Hitler: Ascent, 1889-1939 (103 page)

Only two months later, on 6 February 1936, Hitler opened the Winter Games in the Garmisch-Partenkirchen ice hockey stadium in front of 60,000 spectators and more than 1,000 athletes from 28 countries. “Endless applause from the audience,” noted Goebbels. “Almost all foreign athletes performed the Hitler salute when they marched past the Führer.”
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But the propaganda minister as well as most German people present mistook the traditional Olympic raised-right-arm salute for the Nazi “German greeting.”
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All in all the Nazi leadership was satisfied with the ten-day event, at which the Norwegian figure-skating gold medallist Sonja Henie had captured the hearts of the crowds. The test run for Berlin had been a success, and there had been no unwelcome incidents. “On the whole the Nazis have done a wonderful propaganda job,” William Shirer admitted. “They’ve greatly impressed most of the visiting foreigners with the lavish but smooth way in which they’ve run the games and with their kind manners, which to us who came from Berlin of course seemed staged.”
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After Garmisch-Partenkirchen, not even the remilitarisation of the Rhineland, which so blatantly belied Hitler’s pretence of peacefulness, could endanger the Berlin Games. On the contrary, the ineffectual response of the Western allies to yet another German violation of international agreements weakened the position of those who favoured a boycott. Even France, the country that should have felt most threatened by the remilitarisation, never seriously considered withholding its athletes from the competition. The new Popular Front government under socialist premier Léon Blum approved the funds for the French Olympic team. The policy of appeasement also won out within the Olympic movement.

The Reich capital got a thorough makeover. “Berlin is being transformed into a true festival city,” Goebbels noted on 24 July, a week before the start of the Games. “But there’s still a lot to do.” On 30 July, after a drive around the city to inspect things, he was satisfied: “Berlin is now ready. It is gleaming in its lightest vestments.”
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Banners and other symbols of the regime were everywhere, on public squares, office buildings and private houses. Signs refusing entry to Jews had been removed, and discriminatory labels on park benches painted over.
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For two weeks,
Der
Stürmer
was nowhere to be found at newspaper kiosks, and
Der Angriff
reminded its readers to be solicitous towards foreign visitors: “We must be more charming than the Parisians, easier-going than the Viennese, livelier than the Romans, more cosmopolitan than Londoners and more practical than New Yorkers.”
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An Olympic tourist guide presented Berlin as a vibrant world metropolis and as the headquarters of a confident nationalist government: “[Wilhelmstrasse] is home to the workplace of a man whom every visitor to Berlin would give his eye-teeth to see: Adolf Hitler.”
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If it was raining slightly in Berlin on 1 August, the opening day of the eleventh Olympic Summer Games, it did nothing to dampen the “festival fever.”
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At 1 p.m., Hitler received the members of the International and German National Olympic Committees, thanking them for their work and declaring that the German Reich had “gladly and happily” taken on responsibility for hosting the competition in a form “befitting the great idea and traditions of the Olympic Games.”
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Undermining this sentiment was the fact that Hitler, after travelling the 15-kilometre stretch to the Reich Sports Field in an open car that afternoon, first stopped at the Bell Tower to inspect an honour guard of the army, navy and air force and then proceeded with Werner von Blomberg to the Langemarckhalle to commemorate Germany’s fallen soldiers in the First World War. Only after that, at 4 p.m., did he lead a delegation of the IOC and the German National Olympic Committee into the Olympic Stadium, where he strode, frenetically cheered by 80,000 spectators, to his “Führer box.” The strict choreography of the ceremony was interrupted for a moment, when a small girl—the 5-year-old daughter of the general secretary of the German National Olympic Committee—ran up to Hitler, curtsied and gave him a bouquet of flowers. The scene was apparently unplanned, but Hitler, who gladly had his picture taken with children, must have liked it.
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After that the forty-nine participating nations paraded into the stadium. (The Soviet Union boycotted the event, and the country’s civil war kept Spain out of the Games.) The French were greeted with particular applause when they walked past the Führer’s box with arms raised, which the crowd again misinterpreted as the German greeting. By contrast, the British team declined to salute and was given a cool reception, which even Goebbels described as “somewhat embarrassing.”
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When all the teams had arrived in the oval arena, Hitler declared the Games open for competition. The Olympic flag was raised, thousands of doves flew towards the heavens which had cleared by now, and cannons fired a twenty-one-gun salute. An Olympic hymn especially composed by Richard Strauss was played. Then the final torchbearer ran into the stadium and lit the Olympic fire. Rudolf Ismayr, a gold-medal-winning weightlifter at the 1932 Games in Los Angeles, recited the Olympic oath, although he took hold of the swastika banner, not the five-ringed Olympic flag—the merging of Nazi elements into Olympic ritual could hardly have been more obvious.
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The entire opening ceremony was designed to focus on Hitler. Fanfares announced his arrival, and his way to the VIP box was musically accompanied by Wagner’s “Homage March.” The enthusiasm that greeted Hitler in the stadium was not lost on the foreign athletes. One female Olympian from Britain felt that it was as if God himself had descended from heaven.
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That evening, the people of Berlin showered their leader with tempestuous ovations when he returned to Wilhelmstrasse. “Often on the balcony,” noted Goebbels. “The masses were out of their heads. It was very moving. Girls were brought up and wept before the Führer. A beautiful and a great day. A victory for the German cause.”
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Hitler attended almost every day of competition, and those who observed him up close were taken aback by his behaviour. The sporting spirit was alien to the leader of the Third Reich. If German athletes were beaten, his countenance immediately darkened. But if a German sportsman won, reported Martha Dodd, his enthusiasm knew no limits, and he would leap up from his seat with childish glee.
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It is a legend, however, that he refused to shake hands with the black American sprinter Jesse Owens, who won four gold medals and became the star of the Games. After Hitler had congratulated the Finnish and German medal winners on the first day of competition in his box, Henri de Baillet-Latour pointed out that such a gesture violated the Olympic protocol, whereupon Hitler did not congratulate any of the winners.
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Nevertheless, numerous sources show that Hitler and the other leading Nazis were not at all pleased about the multiple triumphs of a black American since they convincingly gave the lie to the doctrine of the superiority of the “white race.” After the events of 4 August, Goebbels noted: “We Germans won one gold medal, and the Americans three, two of them by a Negro. That’s a scandal. White people should be ashamed. But what does that matter over there in that country without culture.”
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When Baldur von Schirach suggested it would make an excellent impression abroad if Hitler were to receive Owens in the Chancellery, the dictator was outraged. “Do you truly believe that I will allow myself to be photographed shaking hands with a Negro?” Hitler yelled in Schirach’s face.
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Hans Frank remembered Hitler being “passionately interested” in the Games and “always full of feverish suspense at who would win what medal.”
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In the end, Germany topped the medals table ahead of the United States with 33 gold, 26 silver and 30 bronze—an outcome Goebbels praised as being “the result of reawakened ambition.” He added: “This Olympics is a very big breakthrough…we can once more be proud of Germany…The leading sports nation in the world. That is magnificent.”
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Germany impressed the world not just with sporting successes, but also, as had been the case in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, with its perfect organisation and an accompanying programme that showcased the regime’s best side to foreign visitors. In retrospect, Hitler’s interpreter Paul Schmidt called the sixteen-day event an “apotheosis for Hitler and the Third Reich.” In numerous conversations with foreigners, Schmidt observed that they encountered Hitler with “the highest interest—to say nothing of great admiration.”
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André François-Poncet made a similar observation:

The power of attraction he emanates has an effect beyond the borders of his own country. Kings, princes and famous guests come to the capital less to take in the upcoming Games than to meet this man, who seems destined to so greatly influence the future and who seems to hold the fate of the continent in his hands.
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Hitler’s paladins fell over themselves trying to outdo one another with parties and receptions for international VIPs. Joachim von Ribbentrop, just named Nazi Germany’s ambassador to Great Britain, invited more than 600 guests to dinner at his villa in the southern Berlin district of Dahlem on 11 August. Three days later, Göring hosted a huge garden party in the grounds of the new Aviation Ministry, and Goebbels topped everyone on 15 August, the day before the Olympics concluded, with an “Italian Night” on Pfaueninsel Island in the Havel River that was attended by more than 2,700 people. “Great fireworks,” he noted. “A life as never before. Magical lighting…Partner dancing. An elegant picture…The nicest party we’ve ever hosted.”
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The 1936 Olympic Summer Games were also a media spectacle. More than 1,800 journalists were accredited for the event, and 41 broadcasters from around the world had sent reporters, who worked in sound booths in the Olympic Stadium; 125 German photographers supplied national and international agencies with pictures. For the first time ever, a major sporting event was broadcast live on television on the “Paul Nipkow” station and 160,000 viewers were able to watch the competitions in “television parlours” in Berlin, Potsdam and Leipzig, although the quality of the broadcasts left much to be desired.
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The most lasting impression came from Leni Riefenstahl’s documentary film about the Olympics, for which she had been commissioned in August 1935. Once again, Hitler’s star director came up with a number of innovations. She attached hand cameras to balloons so as to capture a bird’s-eye view of the stadium. Trenches inside the arena allowed cameramen to film the athletes from close proximity and unusual angles. Riefenstahl’s footage not only cast an aesthetic eye on perfectly trained, mostly masculine bodies. It was also a homage to the “new Germany,” which she depicted as the successor to Ancient Greece. Various sequences showed Hitler as a true sports lover rooting for Germany’s athletes and celebrating their triumphs. The two-part film—entitled
Festival of Peoples
and
Festival of Beauty
—premiered in the Ufa-Palast cinema on 20 April 1938, Hitler’s forty-ninth birthday. Like her Nuremberg rally films, it was valuable to the Nazis because it concealed the reality of the Third Reich behind the beautifully staged appearances of the peaceful Olympic Games. “One is carried away by the power, depth and beauty of this work,” Goebbels enthused. “A masterful achievement by Leni Riefenstahl.”
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Without doubt, the Olympic Games were a great propaganda triumph for the Nazi regime and did wonders for Hitler’s international standing. Most of the foreign journalists and visitors were blinded by the welcoming atmosphere and the smooth organisation. The Nazis had “put up a very good front,” William Shirer concluded.
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Once the Games were over, everyday reality in the Third Reich, including the persecution of Jews, soon resumed. There was a common saying among party radicals and SA men: “Once the Games are history, we’ll beat the Jews into misery.”
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Victor Klemperer, who saw through the false front of the Olympics better than most people, predicted an “explosion” at the next Nuremberg rally, in which people would take their pent-up desire for aggression out on Jews.
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Indeed, at the rally in September 1936, Nazi leaders competed with one another to see who could deliver the most hateful anti-Semitic tirade. In his opening and concluding speeches, Hitler once again invoked the Jewish-Bolshevik “global peril.” An “international Jewish revolutionary centre in Moscow,” he claimed, “was trying to revolutionise Europe via radio broadcasts and thousands of money and agitation channels.”
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The wild demagogue of Munich’s beer cellars in the 1920s once again broke through the façade of the statesman and “people’s chancellor.” “What the Party Conference of Honour brought forth…in paroxysms of Jew-baiting and insane lies exceeded the imagination,” wrote the downhearted Klemperer in his diary. “You constantly hope that voices of shame and fear would be raised and a protest from abroad would come…but no!” Instead, Klemperer was forced to record, “admiration for the Third Reich, for its culture, trembling fear in the face of its army and its threats.”
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