs of anti-Semitism had been removed, however, ‘I was interested to note, incidentally, that
Der Stuermer
–contrary to rumour–had not ceased publication,' wrote an Alec Dickson to
The Spectator
. ‘[…] I observed copies for sale outside the Gedächtniskirche.' The SS newspaper,
Das Schwarze Korps
, was also noticeable, replacing the pornographically vile, anti-Semitic
Der Stuermer
in the public reading boxes. According to Dickson, the opinion of the former regarding the Games was that they were ‘essentially a German festival at which other nations are honoured guests, but still only guests'.

Like Adolph Kiefer, Thomas Wolfe had visited Germany in 1935. Although he too had noticed that there were fewer public displays of anti-Semitism, the worldly thirty-five-year-old novelist was able to see far more than the eighteen-year-old swimmer.

One of those lives was that of a ‘little man' who had worked in a publishing house, whom Wolfe had met the year before. The novelist had wanted to see him again, and asked the host of a party whether this little man could be also be invited. His host told him that because the man was a Jew, he no longer had a job, and that it would be unwise to meet him in public. Nevertheless, Wolfe insisted on seeing him in private. The two men met in secret, and the first thing Wolfe noticed was the shabbiness of the little man's suit, which was the same suit he was wearing a year ago,

Here, then, was an embodiment of the state of Germany's Jews–unable to work, unable to buy new clothes, unable to get their clothes laundered, unable to feed themselves properly, but still wearing ties, even if they were just shoe-strings of ties. Had Wolfe attended the service for the American Olympic team at the American Church in Berlin, he would have admired Reverend Stewart W. Herman Jr's choice of Psalm 98:

One Jew similar to Wolfe's ‘little man' was Victor Klemperer, who had been a professor of Romance languages until he had been forced to stop teaching because of his faith. Klemperer despised the Olympic Games, regarding them as detestable not only because they married athletic ability to a nation's honour, but also because they were ‘not a matter of sports–here in our country, I mean–but rather a political enterprise through and through'. On 13 August he wrote in his diary: ‘Natives and foreigners are constantly having it drummed into them that what they are seeing is the upswing, blossoming, new spirit, unity, solidity and splendour, naturally also the peaceful and lovingly world-embracing spirit of the Third Reich.' Klemperer was wise to keep such cynicism within the pages of his diary, for those who openly criticised the regime would find themselves in trouble. The daily report of the State Police Office for 15/16 August tells of a man who would constantly approach foreigners in restaurants and ask them what they thought of Berlin. When they told him how much they liked it, he
would respond by saying that ‘he could show them another side, especially since he had been in a concentration camp'. The Criminal Investigation Office tracked him down and arrested him, and discovered that he had in fact not been in a camp, a situation that was soon ‘rectified' by Himmler himself, who ordered that he should be sent to one for five years.

Jews were not the only persons of faith who suffered under the regime, and continued to suffer during the so-called pause. Protestants also found themselves under attack, their churches being forced to merge into the Nazi-controlled Protestant Reich Church. Many pastors were opposed to this, and in May 1934, at the Synod of Barmen, the Confessing Church was formally established by, among others, Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Martin Niemoeller. Much to the fury of the Nazis, the new church proclaimed itself the true voice of Protestantism in Germany. The pastors were not afraid to directly oppose the regime. At a 20,000-strong rally at Dahlem in November 1934, Niemoeller declared that ‘it is a question of which master the German Protestants are going to serve–Christ, or another'. For a while, the Confessing Church was tolerated by the Nazis, but only just. Over seven hundred pastors were arrested, and members of the church were constantly spied upon and subject to eavesdropping. Higher-profile members, such as Niemoeller and Bonhoeffer, were safe–albeit temporarily–only because they had influential friends and they were well known overseas. Between 1933 and 1935, Bonhoeffer had served as a pastor in two German-speaking Protestant churches in London.

The Confessing Church saw the Olympic Games as an opportunity to make itself heard throughout the world. In late July, Niemoeller and others produced a manifesto that was smuggled out of Germany and printed in the foreign press just before the Games.

The pastors did not stop there. On 5 August they wrote a long memorandum to the Nazi government. ‘The attempt to dechristianise the German people', it stated, ‘is to become the official policy of the Government through the further participation of responsible statesmen or even by the fact that they merely look on and allow it to happen […] We must express our concern that honour is often done to him [Hitler] in a way that is due to God only.'