August 1, 2012 • 25 mins
Most people associate the 1936 Berlin Olympics with African-American sprinter Jesse Owens. Yet the games were successful in terms of Nazi propaganda: More nations than ever participated, and the Olympic torch was used for the first time.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm fair A Dowdy and I'm Deblina truck reboarding and
Deblina and I are continuing on with our Olympic theories.
And when I first started thinking, all right, we're going
(00:22):
to cover some sports Olympics history for this twelve Olympic Game,
I've been thinking about a podcast on African American track
star Jesse Owens, who of course won four gold medals
in the nineteen thirty six Berlin Games and very famously
proved that Hitler's ideas of Arian superiority we're just playing wrong.
(00:42):
But owens story is so personally compelling. It's the main
thing that most folks, I think, have taken away from
the nineteen thirty six Games. It's what it's what you
think of if you're thinking of the Berlin Olympics, and
if you look up a clip of Owen's flying past
his competitors or ending proudly for the national anthem, it
(01:02):
seems really easy to believe that the thirty six Games
must have just been a complete failure for the Nazis
and a huge embarrassment for Hitler. Yeah, but once you
start reading more about the Berlin Games, which are sometimes
called the Nazi Olympics, you realize that that's not really
the case. What's often overlooked is how successful the games
were in terms of Nazi propaganda. For example, they bolstered
(01:26):
German pride, They threw off the suspicions of the international community,
at least temporarily and in a more long lasting way,
and away less tied up with the war to come.
They shaped the modern Olympic Games. Frank DeFord sports Illustrated
writer and NPR commentator calls them quote the most fascinating
(01:46):
and historically influential games. Frank affords the sports too, So
that's a pretty high statement. So today we're going to
be looking at both Jesse Owens story and the story
of the nineteen thirty six Games as the whole. The boycotts,
the propaganda, the smoke and mirrors, the athletes, whether they
were African, American or German Jewish. And one thing just
(02:08):
just consider before we even get into this is why
was the United States there? Why was Great Britain or
France there? And it's something that we're going to be
discussing throughout the podcast. So first, let's start out with
the initial irony of the story, which was the International
Olympic Game Committee awarded Berlin the Games in one as
a sign of acceptance. So it was a welcome back
(02:30):
in a way to the international community. Right. The second
irony here, Hitler, who became chancellor two years after this decision,
wasn't really interested in the Olympics at all at first.
Now and and today, because Hitler's reputation is so tied
up to pageantry in these mass public displays, think Lenny
Roof install her films, it seems odd that Hitler wouldn't
(02:52):
have immediately seen the Games as an opportunity for a
grand public show. But according to the US Holocaust Memorial Useum,
he initially just didn't see the appeal of the Olympic vision.
And that makes sense too. After all, it's about internationalism,
it's about fair competition, it's something that's meant to promote
peace between nations. You can you can see how Hitler
(03:14):
wouldn't be into that. But Joseph Goebbel's, Hitler's minister of propaganda,
ultimately convinced him that the Games would make great propaganda
and prepared German youth for war. As Goebbel's himself said
in thirty three, German sport has only one task, to
strengthen the character of the German people, imbuing it with
the fighting spirit and steadfast camaraderie necessary in the struggle
(03:36):
for its existence. That doesn't make you want to break
out the ball and play a game, So no, it
takes some of the fun out of it, I think.
But right from the start the Nazis controlled the games.
The German Olympic committee was supervised by the Reich Sports Office,
and a new stadium was built in Berlin. Colorful posters
drew comparisons between ancient Greece and modern Germany and featured
(03:58):
Arean ideal athletes. So it was a very political thing
right from the start. But to make that arean ideal
that they were glorifying on the posters a reality for
the Berlin Olympics, Jewish athletes, of course, had to be
excluded from competition, and Hitler's anti Semitic policies, which started
as soon as he assumed power, also extended to sports
(04:21):
right from the start, and one very high level example
of this was the high jumper Gretel Bergmann, who found
herself kicked out of her athletic club in nineteen thirty three.
She was a star athlete, participated in lots of different
sports and had been linked to this athletic club for years.
Immediately kicked out, she started training with a club under
the Jewish Association of War Veterans, with a lot of
(04:43):
other Jewish athletes as well as Gypsy athletes. Um But
in many cases these alternate groups for for Jewish athletes
to practice and compete in just didn't have as good equipment,
didn't have as good facilities, They were subpar, and ultimately
Bergmond was strung along until just before the Games, when
(05:04):
she was ultimately thrown off the team. The international sports
community caught onto that discrimination, though, and talk started focusing
on relocating the games. Perhaps. The president of the American
Olympic Committee, Avery Brundage, even said that quote the very
foundation of the modern Olympic revival will be undermined if
individual countries are allowed to restrict participation by reason of class, creed,
(05:28):
or race. So that takes a pretty strong stance on this.
This is not about your politics. It's about an international
sporting event. But unfortunately Brundage had a bit too much
sway in this matter, because in nineteen thirty four, with
a position like that out there, he was invited to
Berlin to investigate the situation for himself, and in a
(05:51):
tightly managed visit, you know, only think exactly what people
wanted him to see. He inspected facilities, met with athletes,
and came home convinced that Jewish athletes weren't being discriminated
against after all, that that things were going to be
fine in Germany, and that Berlin should certainly go ahead
with the game. Yeah, but not everyone was so convinced.
(06:12):
Many American newspapers, for example, called for a boycott. Much
of the Jewish community was in favor of skipping the games,
as were many US Catholic leaders. One of the most
prominent was Judge Jeremiah Mahoney, who was president of the
Amateur Athletic Union, and he argued that Germany was violating
key Olympic rules and that attending the games would basically
(06:35):
endorse the Reich, something that became more and more evident
when the Nuremberg Laws were announced in nineteen thirty five,
stripping Jews of citizenship. So it wasn't it was clearly
not just about athletes. It was a statement about the
whole regime, about the whole country at this point, But
by December nineteen thirty five, after a campaign from Brunage
(06:57):
suggesting as far as uh the boycott being part of
a Jewish communist conspiracy quote that's that's how far he
took this, the Amateur Athletic Union finally voted down a boycott.
And I find it interesting that people, up until the
very end it saw it both ways. Bringedge, for instance,
believe that the boycott was politicizing the games, and the
(07:20):
games were not something meant to be political. Those in
favor of the boycott, though, really saw the games themselves
as political and that was the problem. Um So, for example,
a month before the Amateur Athletic Union vote, the Committee
on Fair Play and Sports said, quote, sport is prostituted
when sport loses its independent and democratic character and becomes
a political institution. Nazi Germany is endeavoring to use the
(07:43):
Eleventh Olympia to serve the necessities and interests of the
Nazi regime rather than the Olympic ideals. So strong feelings
both ways, very strong feelings. The American Athletic Unions vote
kind of set the tone internationally as well. Though there
had been boycott interest in France and Great Britain and Sweden,
the Netherlands and Czechoslovakia, nothing had panned out. A few
(08:06):
alternative games were planned, one on Long Island one in Barcelona,
but these had to be canceled because of the one
in Barcelona at least had to be canceled because of
the Spanish Civil War. But individual athletes could have, of
course still boycott the games if they chose to so.
Several Jewish American athletes did so, including much of the
Long Island University basketball team, considered one of the best
(08:28):
teams in the country at the time, plus sprinters from
Tulane and Harvard. There was um we already mentioned the
US Holocaust Memorial Museum site. They have a lot of
interviews with athletes, American athletes and German athletes, and one
is with sprinter Milton Green, who was the captain of
the Harvard team, and he decided to boycott after his
rabbi called him called him in to tell him all
(08:51):
about what was happening to Jews in Germany, and he
felt like this was the right thing. To do, and
he talked about how surprised he was that his decision
to boycott. He thought it would be a big deal.
He was one of the best runners in the country.
It didn't really resonate with anybody. Nobody really was even
aware that he had chosen to boycott. And he talked
also about how every Olympic that he had watched since then,
(09:14):
he would picture himself competing in his familiar events, missing
that chance, not really feeling bad or regretful about what
he had done, but just sort of wondering what could
have been to it seemed well, missing that chance, and
then on top of it, feeling like nobody was really
paying attention. I'm sure it is like twice his heartbreaking.
But the African American community, however, had a very different
(09:36):
take on this boycott. They saw it as hypocritical, since
for many blacks in the US, the idea of separate
and unequal sporting opportunities was pretty much old news. There
was a quote in the Philadelphia Tribune right before the
Amateur Athletic Union vote that went quote, the Amateur Athletic
Union shouts against the cruelties of the other nations and
(09:57):
the brutalities and foreign climates, but conveniently for gets the
things that sit on its own doorstep. And plus there
was sort of an indication of what was gonna happen
if black athletes were allowed to go. Black victories would
show people just how wrong that area and ideal was.
Eighteen Black Olympians ended up competing on the US team
(10:17):
and ten mettled, so it was worth it for them
to not boycott, and and something to that sort of
ties into that Jesse Owens victory was expected, or some
of his victories were expected. You know, he was the
fastest runner in the country, and a lot of these
other athletes were clear shoeance were for these competitions. So yeah,
(10:39):
the black community knew if these guys were allowed to compete,
they've had a very high chance of winning. Ultimately, though,
you know, despite these um these attempts to boycott, despite
these individual boycotts, forty nine nations chose to attend the games.
But we need to talk a little bit about what
the games were like, why were they not the Olympics?
(11:01):
And one thing to get out there is, by all accounts,
they were incredibly impressive in every way. The athletes competing
were dazzled, and that was that was part of the point.
Impressed the athletes. They'll go home with a positive experience
of the game. So just some examples of what made
these games so impressive. The forty nine countries that attended.
(11:22):
That was more countries than it ever participated before. The
opening ceremonies also featured for the first time the lone
runner carrying a torch that was lit in Olympia, and
the games were televised for the first time. You could
visit these viewing stations throughout Berlin to watch Zeppelin's race
newsreels around Europe for updated coverage. Lenny reef Install filmed
(11:44):
the games for the movie Olympia, which was released in
and the German people were actually very welcoming. Marty Glickman,
a Jewish American athlete who chose not to boycott, called
it all a carnival though so of course, a lot
of the success or the perceived success from the games
(12:04):
was from what was concealed rather than what was promoted.
So swastika's were bedecking all of the arenas and monuments,
but a lot of the anti Semitic signs had come
down around Berlin at least down the heavily traffic streets.
Eight hundred Gypsies had been moved to a camp on
the outskirts of town and just eighteen miles north of Berlin.
(12:27):
The saxon Housen concentration camp was actually under construction during
the games. I think I find this part maybe the
most extraordinary aspect of this, that it was so close
by um. Within months two of the closing ceremonies, that
concentration camp was open began accepting Jova's witnesses and political opponents.
So they were carrying on, just not so overtly in
(12:51):
in Berlin. Gebbels was acutely aware of what needed to
be hidden or avoided. Here. In the Pink Triangle episode,
we talked about how owner was instructed to quote clean
up the town before visitors arrived, but under no circumstances
arrest gay foreigners under a paragraph one. So they hid
(13:11):
that part of their policy during that time because they
knew how people would view it. The same idea extended
to the press. The Reich Press Chamber controlled all coverage
and forbade stories focused on race or religion. So a
quote from July ninety six, the racial point of view
should not be used in any way in reporting sports results.
(13:32):
Above all, negro should not be insensitively reported. Negros are
American citizens and must be treated with respect as Americans,
So don't publish anything that's gonna get get the whole
country into trouble. That dictate, though specifically regarding African Americans,
proved impossible for the German press to maintain. Though after
(13:53):
the stunning success of the black members of the US
track team, the pro Nazi paper are called the attack
just couldn't resist calling the black members of the team
quote auxiliaries. But to the rest of the world and
including the German public, we gotta gotta say that the
talent of the track team was really captivating, and Owens
(14:15):
especially was a star. People were interested in in reading
about them, even if pro Nazi papers were calling them auxiliary.
So we've got to talk about the Owens story a
little bit, just because he is the main figure of
this games, and um, his his background makes his accomplishments
all the more impressive. He was born in nineteen thirteen.
(14:35):
He was the son of a sharecropper and the grandson
of slaves. Born in Danville, Alabama, he moved to Cleveland
when he was nine years old. Interestingly, his name was
not His given name was not. Jesse was a nickname.
He um told the teacher his initials were Tour j C.
And in his Alabama accent, she mistook it for Jesse
(14:55):
and and it's stuck. You gotta be careful of those
accents when we're from the South. We know that. But
he started racing at thirteen, and by his sophomore year
of college at Ohio State, Jesse broke five world records
and equaled a six in forty five minutes at his
first Big Ten Championship with an injured back, he had
been horsing around or wrestling with some of his fraternity
(15:16):
brothers and couldn't even get dressed by himself, but he
was able to break five world records. According to his
New York Times obituary, the Big Ten commissioner Tug Wilson said, quote,
he is a floating wonder, just like he had wings.
So and we alluded to this earlier. Clearly, Jesse Owens
was a favorite in the Berlin Games with that record.
(15:39):
He had sat at the Big ten uh competition just
a year before, and he really did deliver. He won
the gold in the hundred meter, the two hundred meter,
the four hundred meter relay, and the broad jump, which
is now called the long jump. And those last two
events are especially notable. The four hundred meter relay because
Owens and his fellow black American teammate Ralph Metcalfe we're
(16:04):
not supposed to compete in it at all. There were
two American Jewish athletes, Marty Glickman, who we quoted earlier
and Sam Stoller. They were pulled out at the last
minute by Avery Brundage, and it's possible that Owens and
metcalf were substituted because they were the team's fastest sprinters,
but it's also possible that Glickman and Stoller were pulled
(16:25):
out because they were Jewish and Brundage may not have
wanted to offend Hitler with a Jewish victory. The other event,
the broad jump, is really notable because Owens was coached
on and encouraged by his top German competitor, Loots. Long
footage of Long rushing to congratulate and hug Owens really
contrast with the more familiar scenes of Hitler watching Owen's
(16:47):
victories disapprovingly and long and Owens stayed friends until Long's
death in action at the Allied invasion of Sicily. Owens
later said, quote, it took a lot of courage for
him to befriend me in front of Hitler. You can
melt down all the medals and cups I have and
they wouldn't be a plating on the twenty four Carett
friendship that I felt for Looks Long at that moment,
(17:08):
Hitler must have gone crazy watching us embrace, And I
would urge you, guys, if you're going to look up
one video clip from this Olympics, that's the one too,
to see if he sort of want to a more stirring,
heartwarming sort of Olympic moment. So the American press loved
the Long Owens friendship as much as as we do still,
but they also devoted a lot of coverage to the
(17:30):
fact that Hitler didn't shake Owens's hand. It was considered
a huge snub at the time, even though it's kind
of more of a myth than truth. In reality. Hitler
had already been taken to task by the IOC the
very first day of competition for leaving after all of
the German competitors had been eliminated in the final round.
(17:51):
For that day, he had only shook the hands of
a few athletes, all of them were either German or finish,
and the IOC basically said, please don't do that. Either
shake everybody these hands or shake no one's hands. He
decided to shake nobody's hand publicly, and Owens himself later
said kind of, um, not directly challenging this myth that
(18:11):
had been built up about the handshake, but he said, quote,
it was all right with me. I didn't go to
Berlin to shake hands with him anyway. All I know
is that I'm here now. And Hitler isn't the bigger
issue for Owens though, really, and a lot of the
African American athletes, wasn't that Hitler didn't acknowledge them. That
was just a temporary issue. It was that they weren't
(18:33):
acknowledged back home. None of the black medalists were invited
to the White House or congratulated by President Roosevelt. According
to Smithsonian Magazine, and um, a lot of the last
famous ones just kind of had to end up slipping
into obscurity. Owens ended up doing stunt races. He would
race horses, he would race cars, Eventually, though, he did
(18:54):
become a pr man, a motivational speaker, somebody who was
able to make a living for his his Olympic record.
I really liked one thing he said about jogging. Though.
He was asked, as an older man whether he still
enjoyed jogging, and he said, quote, I don't jog because
I can't run flat footed. It just shows you how
(19:15):
fast somebody would be if you can only run on
your toes. Despite Owen's story, though, and the victories of
the other black US medalists and the competition of Jewish
athletes from the US and Europe, Hitler clearly saw the
Olympics as a victory. The closing ceremony featured Beethoven, searchlights,
and blonde dressed in white to represent competing nations. German
(19:38):
athletes won the most medals of anyone, and the organization
of the event was praised highly. Yeah, they actually won
the most medals by far, to almost double that of
the U s which was number two. Um and it
did work in the pr sense to The New York
Times even said that the games put Germany quote back
(19:59):
in the fold of nat Shans, and Hitler thought that
things had gone so well and that everybody approved of
the game so highly. He fully expected that after the
nineteen forty Games, which were already slated to take place
in Tokyo, the Olympics would take place in Berlin forever.
There wouldn't be any other cities that hosted the Olympics.
(20:19):
Um just Berlin year after year after year. Reminded me
a little bit of our early discussion of the modern
Olympics and in Paris and Athens and debates about where
the Olympics should happen. But that's the bold opinion and
a lot of confidence there. Some people, though, saw how
hoodwinked the world had been during this time, and how
(20:39):
a major opportunity to censure the Nazi regime before the
war was basically lost. Others feared the end of the charade.
US Ambassador to Germany William E. Dodd wrote that Jews
were expecting the end of the games with fear and trembling.
Just two days after the games ended, the head of
the Olympic village, who was a Jewish descent, was dismissed
(21:02):
from military service and killed himself. Yeah, so so people
were afraid what the back to business kind of regime
would be like. Now that the world had gone home,
what was regular life going to be like. One example
of this kind of return to normal being intolerable for
people's grettel Bergmann, the high jumper who we mentioned earlier,
(21:25):
who was used as an example of how Germans were
including Jews on their teams and then was ultimately booted
off the team at the last minute. She immigrated to
the United States just a year after the Games. Ultimately,
only two Jewish athletes competed for Germany. One was Rudy Ball.
He competed in ice hockey in the Winter Games, back
(21:45):
when the country would host both the Winter and the
Summer Games. The other was Helene Meyer, who was a
half Jewish blonde. You know, she was considered to look
very arian. Uh. She competed in fencing. She actually he
had already fled Germany before the Games, but came back
to compete. Saluted Hitler ultimately left again. I think you
(22:09):
can look at a lot of these athletes stories and
again the Holocaust Memorial Museum has a really sad page
talking about a lot of Olympians from as early as
the first Games and their fate during the Holocaust. Um
But a bigger picture thing to think about too, is
that this was the last Olympics for a very long time.
(22:33):
The of course, the nineteen forty Tokyo Games didn't happen,
the ninety four Games didn't happen. So it's not on
the same scale, of course as people losing their lives.
But one thing I can't help thinking about is that
your professional athletic window is pretty narrow. Um. And if
you weren't able to compete in this games, whether because
(22:55):
you protested it, you boycotted it, or you weren't allowed to,
very likely would have been your very last chance because
you weren't going to get another one for twelve years.
Bringing it back to athletics a little bit again, like
he said, Um, we have a quote from Owens on
preparing to run the one. He said, it's a nervous,
(23:17):
terrible feeling you feel as you stand there, as if
your legs can't carry the weight of your body. Your
stomach isn't there, and your mouth is dry, and your
hands are wet with perspiration, and you begin to think
in terms of all those years that you've worked, in
my particular case, the one hundred meters as you look
down the field one hundred nine yards two feet away
(23:37):
and recognizing that after eight years of hard work, this
is the point that I had reached and that all
was going to be over in ten seconds. Those are
the great moments in the lives of individuals. So I
thought that was a good way to wrap this up,
because it is an individual story as much as it
is a story of forty nine countries coming from around
(23:58):
the world to compete in Owen. Yeah, and you can't
really separate those stories. You can't tell Owen's story without
telling the story of these very unique games and what
you had to go through. Yeah, So, which is why
we did that. But if you have any other sports stories,
any stories of famous Olympians that you'd like us to
(24:20):
talk about, or that you'd like to share with us,
maybe something about Owen's life that we didn't include today
that you want to point out, feel free to write us.
We're at it try podcast at Discovery dot com. You
can also look us up on Facebook and we're on
Twitter at ust Industry, and we have loads of Olympic
content still coming out. I think in one article that
you could check out if you want to learn about
(24:41):
a few more of these individual stories is five amazing
Olympic athletes. You can search for that on our homepage
at www dot how stuff works dot com for more
on this and thousands of other topics. Because at how
stuff works dot com. The Latin named the Lame and
(25:08):
Agin named the Lay didn't eat in
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm fair A Dowdy and I'm Deblina truck reboarding and
Deblina and I are continuing on with our Olympic theories.
And when I first started thinking, all right, we're going
(00:22):
to cover some sports Olympics history for this twelve Olympic Game,
I've been thinking about a podcast on African American track
star Jesse Owens, who of course won four gold medals
in the nineteen thirty six Berlin Games and very famously
proved that Hitler's ideas of Arian superiority we're just playing wrong.
(00:42):
But owens story is so personally compelling. It's the main
thing that most folks, I think, have taken away from
the nineteen thirty six Games. It's what it's what you
think of if you're thinking of the Berlin Olympics, and
if you look up a clip of Owen's flying past
his competitors or ending proudly for the national anthem, it
(01:02):
seems really easy to believe that the thirty six Games
must have just been a complete failure for the Nazis
and a huge embarrassment for Hitler. Yeah, but once you
start reading more about the Berlin Games, which are sometimes
called the Nazi Olympics, you realize that that's not really
the case. What's often overlooked is how successful the games
were in terms of Nazi propaganda. For example, they bolstered
(01:26):
German pride, They threw off the suspicions of the international community,
at least temporarily and in a more long lasting way,
and away less tied up with the war to come.
They shaped the modern Olympic Games. Frank DeFord sports Illustrated
writer and NPR commentator calls them quote the most fascinating
(01:46):
and historically influential games. Frank affords the sports too, So
that's a pretty high statement. So today we're going to
be looking at both Jesse Owens story and the story
of the nineteen thirty six Games as the whole. The boycotts,
the propaganda, the smoke and mirrors, the athletes, whether they
were African, American or German Jewish. And one thing just
(02:08):
just consider before we even get into this is why
was the United States there? Why was Great Britain or
France there? And it's something that we're going to be
discussing throughout the podcast. So first, let's start out with
the initial irony of the story, which was the International
Olympic Game Committee awarded Berlin the Games in one as
a sign of acceptance. So it was a welcome back
(02:30):
in a way to the international community. Right. The second
irony here, Hitler, who became chancellor two years after this decision,
wasn't really interested in the Olympics at all at first.
Now and and today, because Hitler's reputation is so tied
up to pageantry in these mass public displays, think Lenny
Roof install her films, it seems odd that Hitler wouldn't
(02:52):
have immediately seen the Games as an opportunity for a
grand public show. But according to the US Holocaust Memorial Useum,
he initially just didn't see the appeal of the Olympic vision.
And that makes sense too. After all, it's about internationalism,
it's about fair competition, it's something that's meant to promote
peace between nations. You can you can see how Hitler
(03:14):
wouldn't be into that. But Joseph Goebbel's, Hitler's minister of propaganda,
ultimately convinced him that the Games would make great propaganda
and prepared German youth for war. As Goebbel's himself said
in thirty three, German sport has only one task, to
strengthen the character of the German people, imbuing it with
the fighting spirit and steadfast camaraderie necessary in the struggle
(03:36):
for its existence. That doesn't make you want to break
out the ball and play a game, So no, it
takes some of the fun out of it, I think.
But right from the start the Nazis controlled the games.
The German Olympic committee was supervised by the Reich Sports Office,
and a new stadium was built in Berlin. Colorful posters
drew comparisons between ancient Greece and modern Germany and featured
(03:58):
Arean ideal athletes. So it was a very political thing
right from the start. But to make that arean ideal
that they were glorifying on the posters a reality for
the Berlin Olympics, Jewish athletes, of course, had to be
excluded from competition, and Hitler's anti Semitic policies, which started
as soon as he assumed power, also extended to sports
(04:21):
right from the start, and one very high level example
of this was the high jumper Gretel Bergmann, who found
herself kicked out of her athletic club in nineteen thirty three.
She was a star athlete, participated in lots of different
sports and had been linked to this athletic club for years.
Immediately kicked out, she started training with a club under
the Jewish Association of War Veterans, with a lot of
(04:43):
other Jewish athletes as well as Gypsy athletes. Um But
in many cases these alternate groups for for Jewish athletes
to practice and compete in just didn't have as good equipment,
didn't have as good facilities, They were subpar, and ultimately
Bergmond was strung along until just before the Games, when
(05:04):
she was ultimately thrown off the team. The international sports
community caught onto that discrimination, though, and talk started focusing
on relocating the games. Perhaps. The president of the American
Olympic Committee, Avery Brundage, even said that quote the very
foundation of the modern Olympic revival will be undermined if
individual countries are allowed to restrict participation by reason of class, creed,
(05:28):
or race. So that takes a pretty strong stance on this.
This is not about your politics. It's about an international
sporting event. But unfortunately Brundage had a bit too much
sway in this matter, because in nineteen thirty four, with
a position like that out there, he was invited to
Berlin to investigate the situation for himself, and in a
(05:51):
tightly managed visit, you know, only think exactly what people
wanted him to see. He inspected facilities, met with athletes,
and came home convinced that Jewish athletes weren't being discriminated
against after all, that that things were going to be
fine in Germany, and that Berlin should certainly go ahead
with the game. Yeah, but not everyone was so convinced.
(06:12):
Many American newspapers, for example, called for a boycott. Much
of the Jewish community was in favor of skipping the games,
as were many US Catholic leaders. One of the most
prominent was Judge Jeremiah Mahoney, who was president of the
Amateur Athletic Union, and he argued that Germany was violating
key Olympic rules and that attending the games would basically
(06:35):
endorse the Reich, something that became more and more evident
when the Nuremberg Laws were announced in nineteen thirty five,
stripping Jews of citizenship. So it wasn't it was clearly
not just about athletes. It was a statement about the
whole regime, about the whole country at this point, But
by December nineteen thirty five, after a campaign from Brunage
(06:57):
suggesting as far as uh the boycott being part of
a Jewish communist conspiracy quote that's that's how far he
took this, the Amateur Athletic Union finally voted down a boycott.
And I find it interesting that people, up until the
very end it saw it both ways. Bringedge, for instance,
believe that the boycott was politicizing the games, and the
(07:20):
games were not something meant to be political. Those in
favor of the boycott, though, really saw the games themselves
as political and that was the problem. Um So, for example,
a month before the Amateur Athletic Union vote, the Committee
on Fair Play and Sports said, quote, sport is prostituted
when sport loses its independent and democratic character and becomes
a political institution. Nazi Germany is endeavoring to use the
(07:43):
Eleventh Olympia to serve the necessities and interests of the
Nazi regime rather than the Olympic ideals. So strong feelings
both ways, very strong feelings. The American Athletic Unions vote
kind of set the tone internationally as well. Though there
had been boycott interest in France and Great Britain and Sweden,
the Netherlands and Czechoslovakia, nothing had panned out. A few
(08:06):
alternative games were planned, one on Long Island one in Barcelona,
but these had to be canceled because of the one
in Barcelona at least had to be canceled because of
the Spanish Civil War. But individual athletes could have, of
course still boycott the games if they chose to so.
Several Jewish American athletes did so, including much of the
Long Island University basketball team, considered one of the best
(08:28):
teams in the country at the time, plus sprinters from
Tulane and Harvard. There was um we already mentioned the
US Holocaust Memorial Museum site. They have a lot of
interviews with athletes, American athletes and German athletes, and one
is with sprinter Milton Green, who was the captain of
the Harvard team, and he decided to boycott after his
rabbi called him called him in to tell him all
(08:51):
about what was happening to Jews in Germany, and he
felt like this was the right thing. To do, and
he talked about how surprised he was that his decision
to boycott. He thought it would be a big deal.
He was one of the best runners in the country.
It didn't really resonate with anybody. Nobody really was even
aware that he had chosen to boycott. And he talked
also about how every Olympic that he had watched since then,
(09:14):
he would picture himself competing in his familiar events, missing
that chance, not really feeling bad or regretful about what
he had done, but just sort of wondering what could
have been to it seemed well, missing that chance, and
then on top of it, feeling like nobody was really
paying attention. I'm sure it is like twice his heartbreaking.
But the African American community, however, had a very different
(09:36):
take on this boycott. They saw it as hypocritical, since
for many blacks in the US, the idea of separate
and unequal sporting opportunities was pretty much old news. There
was a quote in the Philadelphia Tribune right before the
Amateur Athletic Union vote that went quote, the Amateur Athletic
Union shouts against the cruelties of the other nations and
(09:57):
the brutalities and foreign climates, but conveniently for gets the
things that sit on its own doorstep. And plus there
was sort of an indication of what was gonna happen
if black athletes were allowed to go. Black victories would
show people just how wrong that area and ideal was.
Eighteen Black Olympians ended up competing on the US team
(10:17):
and ten mettled, so it was worth it for them
to not boycott, and and something to that sort of
ties into that Jesse Owens victory was expected, or some
of his victories were expected. You know, he was the
fastest runner in the country, and a lot of these
other athletes were clear shoeance were for these competitions. So yeah,
(10:39):
the black community knew if these guys were allowed to compete,
they've had a very high chance of winning. Ultimately, though,
you know, despite these um these attempts to boycott, despite
these individual boycotts, forty nine nations chose to attend the games.
But we need to talk a little bit about what
the games were like, why were they not the Olympics?
(11:01):
And one thing to get out there is, by all accounts,
they were incredibly impressive in every way. The athletes competing
were dazzled, and that was that was part of the point.
Impressed the athletes. They'll go home with a positive experience
of the game. So just some examples of what made
these games so impressive. The forty nine countries that attended.
(11:22):
That was more countries than it ever participated before. The
opening ceremonies also featured for the first time the lone
runner carrying a torch that was lit in Olympia, and
the games were televised for the first time. You could
visit these viewing stations throughout Berlin to watch Zeppelin's race
newsreels around Europe for updated coverage. Lenny reef Install filmed
(11:44):
the games for the movie Olympia, which was released in
and the German people were actually very welcoming. Marty Glickman,
a Jewish American athlete who chose not to boycott, called
it all a carnival though so of course, a lot
of the success or the perceived success from the games
(12:04):
was from what was concealed rather than what was promoted.
So swastika's were bedecking all of the arenas and monuments,
but a lot of the anti Semitic signs had come
down around Berlin at least down the heavily traffic streets.
Eight hundred Gypsies had been moved to a camp on
the outskirts of town and just eighteen miles north of Berlin.
(12:27):
The saxon Housen concentration camp was actually under construction during
the games. I think I find this part maybe the
most extraordinary aspect of this, that it was so close
by um. Within months two of the closing ceremonies, that
concentration camp was open began accepting Jova's witnesses and political opponents.
So they were carrying on, just not so overtly in
(12:51):
in Berlin. Gebbels was acutely aware of what needed to
be hidden or avoided. Here. In the Pink Triangle episode,
we talked about how owner was instructed to quote clean
up the town before visitors arrived, but under no circumstances
arrest gay foreigners under a paragraph one. So they hid
(13:11):
that part of their policy during that time because they
knew how people would view it. The same idea extended
to the press. The Reich Press Chamber controlled all coverage
and forbade stories focused on race or religion. So a
quote from July ninety six, the racial point of view
should not be used in any way in reporting sports results.
(13:32):
Above all, negro should not be insensitively reported. Negros are
American citizens and must be treated with respect as Americans,
So don't publish anything that's gonna get get the whole
country into trouble. That dictate, though specifically regarding African Americans,
proved impossible for the German press to maintain. Though after
(13:53):
the stunning success of the black members of the US
track team, the pro Nazi paper are called the attack
just couldn't resist calling the black members of the team
quote auxiliaries. But to the rest of the world and
including the German public, we gotta gotta say that the
talent of the track team was really captivating, and Owens
(14:15):
especially was a star. People were interested in in reading
about them, even if pro Nazi papers were calling them auxiliary.
So we've got to talk about the Owens story a
little bit, just because he is the main figure of
this games, and um, his his background makes his accomplishments
all the more impressive. He was born in nineteen thirteen.
(14:35):
He was the son of a sharecropper and the grandson
of slaves. Born in Danville, Alabama, he moved to Cleveland
when he was nine years old. Interestingly, his name was
not His given name was not. Jesse was a nickname.
He um told the teacher his initials were Tour j C.
And in his Alabama accent, she mistook it for Jesse
(14:55):
and and it's stuck. You gotta be careful of those
accents when we're from the South. We know that. But
he started racing at thirteen, and by his sophomore year
of college at Ohio State, Jesse broke five world records
and equaled a six in forty five minutes at his
first Big Ten Championship with an injured back, he had
been horsing around or wrestling with some of his fraternity
(15:16):
brothers and couldn't even get dressed by himself, but he
was able to break five world records. According to his
New York Times obituary, the Big Ten commissioner Tug Wilson said, quote,
he is a floating wonder, just like he had wings.
So and we alluded to this earlier. Clearly, Jesse Owens
was a favorite in the Berlin Games with that record.
(15:39):
He had sat at the Big ten uh competition just
a year before, and he really did deliver. He won
the gold in the hundred meter, the two hundred meter,
the four hundred meter relay, and the broad jump, which
is now called the long jump. And those last two
events are especially notable. The four hundred meter relay because
Owens and his fellow black American teammate Ralph Metcalfe we're
(16:04):
not supposed to compete in it at all. There were
two American Jewish athletes, Marty Glickman, who we quoted earlier
and Sam Stoller. They were pulled out at the last
minute by Avery Brundage, and it's possible that Owens and
metcalf were substituted because they were the team's fastest sprinters,
but it's also possible that Glickman and Stoller were pulled
(16:25):
out because they were Jewish and Brundage may not have
wanted to offend Hitler with a Jewish victory. The other event,
the broad jump, is really notable because Owens was coached
on and encouraged by his top German competitor, Loots. Long
footage of Long rushing to congratulate and hug Owens really
contrast with the more familiar scenes of Hitler watching Owen's
(16:47):
victories disapprovingly and long and Owens stayed friends until Long's
death in action at the Allied invasion of Sicily. Owens
later said, quote, it took a lot of courage for
him to befriend me in front of Hitler. You can
melt down all the medals and cups I have and
they wouldn't be a plating on the twenty four Carett
friendship that I felt for Looks Long at that moment,
(17:08):
Hitler must have gone crazy watching us embrace, And I
would urge you, guys, if you're going to look up
one video clip from this Olympics, that's the one too,
to see if he sort of want to a more stirring,
heartwarming sort of Olympic moment. So the American press loved
the Long Owens friendship as much as as we do still,
but they also devoted a lot of coverage to the
(17:30):
fact that Hitler didn't shake Owens's hand. It was considered
a huge snub at the time, even though it's kind
of more of a myth than truth. In reality. Hitler
had already been taken to task by the IOC the
very first day of competition for leaving after all of
the German competitors had been eliminated in the final round.
(17:51):
For that day, he had only shook the hands of
a few athletes, all of them were either German or finish,
and the IOC basically said, please don't do that. Either
shake everybody these hands or shake no one's hands. He
decided to shake nobody's hand publicly, and Owens himself later
said kind of, um, not directly challenging this myth that
(18:11):
had been built up about the handshake, but he said, quote,
it was all right with me. I didn't go to
Berlin to shake hands with him anyway. All I know
is that I'm here now. And Hitler isn't the bigger
issue for Owens though, really, and a lot of the
African American athletes, wasn't that Hitler didn't acknowledge them. That
was just a temporary issue. It was that they weren't
(18:33):
acknowledged back home. None of the black medalists were invited
to the White House or congratulated by President Roosevelt. According
to Smithsonian Magazine, and um, a lot of the last
famous ones just kind of had to end up slipping
into obscurity. Owens ended up doing stunt races. He would
race horses, he would race cars, Eventually, though, he did
(18:54):
become a pr man, a motivational speaker, somebody who was
able to make a living for his his Olympic record.
I really liked one thing he said about jogging. Though.
He was asked, as an older man whether he still
enjoyed jogging, and he said, quote, I don't jog because
I can't run flat footed. It just shows you how
(19:15):
fast somebody would be if you can only run on
your toes. Despite Owen's story, though, and the victories of
the other black US medalists and the competition of Jewish
athletes from the US and Europe, Hitler clearly saw the
Olympics as a victory. The closing ceremony featured Beethoven, searchlights,
and blonde dressed in white to represent competing nations. German
(19:38):
athletes won the most medals of anyone, and the organization
of the event was praised highly. Yeah, they actually won
the most medals by far, to almost double that of
the U s which was number two. Um and it
did work in the pr sense to The New York
Times even said that the games put Germany quote back
(19:59):
in the fold of nat Shans, and Hitler thought that
things had gone so well and that everybody approved of
the game so highly. He fully expected that after the
nineteen forty Games, which were already slated to take place
in Tokyo, the Olympics would take place in Berlin forever.
There wouldn't be any other cities that hosted the Olympics.
(20:19):
Um just Berlin year after year after year. Reminded me
a little bit of our early discussion of the modern
Olympics and in Paris and Athens and debates about where
the Olympics should happen. But that's the bold opinion and
a lot of confidence there. Some people, though, saw how
hoodwinked the world had been during this time, and how
(20:39):
a major opportunity to censure the Nazi regime before the
war was basically lost. Others feared the end of the charade.
US Ambassador to Germany William E. Dodd wrote that Jews
were expecting the end of the games with fear and trembling.
Just two days after the games ended, the head of
the Olympic village, who was a Jewish descent, was dismissed
(21:02):
from military service and killed himself. Yeah, so so people
were afraid what the back to business kind of regime
would be like. Now that the world had gone home,
what was regular life going to be like. One example
of this kind of return to normal being intolerable for
people's grettel Bergmann, the high jumper who we mentioned earlier,
(21:25):
who was used as an example of how Germans were
including Jews on their teams and then was ultimately booted
off the team at the last minute. She immigrated to
the United States just a year after the Games. Ultimately,
only two Jewish athletes competed for Germany. One was Rudy Ball.
He competed in ice hockey in the Winter Games, back
(21:45):
when the country would host both the Winter and the
Summer Games. The other was Helene Meyer, who was a
half Jewish blonde. You know, she was considered to look
very arian. Uh. She competed in fencing. She actually he
had already fled Germany before the Games, but came back
to compete. Saluted Hitler ultimately left again. I think you
(22:09):
can look at a lot of these athletes stories and
again the Holocaust Memorial Museum has a really sad page
talking about a lot of Olympians from as early as
the first Games and their fate during the Holocaust. Um
But a bigger picture thing to think about too, is
that this was the last Olympics for a very long time.
(22:33):
The of course, the nineteen forty Tokyo Games didn't happen,
the ninety four Games didn't happen. So it's not on
the same scale, of course as people losing their lives.
But one thing I can't help thinking about is that
your professional athletic window is pretty narrow. Um. And if
you weren't able to compete in this games, whether because
(22:55):
you protested it, you boycotted it, or you weren't allowed to,
very likely would have been your very last chance because
you weren't going to get another one for twelve years.
Bringing it back to athletics a little bit again, like
he said, Um, we have a quote from Owens on
preparing to run the one. He said, it's a nervous,
(23:17):
terrible feeling you feel as you stand there, as if
your legs can't carry the weight of your body. Your
stomach isn't there, and your mouth is dry, and your
hands are wet with perspiration, and you begin to think
in terms of all those years that you've worked, in
my particular case, the one hundred meters as you look
down the field one hundred nine yards two feet away
(23:37):
and recognizing that after eight years of hard work, this
is the point that I had reached and that all
was going to be over in ten seconds. Those are
the great moments in the lives of individuals. So I
thought that was a good way to wrap this up,
because it is an individual story as much as it
is a story of forty nine countries coming from around
(23:58):
the world to compete in Owen. Yeah, and you can't
really separate those stories. You can't tell Owen's story without
telling the story of these very unique games and what
you had to go through. Yeah, So, which is why
we did that. But if you have any other sports stories,
any stories of famous Olympians that you'd like us to
(24:20):
talk about, or that you'd like to share with us,
maybe something about Owen's life that we didn't include today
that you want to point out, feel free to write us.
We're at it try podcast at Discovery dot com. You
can also look us up on Facebook and we're on
Twitter at ust Industry, and we have loads of Olympic
content still coming out. I think in one article that
you could check out if you want to learn about
(24:41):
a few more of these individual stories is five amazing
Olympic athletes. You can search for that on our homepage
at www dot how stuff works dot com for more
on this and thousands of other topics. Because at how
stuff works dot com. The Latin named the Lame and
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