50TH ANNIVERSARY OF BERLIN OLYMPICS : Hitler Is Recalled, but So Too Is Owens

On a drizzly Saturday afternoon 50 years ago, in the magnificently proportioned stadium that still stands in the Charlottenburg District here, German leader Adolf Hitler, in military uniform, opened the Games of the XI Olympiad.

For two weeks, beginning Aug. 1, 1936, athletes from 52 nations participated in the most controversial Olympics in history, a sporting event later known derisively as “Hitler’s Games.”

They were held in the granite, marble and limestone structure designed on Hitler’s orders to seat 100,000. On its portals are still chiseled the names of the 1936 winners.

Nine miles to the West, an Olympic village was laid out. It is occupied today by Soviet soldiers stationed in East Germany.

In the 1936 Games, the host nation was declared the unofficial winner with the most medals, the first time that the United States had not won in the modern Games. These Olympics were viewed as a propaganda triumph for Hitler’s “New Germany,” his Third Reich.

The Berlin Games inspired a huge outpouring of nationalism from the German audiences that seemed to overshadow the international character of the Games, which originally were contests between individual sportsmen, rather than among nations.

“Host nations use the Games to show themselves off,” commented Willi Knecht, information director for the sports group arranging ceremonies in West Berlin for Aug. 14-17 to mark the 50th anniversary of the Berlin Olympics.

“Hitler, of course, was the worst of all. But in Moscow (1980), I saw the Russian government using the Games for their ends, and in Los Angeles (1984), I saw President Reagan telling Americans, ‘Go for it all,’ ” Knecht said.

“The Olympics can’t change the political situation in a country,” he added. “But what could reduce the element of nationalism in the Olympic Games is to have no national uniforms, no national flags raised for winners and no national anthems played. That might return some of the original spirit to the Games.”

A 1936 Olympic contestant, Vane Ivanovic, who represented Yugoslavia as a hurdler, goes so far as to recommend abolishing all team events, adding in a recent article:

“No events such as diving, skating and others where judgments of placings are made by politically prejudiced officials instead of in accordance with measurable performances. The Games to be held in one place always. Greece comes to mind.”

There were, to be sure, some ironies to the politics of the Hitler Games. Chief among them was that the outstanding popular star of the Olympics was not a blue-eyed, blond Aryan but a black American sprinter named James Cleveland (Jesse) Owens, who won four gold medals.

The Berlin Olympics touched off an international debate and raised questions that remain unresolved today: To what degree should sportsmen allow the Olympics to be politicized, particularly by the host nation? Should boycotts be employed in international sporting events, no matter what the justification?

Many observers in the United States and Britain thought then, and still think, that a boycott of some kind would have called the world’s attention to what was happening in Germany in 1936: the creation of a police state, secret rearmament, the imprisonment of political prisoners in concentration camps and, above all, the systematic campaign against Jews by the Nazis.

As British author Duff Hart-Davis writes in a new book called “Hitler’s Games”:

It is true that attempts were made to organize a boycott, but none of them came anywhere near success.

“Politics must not be brought into sport” was the constant cry--yet the introduction of politics into sport was precisely what the Nazis had perpetrated. For the first time in their history, the Olympic Games were deliberately exploited to make political capital.

How, in such circumstances, did the International Olympic Committee allow the Games to go ahead? How did the national committees allow their countries’ teams to take part? Why did no foreign government forbid its citizens to go to Berlin? Why did 52 countries, by their very participation, bolster the designs of a regime so manifestly dishonest and inhuman?

In 1933, the year Hitler took power, the German Boxing Federation banned Jewish boxers and referees; Dr. Danny Prenn was excluded from Germany’s Davis Cup tennis team because he was Jewish, and Jews were ruled out of youth and sport organizations.

When American Olympic czar Avery Brundage led a fact-finding mission to Germany in 1934. the Nazis, as a ploy, announced that 21 Jews had been nominated for Olympic training. So Brundage came away singing the regime’s praises, and his blind assessment was enough to cause the United States Olympic Committee to endorse participation in the Games.

In 1935, the debate continued in the United States, with the American Federation of Labor and other groups asking individual athletes not to go to Berlin, sentiments that were endorsed by sportsmen like Jim Busch, the U.S. gold medal winner in the 1932 decathlon.

In September 1935, the Nazis passed the Nuremberg Laws, blatantly discriminating against anyone of Jewish blood, leading Judge Jeremiah Mahoney, head of the Amateur Athletic Union, to declare:

“The present government has injected race, religion and politics into sport in general and into the Olympic Games in particular, and has destroyed their free and independent character; and if Germany today has no Jews of Olympic caliber, it is because she has denied them adequate facilities for training and has driven them into exile or suicide.”

Nonetheless, in December 1935, the AAU voted by a slender margin to send American athletes to the Games.

The Winter Games were held in the Alpine resort of Garmisch-Partenkirchen in Bavaria. They were dominated by the Scandinavians but went off very much to Hitler’s satisfaction.

They also were attended by Leni Riefenstahl, the beautiful and energetic film director, a favorite of Hitler whom he assigned to photograph the Olympic Games and whose documentary “Olympia” has become a classic.

In March 1936, Hitler ordered his troops into the demilitarized Rhineland, and when the West made no serious objections, the way for further aggression was opened.

U.S. Ambassador William E. Dodd and the British envoy, Sir Eric Phipps, were among the more astute diplomats who early on warned their governments about the menace of Hitler’s Nazism. But the governments in Washington and London preferred to take a rosier view of the New Germany, and ignored reports from the scene.

During that spring, Hitler instituted the so-called “Olympic Pause,” a period in which he ordered the more obvious evidences of Nazism and anti-Semitism toned down in order not to disturb foreign visitors and officials.

Participation at Berlin was viewed quite differently by various sports figures, even Jews.

In England, for instance, Harold Abrahams, the Jewish sprinter who had won the gold medal in the 100 meters at Paris in 1924 and whose story was at the center of the 1981 film “Chariots of Fire,” declared that isolating Germany would not promote peace. He recommended that the British team take part as an “influence for good.”

In Austria, however, Judith Deutsch, a leading swimmer who held a dozen national records, said: “I refuse to enter a contest in a land which so shamefully persecutes my people.”

So the Games went ahead with all the scheduled nations and all the trappings. The Olympic torch was relayed from Greece, and a specially cast nine-ton bronze bell arrived. It was inscribed, “I call the youth of the world,” and was taken on a tour across Germany.

Of the new stadium, Godfrey Rampling, who won a gold as a member of Britain’s 1,600-meter relay team and who is the father of actress Charlotte Rampling, remembers: “I went to Los Angeles in 1932, and they built a pretty reasonable one. But the German one was magnificent: I had never seen anything like it.”

The American team arrived aboard ship and amid headlines. Eleanor Holm Jarret, a swimmer who four years earlier had won a gold medal in the 100-meter backstroke at Los Angeles, was barred for drinking too much champagne aboard the liner Manhattan.

She was popular with her teammates, who signed a petition calling for her reinstatement. But Brundage, who detested her as she did him, succeeded in barring her, though she created a stir in the stands.

The American team was the largest with 384 members, followed by Germany with 300.

The 100-meter heats made up the first event of the Games. Owens, 22, of Ohio State, and a fellow black, Ralph Metcalfe of Marquette, were leading contenders.

In the final the next day, Owens and Metcalfe were matched against four white sprinters. The huge crowd went silent, the starting pistol sounded, the runners were off, and 10.3 seconds later, Owens had his gold, equaling the Olympic and world records, followed by Metcalfe and Martinus Osendarp of Holland.

After Owens’ victory, an incident occurred that is still a matter of historical controversy.

On the first day, Hitler had received the German shotput winner, Hans Woellke, in his box. However, Count Henri de Baillet-Latour, the Belgian president of the International Olympic Committee, told the German leader that as host of the Games he should personally congratulate all the winners or none.

Thus on the second day, Hitler chose not to receive anyone in his box, which many observers at the time took as an implied slap at the black athlete.

Although most historians now believe that this was not a deliberate snub of Owens, sources close to Hitler admitted that he had no intention of being photographed shaking hands with a black American.

Owens went on to win gold medals in the 200-meter dash, in an Olympic-record time of 20.7 and in the 400-meter relay, won by the American team in the world-record time of 39.8. But perhaps Owens’ most dramatic victory was in the broad jump.

He was matched against the strong German, Ludwig (Luz) Long, who like Owens had passed the Olympic record in the second-to-last round. Owens gave Long a pat of encouragement, and the crowd cheered.

On his last jump, Long tied Owens’ earlier mark with a leap of 25 feet 10 inches.

Then, in the final effort, as Godfrey Rampling recalls: “There were 100,000 people there but it was so still it was eerie. The wind wasn’t strong, but you could hear the flags above flapping lightly against their poles. Then Owens was off.

“He sprinted down the track and took off. He beat everything: Long, the Olympic record. . . . A huge groan went up from all the Germans, but Long went and put his arm around Owens in congratulations.”

Owens had jumped 26 feet 5 1/2 inches.

Among the other American individual track and field gold winners were Archie Williams in the 400 meters, John Woodruff in the 800 meters, Forrest Towns in the 110-meter hurdles, Glenn Hardin in the 400-meter hurdles, Ken Carpenter in the discus, Cornelius Johnson in the high jump, Earle Meadows in the pole vault, Glenn Morris in the decathlon and Helen Stephens in the women’s 100-meter dash.

In the 1,500-meter run, the so-called metric mile, America’s Glenn Cunningham came in second to New Zealand’s Jack Lovelock, both breaking the previous world record.

The rowing events were held at Gruenau, now in East Berlin, and one of the winners, a member of Germany’s four-oared shell team with coxswain, was Walter Volle.

Now looking remarkable fit for his 73 years, perhaps because he has remained in sports as a coach, Volle recalled recently how he won his race, with the partisan crowd chanting “Deutschland! Deutschland!” so loud that the cadence almost interfered with the team’s stroke.

Later, a German official took the team to be presented to Hitler.

“They were all there,” Volle recalled. “Hitler, Goering, even Leni Riefenstahl with her cameras. ‘We are so proud of you,’ Hitler said. It was this win which put Germany in the lead in the medal table. ‘We must keep this lead,’ he told me.”

By the close of the games, Germany had won the medals’ race in gold, 33-24, in silver, 26-20, and in bronze, 30-12.

And Hart-Davis points out in his book:

That the success of the 11th Olympiad gave Hitler an enormous boost, both moral and political, nobody could deny. The world came to Berlin, and, with the exception of a few cynics, the world was overwhelmed with admiration for what it had seen.

Ninety-nine out of 100 people who went to Germany that summer came away thinking the Nazi regime could not be as bad as rumor claimed. Both at the level of the ordinary tourist and in the highest diplomatic circles, the regime had scored a triumphant success.

Volle remembers his impression: “The Games were awarded to Berlin in 1931, when the Weimar Republic was in power. The regime changed in 1933, and I am still amazed at the organization that went into effect to create the German team and the physical plant. They got the young people involved, built up strong national interest in the Games.

“I still believe that most of us who worked to win in the Olympics did not know then the dark side of Nazi behavior.”

Many of the German contestants fought in World War II. Volle was a Panzer tank officer, and Long was killed in action in Italy.

Knecht, who hopes to see the surviving German medal winners gather in Berlin in the ceremonies this month, said: “Hitler tried to instill his ideas in the Olympic Games. But that doesn’t mean the Games were bad.”

“How it must have infuriated Hitler that a black man became the idol of the Games,” Knecht added.

“That’s one reason I’m against sports boycotts. They only hurt the athletes. If the U.S. had boycotted the Berlin Games, Hitler would have done the same, but Jesse Owens would not have had the chance to capture the eyes of the world.”

Knecht said that there will be a benefit dinner honoring Owens Aug. 14--Berlin Mayor Eberhard Diepgen will be the host--and a memorial competition the next day, together with a gathering of the German medal winners.

Officials will also lay a wreath at the Ploetzenzee memorial to Hitler’s victims honoring Werner Seelenbender, a 1936 wrestler who was executed for political opposition to Hitler.

Unlike modern Olympic stars, Owens, the hero of Hitler’s Games, did not reap commercial advantage from his gold medals.

Modest and unassuming, he kept running wherever he could, “the world’s fastest human,” in exhibition races against cars, horses, or greyhounds.

He remained active in sports, Olympic and youth movements, and died in 1980 in Tucson, Ariz., at 66.

In 1984, a street near the Berlin’s Olympic stadium was renamed Jesse Owens Allee.

“Owens was a great sportsman,” Volle said. “In Berlin, even after 50 years, we never forgot him.”