August 15, 2024 • 33 mins
In the early 1930s, a young German law student spent a year in Arkansas, studying American “race law.” The fight over the 1936 Games provided Americans with a chance to study Nazi Germany. But it turns out the Nazis were studying us too.
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Speaker 1 (00:06):
Bushkin. Yeah. Yeah, now's about you're the best thing to
think about the guy Krieger who goes from Germany to Arkansas. Yes,
he does, to Fayetteville. Yes, I'm talking to a professor
(00:28):
at Yale Law School, James Q. Whitman, about an all
but forgotten figure named Heinrich Krieger. In the early nineteen thirties.
Krieger was a student in Dusseldorf, an intellectual who set
out for a semester abroad. We have no pictures of him,
so we'll have to use our imaginations. A proper upper
(00:49):
class European waistcoat, little round glasses, bouler hat in his
briefcase about her copy of NIETZSCHEZ Beyond Good and Evil.
I'm guessing he's never been to America before. He takes
a steamship from Hamburg to New Orleans the SS Westmoreland,
his heart beating furiously with a mixture of apprehension and excitement,
(01:11):
he disembarks, takes a train north and west, and arrives
in Fayetteville, Arkansas. Rents a room in the house of
a German professor named of Gustav on Maple Street, right
by the University of Arkansas. The School of Law. The
law school was only ten years old. Classes were held
in the old chemistry building on campus. Today, Fayetteville has
(01:32):
one hundred thousand people. Back then it's just over seven thousand.
A dusty little place, a whole world away from dusudarf.
Did the University of Arkansas Law School get a lot
of overseas students in the nineteen thirties, I don't think so.
This is this is almost a comic notion that someone's
(01:53):
coming from this, from the cradle of European civilization to
Faytteville in the early nineteen thirties. I mean, it's like
the culture shock that poor man.
Speaker 2 (02:01):
I don't know how he ended up there, I truly don't.
Speaker 1 (02:04):
Yeah. Yeah, and he goes there. How much time is
he spend in just a year?
Speaker 3 (02:07):
A year?
Speaker 2 (02:08):
He was an exchange student for a year, and.
Speaker 1 (02:09):
He ends up writing. And you've read this book, he writes, Oh.
Speaker 2 (02:13):
Yes, yeah, and it's quite a good book if you
accept this basic starting premise, that's well done, you know.
Speaker 1 (02:18):
So describe to us what he produces in his time
in favor. But he produced a book called Race Law
in America. Oh, I really forgot to mention Herr Krieger
is a Nazi, a serious one. My name is Malcolm Gladwell.
You're listening to Hitler's Olympics are a series of the
(02:40):
nineteen thirty six Berlin Games. Dorothy Thompson, Charles Cheryl, Avery Brandage,
Jesse Owens the main subjects of our series so far.
We're all Americans trying to make sense of what was
happening in Germany in the early days of the Nazi regime.
The Olympics forced us to look at them, but the
(03:01):
Germans were looking at us too. The bronze medalist in
the men's foundred meters in Berlin was an American named
Jimmy Luvall. He went on to become a chemist at
Stanford University. I happened to be somewhat obsessed with Jimmy
LaVall for a whole series of reasons that have nothing
to do with his running career, but that's for another time.
(03:24):
In nineteen eighty eight, LaVall sits for a long interview
about his experiences at the Olympics, and at one point
he describes what happened when the team first got to Germany.
Speaker 3 (03:34):
We arrived eventually in the Hamburg disembarked. They took us
up to the Roth house and served us so each
of us had a small glass of twenty five year
old port. Well up to that time, I'd never realized
how delightful a good wine could taste. This was excellent wine.
Speaker 1 (03:56):
The Germans saw all these Americans coming from across the
ocean and welcomed them with open arms.
Speaker 3 (04:02):
I mean, you heard all this regular all about Hitler,
But certainly the German people or as nice as they
could be. I had a Jena and colonel invite me
out to his home for dinner one night, and dinner
with he and his children, his two daughters, and his wife,
very pleasant. Two or three of us went along. We
(04:24):
saw no sign of any intolerance of any.
Speaker 1 (04:26):
Type, no sign of any intolerance. Jimmy Navau was black.
He was from Los Angeles, which in the nineteen thirties
was functionally as segregated as Birmingham. In Los Angeles, white
people did not invite him to their houses for dinner
or give him a glass of twenty five year old port.
(04:47):
The runner who took gold in the fornded meters Archie Williams,
was also African American, also from California.
Speaker 4 (04:54):
He took us outter this beautiful looked like a country
club where the Olympic village where they had was landscape
with beauty and all the buildings were brand new. In fact,
uh it later be was to become what a monitor
or military academy, and it was set up with the
cottage type barracks and they had uh all every country
(05:16):
had its own dining hall. And since we had one
of the largest teams and we had all the goodies,
all the foreign athletes wanted to be our friends immediately.
And in addition to that, we had some kind of
a car which allowed us to ride any transportation anywhere
in in Berlin free of charge. All you had to
do was just show it to the conductor and sit out,
(05:38):
and you could go wherever you wanted to.
Speaker 1 (05:40):
Sit down and go anywhere you wanted to. If you
were black in Los Angeles in the nineteen thirties, you
couldn't even go to the beach.
Speaker 3 (05:47):
We got on the train to go to Berlin. We
arrived in Berlin and there was this mob of uh
young people with a lot of girls. Bois Jesse, Bois Jesse,
Bois Jesse. Oh yeah, uh remember that Jesse had scept
four world records here in the United States that year,
so they wanted to see him. Well, Jesse got off
the train and these little girls had scissors and I
started slipping off his clothes. I'm not kidding. It was wonderful.
Speaker 1 (06:12):
How did Jesse respond able?
Speaker 3 (06:14):
Jesse got back on the train as fast as he cut.
Speaker 1 (06:19):
The Germans were fascinated with the black athletes. The Nazis
were probably as obsessed with the way white Americans treated
black people as Americans were with the way Nazis treated
the Jews, because America had mastered a problem that the
Nazis were desperately trying to solve for themselves. Remember Putsy
(06:40):
Hitler's Harvard educated piano playing pr guy. He set up
Dorothy Thompson's nineteen thirty one interview with Hitler, where she
concludes that Hitler's eyes have the peculiar shine which often
distinguishes geniuses, alcoholics, and hysterics. After Thompson's article, Hitler refused
all all interviews with foreign journalists for about a year,
(07:03):
but finally Putsy convinced Hitler to sit down with Putsy's
best friend from Harvard, a radio commentator from Wisconsin named H. V. Caltenborn.
Putsy and Kaltenborn did theater together in college. Putsy has
his friend come to Hitler's chalet in the Bavarian Alps.
It's August. The views are gorgeous. Hitler's laundry is flapping
(07:25):
on the clothesline in the backyard. Putsy takes a picture
of Hitler and his Harvard body standing next to each
other on the porch. Hitler's all in black, looking very stern.
Kaltenborne will later write he dislikes talking to strangers. Instead
of answering an interviewer's questions, he makes excited speeches, thus
seeking to create for himself the atmosphere of the public
(07:48):
meeting in which he is at home. Kaltenborn asks Hitler
about the Jews. For a moment, he bored into me
with his clear blue eyes, which are his most attractive feature.
People were always fixated on Hitler's eyes. You have a
Monroe doctrine for America, he wrote at me. We believe
in a Monroe doctrine for Germany. You exclude and he
(08:11):
would be immigrants you do not care to admit. You
regulate their number, You demand that they come up to
a certain physical standard, you insist that they bring in
a certain amount of money, You examine them as to
their political opinions. We demand the same right. We are
concerned about any anti German elements in our own country,
(08:32):
and we demand the right to deal with them as
we see fit. Hitler has never visited America. He doesn't
even speak English, but here he is holding forth on
the fine points of US immigration law and foreign policy.
As first articulated by James Monroe in his seventh Annual
(08:52):
Message to Congress in December eighteen twenty three, there's a
project going on within Germany in the thirties to kind
of find a legal basis for what they want to
do with the Jews. Right, an incredibly naive question would
be why would they bother to find legal basis.
Speaker 2 (09:13):
It's not a naive question, it's a crucial Well, it
may be naive, but it's a question crucial for understanding
what went on.
Speaker 1 (09:18):
Our Yale law professor James Q. Whitman. Again, part of.
Speaker 2 (09:22):
The answer has to do with German culture. Much more broadly,
Germans do tend to insist that things be properly legally codified,
and that was even true of the Nazis.
Speaker 1 (09:36):
In nineteen thirty two when Caltenborn and Hitler meat. The
Nazis aren't yet at the stage where they've settled on
mass murderer as a solution to their Jewish problem. That's
years away. They're still trying to figure out how to
marginalize the Jews in a way that seems acceptable.
Speaker 2 (09:52):
The Nazis, it is important to remember, especially in the
early years, had to run a state which was not
entirely managed Nazis. They had to have the German bureaucracy
on their side. They had to do things that would
appeal to.
Speaker 1 (10:09):
People.
Speaker 2 (10:09):
Most of them were trained in law and would expect
law to be to govern.
Speaker 1 (10:14):
What was done by through the Nazi program. So they
looked to the US, where the Constitution promised its citizens
equal protection under the laws, but with the laws made
black people second class citizens. The US systematically oppressed a
racial class, but the country was still respected around the world.
(10:34):
So how exactly was the US doing it? If you
were a Nazi in Germany, this seemed like a really
important question. It's like if you were a kid doing
card tricks in your bedroom and your parents take you
to a full on magic show in Las Vegas, and
you watch the lady get cut in half, and you
turn to your dad and you say, wait what, Which
(10:58):
brings us back to hairc Our eager law student from Dusseldorf,
with his waistcoat and his little round glasses put yourself
for a moment in his elegant hand made brogues. You're
young and idealistic. You are really interested in helping out
this grand national project to do the Jewish thing right?
So where do you go for inspiration? Well, you don't
(11:21):
spend a year at Harvard Law School. The Germans knew
all about Harvard. Putsey went to Harvard. What could you
learn from the brightest legal minds of Massachusetts? Not so much.
You need to go somewhere where Americans had spent years
working through the nitty gritty of how to get away
with marginalizing people. You need to go to the American South.
(11:41):
Did Herkrieger consider the University of Alabama Law School, possibly
a logical choice given his agenda, or maybe all miss
in Oxford, Mississippi. They knew a thing or two, definitely
on the short list. He must have spent many long
hours going over the pros and cons of each possible
destination until one day, over schnapps in the Krieger family's
(12:03):
elegant townhouse on Radhas for strassa right on the Rhine Promenade.
Young Kreeger turns to Papa Krieger and says, vatter it
is to be Fairdville, Arkansas, and so it was in Fatdeville.
He learns from local politicians. He has long conversations with
(12:24):
his law professors. After a year, he says, here is
too much to master. I must stay longer. In the
United States of America. He moves to d C so
he can do more research. At the Library of Congress,
Krieger writes up everything he's learned just in time.
Speaker 2 (12:40):
He came back to Germany, and it seems that the
Justice ministry in Berlin was looking for somebody who knew
about American law, and somebody said, gee, I know this
kid Kreeger.
Speaker 1 (12:50):
And he was enlisted. Yeah. But what they couldn't figure
out is so the German legal establishment, as it sort
of searches for waste to think about their their version
of a race problem. They must be kind of they
are generally aware of what's going on, obviously and going
on in the United States. But what Kreeger is doing
(13:12):
is he is giving them what he's giving He's giving
them a concrete picture of the range and diversity of
strategies and legal strategies that Americans use.
Speaker 2 (13:22):
Absolutely and done in a very sensitive way, concrete and
extensive picture of what's going on. I mean, I say, so,
you're perfectly right. There have been plenty of interests in
American race law before that, but the knowledge was kind
of scattershot. This was a much much more systematic treatment.
I mean, I hate to say it's not a fine book,
but it's quite a well known book.
Speaker 1 (13:42):
And what is Kreeger's conclusion? There is much much more
to American race law than anyone back home in Dusseldorff
has realized. So imagine that there is this guy from
Germany who comes over and what itever it is thirty
(14:04):
three or thirty four. What is that man learning about South?
Speaker 5 (14:11):
I think if he went to small towns and small communities,
what he would find would be very, very complex, unexpected
relationships that crossed racial lines, also cross gender lines.
Speaker 1 (14:27):
Lisa Lindquist Dor is a historian at the University of
Alabama and an expert on Jim Crow. I called Dor
because of a fascinating bit of research she did a
couple of years ago. She collected every example she could
find of accusations of black on white rape in the
state of Virginia between nineteen hundred and nineteen sixty. She
(14:48):
was interested in what happened to a black man during
the high water years of segregation if he was alleged
to have sexually assaulted a white woman. Now, if you
remember to kill a mockingbird, you'd assume that any black
man accused of raping a white woman in the South
ended up dead. But that's not what Lisa Linquistor finds.
(15:10):
She looks at two hundred and eighty eight cases. Seventeen
of the accused are killed through extra legal violence. They're lynched,
fifty are executed by the state. Forty eight people get
sentence of the maximum prison sentence, fifty two get five
years or less. But one hundred and twenty one forty
(15:30):
two percent, the largest of all categories, are either acquitted, pardoned,
or paroled. Take for example, a nineteen thirty one case
involving a black man in Norfolk, Virginia named William Harper.
Speaker 5 (15:44):
A woman named Dorothy Skaggs, who is married to a
sailor left her home to go to a guitar lesson,
and she later testified in court that while walking along
the street, who was struck on the head dragged into
an allien rigged by a black man. William Harper was arrested,
he was identi. His trial was very predictable, and he
was sentenced to death, and then the defense revealed new
(16:05):
evidence and he was given a new trial. And at
the second trial, Harper produced six white witnesses who testified
that on the night in question, Dorothy Skaggs was not
on her way to a guitar lesson, but was at
a roadhouse across state lines in North Carolina, drinking and
dancing with a man who was not her husband. Harper
was quickly acquitted, but the case was not over. Dorothy
(16:27):
Skaggs and a white woman who corroborated her story of
rape were brought to trial on charges of perjury. Both
were initially convicted and sentenced to five years in prison,
but both eventually were granted new tiles and subsequently acquitted.
Speaker 1 (16:39):
So you almost met it's like a mess. It is
right for the white men of Virginia. Clearly, there are
three separate considerations here. First, there's a black man who
might have raped one of our own. That makes us
really unhappy. Well, wait, she also cheated on her husband.
(17:00):
That also makes us unhappy. And then hold on, should
we really make a practice of just out and now
believing a woman who says she's been raped, Because once
you start going down that road, I mean, god knows
where that ends. If segregation was, if the foundation of
it was simply white supremacy, it gives white men one
(17:21):
card to play. But what you're describing is they have
two cards they can play, and they can choose when
they play them, and if it suits their interests, they
can either use the male card or the white card.
Speaker 5 (17:33):
Right right, And not only that, they always have the
two cards. Then, even women who they claim an assault
and they're believed in court and the guy goes to
prison if they do anything, even subsequently, men can continue
to play that men card and say, now we don't
believe her anymore. Look what she has done. She has
(17:55):
behaved poorly.
Speaker 1 (17:57):
The point is that Jim Crow isn't really systematic, not
in Virginia or Arkansas or anywhere else. It's not some
rigid set of rules. It's a Jerry built contraption with
a million different exceptions and contradictions, which allows you to
lynch the black guy when you want, or go to
the formal legal route and have him executed, or if
the whole thing feels a little too complicated, just blame
(18:20):
your accuser.
Speaker 5 (18:21):
It is not so rigid and brutal that every instance
of misbehavior causes a crackdown.
Speaker 1 (18:33):
And that's in your mind. That's why it survives as
long as it does right.
Speaker 5 (18:38):
It's flexible, and it can incorporate all kinds of relationships
across racial, gender class lines that might otherwise seem to
violate the rules.
Speaker 1 (18:47):
What is it that allows the South to construct this
kind of flexible, resilient I mean, you know, I'm thinking
back to our German who comes over to the South.
When our German goes home, much of what he reports
(19:07):
the Nazis find shocking. And the thing they find shocking
is the very thing you're describing. That They think what
they need to have is a very clear, consistent rule
which they follow to the letter. And what they can't
get over is this idea that it's just kind of discretionary.
It appalls their legal minds.
Speaker 6 (19:27):
Oh sure, So I'm just curious why how did they
get there? Is it because their world was so messy
that they had to accommodate that messiness.
Speaker 5 (19:38):
I suspect so because whites don't want to lose all
the benefits they get from African Americans, whether it's buying
their stuff or having them work in their houses or
on their farms. White Southerners very much want to be
able to benefit from and profit from a system based
on white supremacy, and yet to do that, it's going
(19:59):
to corporate all sorts of interactions all the time in
their daily lives that are often incidental, very difficult to police.
Speaker 1 (20:10):
This is what Heinrich Krieger reads about in the law
library at the University of Arkansas and then later at
the Library of Congress. He reads court cases, state constitutions,
and criminal codes. He may well have read about that
William Harper case. It was all over the newspapers. What's
the right word to describe the way he makes sense
of what he finds in that year in Fayetteville. Is
(20:33):
it surprise? Is it shock?
Speaker 7 (20:37):
Yeah, that's a great question. It's very hard to read
him because, on the one hand, he shows a certain
level of admiration and support for what he sees in
the United States, that is to say, a racial awareness
that he did texts in the South, like, you know,
people know, we know we are white, we know that
there are racial others. We have to deal with it.
But he's also strangely disgusted with the way the United
(21:01):
States handles it.
Speaker 1 (21:02):
I'm talking to the historian Jonathan Wisen, another of the
scholars fascinated by Heinrich Grieger's time in the South.
Speaker 7 (21:08):
On the one hand, he's approving and on the other hand,
he's surprised by the violence.
Speaker 1 (21:14):
Kreeger is appalled by lynch bobs, but he's a Nazi.
It's not the racial violence that bothers him. The thing
about lynching that he can't take is it is so
messy and disorganized. What are the rules.
Speaker 7 (21:26):
It's hard to pin him down because he has a
whole range of emotions that I think capture the general
German view. You know, the Americans are so violent, how
could they be doing this? So he's really intrigued by
this disconnect between how close Americans are to kind of
acting on their racial impulses, but how badly they are
(21:48):
doing it. And so it's a strange mixture of discussed surpride,
support dismissal. It's a fascinating and puzzling read in that regard.
Speaker 1 (21:57):
Yeah, he agrees with America in theory, but disagrees in practice.
Speaker 8 (22:03):
Absolutely.
Speaker 1 (22:04):
Kreeger actually writes an article on that for the George
Washington University Law Review about the way the US handles
Native Americans. And if you ask Krieger to sum up
what he concluded in that article, he would have said,
lost money, ENFUNO. Don't get me started.
Speaker 8 (22:24):
The Olympics are this chance, like this moment where the
whole world is put into dialogue in some way with
Nazi Germany before it's just painfully obvious what they're going
to be.
Speaker 1 (22:33):
I'm talking to Ben A. Daph Haffrey, my partner in
this series on Hitler's Olympics. Midway through Ben and I
realized that we weren't all that interested in what happened
at the Olympic Games, who won, what, and all that
we were interested in what was going on around the
Olympic Games, the contortions the Americans had to go through
to justify going to Berlin at all. And Krieger's time
(22:57):
in Arkansas is just a flip side of what we
exploring all along, every almost every episode we have is
about an encounter between a German and an American and
the and the kind of complicated, tangled ways in which
each party strives to make sense of what happened or
makes sense of the other. And it's a it's a
(23:20):
kind of it's a hugely important moment for the US
in Germany, because the US is the ascended power in
the world, and Germany is at a moment in its
history when it desperately wants to be the other, right,
the other great superpower. And I think that's what we're
describing here.
Speaker 8 (23:37):
Yeah, I think that's true. And I also and I
think that the the broader significance of that, to me
is the sort of implication of the Dorothy Thompson who
goes Nazi question, which is that the wrong understanding and
the popular understanding of World War two is that the
Nazis kind of am out of nowhere and are the
(23:59):
singular evil who then must be defeated and then good
triumphs and that's that, And of course it's not the case.
I mean, they are profoundly evil, but they're not actually
that singular, and neither is the passist impulse.
Speaker 1 (24:15):
Los minidan fanga, don't get me started. The meeting is
where in Berlin. It's in Berlin, in Putstam. Actually James Whitman,
in the course of his research he uncovered a transcript
(24:38):
of a crucial conference held just outside Berlin in June
of nineteen thirty four. By that point, the Nazis have
seized power and put out a big proposal, the Prussian Memorandum.
It's all about how they want to handle the Jewish question,
and all the country's biggest legal experts are gathering in
Postam to try and figure out if and how they
(25:00):
can translate those ideas into law.
Speaker 2 (25:03):
So the radicals were demanding bans on sexual relations between
Jews and Arians.
Speaker 1 (25:09):
It's one thing to say that, though, but how do
you make that work in practice? Well, it was a
tough question, you know what. It remains a tough question. Now.
Speaker 2 (25:19):
The Nazis were having understandably a great deal of difficulty
determining who would count biologically as a Jew. It's worth
emphasizing that they didn't know anything about genetics, right. There
was a lot of concern that if there was racial
mixing between Jews and Arians, eventually the awful Jewish blood
(25:39):
would come to the surface. You know, there were others
who thought that whatever the Jewish blood was, it would
be swamped in any case if there wasn't very much
of the mixing. But nobody really knew. The scientists who
were involved complained that there's absolutely no physiology logical way of.
Speaker 1 (26:00):
Determining who's a Jew. Yeah, so how do I The
fuhnomental problem here is how do I erect a legal
system which seeks to, in some you know, create a
second class status for Jews when I don't know what
a Jew is? So who's thought about this issue? Well,
of course the Americans had, and Heinrich Krieger had just
(26:20):
written it up in his recent book Race Law in
the United States. It would become Krieger's great contribution to
Nazi ideology. He gave them a concrete understanding of the
American way of prejudice, a legal understanding, something he could
start from if you're interested in building a whole new
system of racism from scratch.
Speaker 2 (26:46):
The difficulty that the Nazis, the main difficulty that the
Nazis faced and trying to create a new race law
was that all of the traditions of European criminal law.
Jurisprudence insisted that you had to abide by a normal
of what we call formal equality, that you just speak
of the defendant and the state party the first part
(27:06):
party the second part. But there's no room from their
point of view in specifying characteristics of the individuals, including
specifying their membership in a particular race. And that was
the rule all through the world, but Americans didn't care.
Speaker 1 (27:21):
Then the Nazis had to make sense of all the
ways Americans banned into racial marriage and sex.
Speaker 2 (27:27):
So there were many many anti missiggenation statutes, and the
miss the anti misceggonation statutes took a huge variety of
views on who counted as a member of whatever race.
The most extreme view, of course, was the notorious one
drop rule.
Speaker 1 (27:42):
Among those states that used the one drop standard, meaning
even a single black ancestor made you count as black,
was Arkansas. Maybe that's why Heinrich Krieger ended up in Fayetteville.
You can Betty had many late night conversations about it
in some Fayetteville dive bar. In states where there was
no one drop rule, well, there was just a very
(28:04):
unteutonic patchwork of laws.
Speaker 2 (28:08):
But the others just came up with a huge variety
of as the as the Nazis said, politically determined judgments
about who was going to count. What's more, and very interestingly,
to the radical Nazis, the question was effectively left to
a kind of judicial discretion. Somebody appears in court in
the questions does everybody regard this person as.
Speaker 1 (28:31):
Black?
Speaker 2 (28:32):
Or or does this person kind of look that way
to me? And that seemed extremely appealing to the radical Nazis,
just just cut the whole knot by making a political
decision on the spot.
Speaker 1 (28:44):
Or yeah, yeah, so they're they're kind of liberated by
the by by American indifference to legal formalities on this questions.
Speaker 2 (28:55):
As many Europeans who come to study in this country
still are.
Speaker 1 (28:58):
Yeah, think about all the crucial meetings that led to
the American decision to send athletes to the Games. Charles
Cheryl goes to Vienna and convinces the German delegation to
commit in principle to including Jews on their team. Then,
when it seems like the Germans might not be keeping
their word, Avery Brundage goes over to visit them, and
(29:21):
the Nazis convince him that what they're doing to Jewish
athletes is no big deal. Then Cheryl goes back and
see the Nazis a second time, and Broker is the
grand bargain. Just put this half Jewish fencer, Helene Mayer
on your Olympic team and everything will be fine. Jesse
Owens decides to go to the games and gets hugged
on the field by his German competitor, loots long and
(29:44):
builds a myth out of it. We understand what is
motivating all of them. Brundage wants a seat on the
International Olympic Committee. Cheryl is surfing the endless waves of
his own ego. Jesse Owens is trying to justify his
decision to go to the game. But what are the
Nazis on the other side of the table. The easiest
(30:05):
answer is that they're con men. They played the Americans
first song. They meet Cheryl and Brundage and say to themselves,
oh my god, these guys are children puppets. But I
don't think that's right. The Nazis aren't rolling their eyes
at the Americans, They're learning from them. The Germans look
at Jesse Owens and Jimmy Laval and Archie Williams and
(30:27):
all the other black athletes, and they say they came
after all you put them through. You get to bask
in the glory of their success without having to treat
them like human beings. So this whole audacious project we're
launching where we want to take a portion of our
population and treat them like second class citizens and still
also win the respect of the world, be crowned as superpower.
(30:50):
Maybe it's possible. Maybe we don't even need some kind
of principal justification, some set of reasoned out laws. Maybe
we can just make it up as we go along.
The modern Olympics were created to bring cultures together to
promote international understanding, and Berlin maybe the potonic ideal of that,
because it's where the Germans learned to think like Americans.
(31:15):
Although there were some limits, These Germans, even quite serious Nazis,
were were quite alarmed to learn about the one drop rule.
Speaker 2 (31:25):
They were indeed, as they described it as inhumane. How
can you possibly visit all this discrimination on someone who
just somewhere way back in the ancestry, I had some
you know, a little bit of a drop of George blood.
Speaker 1 (31:41):
I mean, this is like this one of those insane
moments where I'm just curious when you how did you
when you were reading this and you come across those
moments where even the Nazis are you know, are taken
aback by what's going on? What's your reaction? My reaction was, well,
(32:04):
good lord, I mean, who would have imagined that there
was American racism that went too far for Nazis? And
where do you suppose Heinrich Kriger goes after he's done
with his mission to the American South South Africa to
study apartheid. Heinrich Krieger reminds us that you can't tell
(32:27):
the story of the nineteen thirty six Olympics by focusing
just on the nineteen thirty six Olympics. That's what Ben
and I started to understand. You have to broaden the lens.
And in our next episode, we turned the clock back
to nineteen thirty two and ask the same questions we've
been asking of Berlin about the games that came before Berlin.
(32:49):
A little thought experiment that will take us to Los
Angeles for a drive down Olympic Boulevard. Revisionist History is
produced by Benda daf Haffrey, Tally Emlin and Nina Bird Lawrence.
(33:13):
Our editor is Sarah Nix. Fact Checking by Arthur Gomperts
and Jail Goldfind Original scoring by Luis Kara, mastering by
Sarah Bruger and Jake Korski. Engineering by Nina Bird Lawrence.
Our executive producer is Jacob Smith. Special thanks to Karen Chakerji,
Laura Walker, and Zabina Schmidt. I'm Malcolm Gladwell.
Bushkin. Yeah. Yeah, now's about you're the best thing to
think about the guy Krieger who goes from Germany to Arkansas. Yes,
he does, to Fayetteville. Yes, I'm talking to a professor
(00:28):
at Yale Law School, James Q. Whitman, about an all
but forgotten figure named Heinrich Krieger. In the early nineteen thirties.
Krieger was a student in Dusseldorf, an intellectual who set
out for a semester abroad. We have no pictures of him,
so we'll have to use our imaginations. A proper upper
(00:49):
class European waistcoat, little round glasses, bouler hat in his
briefcase about her copy of NIETZSCHEZ Beyond Good and Evil.
I'm guessing he's never been to America before. He takes
a steamship from Hamburg to New Orleans the SS Westmoreland,
his heart beating furiously with a mixture of apprehension and excitement,
(01:11):
he disembarks, takes a train north and west, and arrives
in Fayetteville, Arkansas. Rents a room in the house of
a German professor named of Gustav on Maple Street, right
by the University of Arkansas. The School of Law. The
law school was only ten years old. Classes were held
in the old chemistry building on campus. Today, Fayetteville has
(01:32):
one hundred thousand people. Back then it's just over seven thousand.
A dusty little place, a whole world away from dusudarf.
Did the University of Arkansas Law School get a lot
of overseas students in the nineteen thirties, I don't think so.
This is this is almost a comic notion that someone's
(01:53):
coming from this, from the cradle of European civilization to
Faytteville in the early nineteen thirties. I mean, it's like
the culture shock that poor man.
Speaker 2 (02:01):
I don't know how he ended up there, I truly don't.
Speaker 1 (02:04):
Yeah. Yeah, and he goes there. How much time is
he spend in just a year?
Speaker 3 (02:07):
A year?
Speaker 2 (02:08):
He was an exchange student for a year, and.
Speaker 1 (02:09):
He ends up writing. And you've read this book, he writes, Oh.
Speaker 2 (02:13):
Yes, yeah, and it's quite a good book if you
accept this basic starting premise, that's well done, you know.
Speaker 1 (02:18):
So describe to us what he produces in his time
in favor. But he produced a book called Race Law
in America. Oh, I really forgot to mention Herr Krieger
is a Nazi, a serious one. My name is Malcolm Gladwell.
You're listening to Hitler's Olympics are a series of the
(02:40):
nineteen thirty six Berlin Games. Dorothy Thompson, Charles Cheryl, Avery Brandage,
Jesse Owens the main subjects of our series so far.
We're all Americans trying to make sense of what was
happening in Germany in the early days of the Nazi regime.
The Olympics forced us to look at them, but the
(03:01):
Germans were looking at us too. The bronze medalist in
the men's foundred meters in Berlin was an American named
Jimmy Luvall. He went on to become a chemist at
Stanford University. I happened to be somewhat obsessed with Jimmy
LaVall for a whole series of reasons that have nothing
to do with his running career, but that's for another time.
(03:24):
In nineteen eighty eight, LaVall sits for a long interview
about his experiences at the Olympics, and at one point
he describes what happened when the team first got to Germany.
Speaker 3 (03:34):
We arrived eventually in the Hamburg disembarked. They took us
up to the Roth house and served us so each
of us had a small glass of twenty five year
old port. Well up to that time, I'd never realized
how delightful a good wine could taste. This was excellent wine.
Speaker 1 (03:56):
The Germans saw all these Americans coming from across the
ocean and welcomed them with open arms.
Speaker 3 (04:02):
I mean, you heard all this regular all about Hitler,
But certainly the German people or as nice as they
could be. I had a Jena and colonel invite me
out to his home for dinner one night, and dinner
with he and his children, his two daughters, and his wife,
very pleasant. Two or three of us went along. We
(04:24):
saw no sign of any intolerance of any.
Speaker 1 (04:26):
Type, no sign of any intolerance. Jimmy Navau was black.
He was from Los Angeles, which in the nineteen thirties
was functionally as segregated as Birmingham. In Los Angeles, white
people did not invite him to their houses for dinner
or give him a glass of twenty five year old port.
(04:47):
The runner who took gold in the fornded meters Archie Williams,
was also African American, also from California.
Speaker 4 (04:54):
He took us outter this beautiful looked like a country
club where the Olympic village where they had was landscape
with beauty and all the buildings were brand new. In fact,
uh it later be was to become what a monitor
or military academy, and it was set up with the
cottage type barracks and they had uh all every country
(05:16):
had its own dining hall. And since we had one
of the largest teams and we had all the goodies,
all the foreign athletes wanted to be our friends immediately.
And in addition to that, we had some kind of
a car which allowed us to ride any transportation anywhere
in in Berlin free of charge. All you had to
do was just show it to the conductor and sit out,
(05:38):
and you could go wherever you wanted to.
Speaker 1 (05:40):
Sit down and go anywhere you wanted to. If you
were black in Los Angeles in the nineteen thirties, you
couldn't even go to the beach.
Speaker 3 (05:47):
We got on the train to go to Berlin. We
arrived in Berlin and there was this mob of uh
young people with a lot of girls. Bois Jesse, Bois Jesse,
Bois Jesse. Oh yeah, uh remember that Jesse had scept
four world records here in the United States that year,
so they wanted to see him. Well, Jesse got off
the train and these little girls had scissors and I
started slipping off his clothes. I'm not kidding. It was wonderful.
Speaker 1 (06:12):
How did Jesse respond able?
Speaker 3 (06:14):
Jesse got back on the train as fast as he cut.
Speaker 1 (06:19):
The Germans were fascinated with the black athletes. The Nazis
were probably as obsessed with the way white Americans treated
black people as Americans were with the way Nazis treated
the Jews, because America had mastered a problem that the
Nazis were desperately trying to solve for themselves. Remember Putsy
(06:40):
Hitler's Harvard educated piano playing pr guy. He set up
Dorothy Thompson's nineteen thirty one interview with Hitler, where she
concludes that Hitler's eyes have the peculiar shine which often
distinguishes geniuses, alcoholics, and hysterics. After Thompson's article, Hitler refused
all all interviews with foreign journalists for about a year,
(07:03):
but finally Putsy convinced Hitler to sit down with Putsy's
best friend from Harvard, a radio commentator from Wisconsin named H. V. Caltenborn.
Putsy and Kaltenborn did theater together in college. Putsy has
his friend come to Hitler's chalet in the Bavarian Alps.
It's August. The views are gorgeous. Hitler's laundry is flapping
(07:25):
on the clothesline in the backyard. Putsy takes a picture
of Hitler and his Harvard body standing next to each
other on the porch. Hitler's all in black, looking very stern.
Kaltenborne will later write he dislikes talking to strangers. Instead
of answering an interviewer's questions, he makes excited speeches, thus
seeking to create for himself the atmosphere of the public
(07:48):
meeting in which he is at home. Kaltenborn asks Hitler
about the Jews. For a moment, he bored into me
with his clear blue eyes, which are his most attractive feature.
People were always fixated on Hitler's eyes. You have a
Monroe doctrine for America, he wrote at me. We believe
in a Monroe doctrine for Germany. You exclude and he
(08:11):
would be immigrants you do not care to admit. You
regulate their number, You demand that they come up to
a certain physical standard, you insist that they bring in
a certain amount of money, You examine them as to
their political opinions. We demand the same right. We are
concerned about any anti German elements in our own country,
(08:32):
and we demand the right to deal with them as
we see fit. Hitler has never visited America. He doesn't
even speak English, but here he is holding forth on
the fine points of US immigration law and foreign policy.
As first articulated by James Monroe in his seventh Annual
(08:52):
Message to Congress in December eighteen twenty three, there's a
project going on within Germany in the thirties to kind
of find a legal basis for what they want to
do with the Jews. Right, an incredibly naive question would
be why would they bother to find legal basis.
Speaker 2 (09:13):
It's not a naive question, it's a crucial Well, it
may be naive, but it's a question crucial for understanding
what went on.
Speaker 1 (09:18):
Our Yale law professor James Q. Whitman. Again, part of.
Speaker 2 (09:22):
The answer has to do with German culture. Much more broadly,
Germans do tend to insist that things be properly legally codified,
and that was even true of the Nazis.
Speaker 1 (09:36):
In nineteen thirty two when Caltenborn and Hitler meat. The
Nazis aren't yet at the stage where they've settled on
mass murderer as a solution to their Jewish problem. That's
years away. They're still trying to figure out how to
marginalize the Jews in a way that seems acceptable.
Speaker 2 (09:52):
The Nazis, it is important to remember, especially in the
early years, had to run a state which was not
entirely managed Nazis. They had to have the German bureaucracy
on their side. They had to do things that would
appeal to.
Speaker 1 (10:09):
People.
Speaker 2 (10:09):
Most of them were trained in law and would expect
law to be to govern.
Speaker 1 (10:14):
What was done by through the Nazi program. So they
looked to the US, where the Constitution promised its citizens
equal protection under the laws, but with the laws made
black people second class citizens. The US systematically oppressed a
racial class, but the country was still respected around the world.
(10:34):
So how exactly was the US doing it? If you
were a Nazi in Germany, this seemed like a really
important question. It's like if you were a kid doing
card tricks in your bedroom and your parents take you
to a full on magic show in Las Vegas, and
you watch the lady get cut in half, and you
turn to your dad and you say, wait what, Which
(10:58):
brings us back to hairc Our eager law student from Dusseldorf,
with his waistcoat and his little round glasses put yourself
for a moment in his elegant hand made brogues. You're
young and idealistic. You are really interested in helping out
this grand national project to do the Jewish thing right?
So where do you go for inspiration? Well, you don't
(11:21):
spend a year at Harvard Law School. The Germans knew
all about Harvard. Putsey went to Harvard. What could you
learn from the brightest legal minds of Massachusetts? Not so much.
You need to go somewhere where Americans had spent years
working through the nitty gritty of how to get away
with marginalizing people. You need to go to the American South.
(11:41):
Did Herkrieger consider the University of Alabama Law School, possibly
a logical choice given his agenda, or maybe all miss
in Oxford, Mississippi. They knew a thing or two, definitely
on the short list. He must have spent many long
hours going over the pros and cons of each possible
destination until one day, over schnapps in the Krieger family's
(12:03):
elegant townhouse on Radhas for strassa right on the Rhine Promenade.
Young Kreeger turns to Papa Krieger and says, vatter it
is to be Fairdville, Arkansas, and so it was in Fatdeville.
He learns from local politicians. He has long conversations with
(12:24):
his law professors. After a year, he says, here is
too much to master. I must stay longer. In the
United States of America. He moves to d C so
he can do more research. At the Library of Congress,
Krieger writes up everything he's learned just in time.
Speaker 2 (12:40):
He came back to Germany, and it seems that the
Justice ministry in Berlin was looking for somebody who knew
about American law, and somebody said, gee, I know this
kid Kreeger.
Speaker 1 (12:50):
And he was enlisted. Yeah. But what they couldn't figure
out is so the German legal establishment, as it sort
of searches for waste to think about their their version
of a race problem. They must be kind of they
are generally aware of what's going on, obviously and going
on in the United States. But what Kreeger is doing
(13:12):
is he is giving them what he's giving He's giving
them a concrete picture of the range and diversity of
strategies and legal strategies that Americans use.
Speaker 2 (13:22):
Absolutely and done in a very sensitive way, concrete and
extensive picture of what's going on. I mean, I say, so,
you're perfectly right. There have been plenty of interests in
American race law before that, but the knowledge was kind
of scattershot. This was a much much more systematic treatment.
I mean, I hate to say it's not a fine book,
but it's quite a well known book.
Speaker 1 (13:42):
And what is Kreeger's conclusion? There is much much more
to American race law than anyone back home in Dusseldorff
has realized. So imagine that there is this guy from
Germany who comes over and what itever it is thirty
(14:04):
three or thirty four. What is that man learning about South?
Speaker 5 (14:11):
I think if he went to small towns and small communities,
what he would find would be very, very complex, unexpected
relationships that crossed racial lines, also cross gender lines.
Speaker 1 (14:27):
Lisa Lindquist Dor is a historian at the University of
Alabama and an expert on Jim Crow. I called Dor
because of a fascinating bit of research she did a
couple of years ago. She collected every example she could
find of accusations of black on white rape in the
state of Virginia between nineteen hundred and nineteen sixty. She
(14:48):
was interested in what happened to a black man during
the high water years of segregation if he was alleged
to have sexually assaulted a white woman. Now, if you
remember to kill a mockingbird, you'd assume that any black
man accused of raping a white woman in the South
ended up dead. But that's not what Lisa Linquistor finds.
(15:10):
She looks at two hundred and eighty eight cases. Seventeen
of the accused are killed through extra legal violence. They're lynched,
fifty are executed by the state. Forty eight people get
sentence of the maximum prison sentence, fifty two get five
years or less. But one hundred and twenty one forty
(15:30):
two percent, the largest of all categories, are either acquitted, pardoned,
or paroled. Take for example, a nineteen thirty one case
involving a black man in Norfolk, Virginia named William Harper.
Speaker 5 (15:44):
A woman named Dorothy Skaggs, who is married to a
sailor left her home to go to a guitar lesson,
and she later testified in court that while walking along
the street, who was struck on the head dragged into
an allien rigged by a black man. William Harper was arrested,
he was identi. His trial was very predictable, and he
was sentenced to death, and then the defense revealed new
(16:05):
evidence and he was given a new trial. And at
the second trial, Harper produced six white witnesses who testified
that on the night in question, Dorothy Skaggs was not
on her way to a guitar lesson, but was at
a roadhouse across state lines in North Carolina, drinking and
dancing with a man who was not her husband. Harper
was quickly acquitted, but the case was not over. Dorothy
(16:27):
Skaggs and a white woman who corroborated her story of
rape were brought to trial on charges of perjury. Both
were initially convicted and sentenced to five years in prison,
but both eventually were granted new tiles and subsequently acquitted.
Speaker 1 (16:39):
So you almost met it's like a mess. It is
right for the white men of Virginia. Clearly, there are
three separate considerations here. First, there's a black man who
might have raped one of our own. That makes us
really unhappy. Well, wait, she also cheated on her husband.
(17:00):
That also makes us unhappy. And then hold on, should
we really make a practice of just out and now
believing a woman who says she's been raped, Because once
you start going down that road, I mean, god knows
where that ends. If segregation was, if the foundation of
it was simply white supremacy, it gives white men one
(17:21):
card to play. But what you're describing is they have
two cards they can play, and they can choose when
they play them, and if it suits their interests, they
can either use the male card or the white card.
Speaker 5 (17:33):
Right right, And not only that, they always have the
two cards. Then, even women who they claim an assault
and they're believed in court and the guy goes to
prison if they do anything, even subsequently, men can continue
to play that men card and say, now we don't
believe her anymore. Look what she has done. She has
(17:55):
behaved poorly.
Speaker 1 (17:57):
The point is that Jim Crow isn't really systematic, not
in Virginia or Arkansas or anywhere else. It's not some
rigid set of rules. It's a Jerry built contraption with
a million different exceptions and contradictions, which allows you to
lynch the black guy when you want, or go to
the formal legal route and have him executed, or if
the whole thing feels a little too complicated, just blame
(18:20):
your accuser.
Speaker 5 (18:21):
It is not so rigid and brutal that every instance
of misbehavior causes a crackdown.
Speaker 1 (18:33):
And that's in your mind. That's why it survives as
long as it does right.
Speaker 5 (18:38):
It's flexible, and it can incorporate all kinds of relationships
across racial, gender class lines that might otherwise seem to
violate the rules.
Speaker 1 (18:47):
What is it that allows the South to construct this
kind of flexible, resilient I mean, you know, I'm thinking
back to our German who comes over to the South.
When our German goes home, much of what he reports
(19:07):
the Nazis find shocking. And the thing they find shocking
is the very thing you're describing. That They think what
they need to have is a very clear, consistent rule
which they follow to the letter. And what they can't
get over is this idea that it's just kind of discretionary.
It appalls their legal minds.
Speaker 6 (19:27):
Oh sure, So I'm just curious why how did they
get there? Is it because their world was so messy
that they had to accommodate that messiness.
Speaker 5 (19:38):
I suspect so because whites don't want to lose all
the benefits they get from African Americans, whether it's buying
their stuff or having them work in their houses or
on their farms. White Southerners very much want to be
able to benefit from and profit from a system based
on white supremacy, and yet to do that, it's going
(19:59):
to corporate all sorts of interactions all the time in
their daily lives that are often incidental, very difficult to police.
Speaker 1 (20:10):
This is what Heinrich Krieger reads about in the law
library at the University of Arkansas and then later at
the Library of Congress. He reads court cases, state constitutions,
and criminal codes. He may well have read about that
William Harper case. It was all over the newspapers. What's
the right word to describe the way he makes sense
of what he finds in that year in Fayetteville. Is
(20:33):
it surprise? Is it shock?
Speaker 7 (20:37):
Yeah, that's a great question. It's very hard to read
him because, on the one hand, he shows a certain
level of admiration and support for what he sees in
the United States, that is to say, a racial awareness
that he did texts in the South, like, you know,
people know, we know we are white, we know that
there are racial others. We have to deal with it.
But he's also strangely disgusted with the way the United
(21:01):
States handles it.
Speaker 1 (21:02):
I'm talking to the historian Jonathan Wisen, another of the
scholars fascinated by Heinrich Grieger's time in the South.
Speaker 7 (21:08):
On the one hand, he's approving and on the other hand,
he's surprised by the violence.
Speaker 1 (21:14):
Kreeger is appalled by lynch bobs, but he's a Nazi.
It's not the racial violence that bothers him. The thing
about lynching that he can't take is it is so
messy and disorganized. What are the rules.
Speaker 7 (21:26):
It's hard to pin him down because he has a
whole range of emotions that I think capture the general
German view. You know, the Americans are so violent, how
could they be doing this? So he's really intrigued by
this disconnect between how close Americans are to kind of
acting on their racial impulses, but how badly they are
(21:48):
doing it. And so it's a strange mixture of discussed surpride,
support dismissal. It's a fascinating and puzzling read in that regard.
Speaker 1 (21:57):
Yeah, he agrees with America in theory, but disagrees in practice.
Speaker 8 (22:03):
Absolutely.
Speaker 1 (22:04):
Kreeger actually writes an article on that for the George
Washington University Law Review about the way the US handles
Native Americans. And if you ask Krieger to sum up
what he concluded in that article, he would have said,
lost money, ENFUNO. Don't get me started.
Speaker 8 (22:24):
The Olympics are this chance, like this moment where the
whole world is put into dialogue in some way with
Nazi Germany before it's just painfully obvious what they're going
to be.
Speaker 1 (22:33):
I'm talking to Ben A. Daph Haffrey, my partner in
this series on Hitler's Olympics. Midway through Ben and I
realized that we weren't all that interested in what happened
at the Olympic Games, who won, what, and all that
we were interested in what was going on around the
Olympic Games, the contortions the Americans had to go through
to justify going to Berlin at all. And Krieger's time
(22:57):
in Arkansas is just a flip side of what we
exploring all along, every almost every episode we have is
about an encounter between a German and an American and
the and the kind of complicated, tangled ways in which
each party strives to make sense of what happened or
makes sense of the other. And it's a it's a
(23:20):
kind of it's a hugely important moment for the US
in Germany, because the US is the ascended power in
the world, and Germany is at a moment in its
history when it desperately wants to be the other, right,
the other great superpower. And I think that's what we're
describing here.
Speaker 8 (23:37):
Yeah, I think that's true. And I also and I
think that the the broader significance of that, to me
is the sort of implication of the Dorothy Thompson who
goes Nazi question, which is that the wrong understanding and
the popular understanding of World War two is that the
Nazis kind of am out of nowhere and are the
(23:59):
singular evil who then must be defeated and then good
triumphs and that's that, And of course it's not the case.
I mean, they are profoundly evil, but they're not actually
that singular, and neither is the passist impulse.
Speaker 1 (24:15):
Los minidan fanga, don't get me started. The meeting is
where in Berlin. It's in Berlin, in Putstam. Actually James Whitman,
in the course of his research he uncovered a transcript
(24:38):
of a crucial conference held just outside Berlin in June
of nineteen thirty four. By that point, the Nazis have
seized power and put out a big proposal, the Prussian Memorandum.
It's all about how they want to handle the Jewish question,
and all the country's biggest legal experts are gathering in
Postam to try and figure out if and how they
(25:00):
can translate those ideas into law.
Speaker 2 (25:03):
So the radicals were demanding bans on sexual relations between
Jews and Arians.
Speaker 1 (25:09):
It's one thing to say that, though, but how do
you make that work in practice? Well, it was a
tough question, you know what. It remains a tough question. Now.
Speaker 2 (25:19):
The Nazis were having understandably a great deal of difficulty
determining who would count biologically as a Jew. It's worth
emphasizing that they didn't know anything about genetics, right. There
was a lot of concern that if there was racial
mixing between Jews and Arians, eventually the awful Jewish blood
(25:39):
would come to the surface. You know, there were others
who thought that whatever the Jewish blood was, it would
be swamped in any case if there wasn't very much
of the mixing. But nobody really knew. The scientists who
were involved complained that there's absolutely no physiology logical way of.
Speaker 1 (26:00):
Determining who's a Jew. Yeah, so how do I The
fuhnomental problem here is how do I erect a legal
system which seeks to, in some you know, create a
second class status for Jews when I don't know what
a Jew is? So who's thought about this issue? Well,
of course the Americans had, and Heinrich Krieger had just
(26:20):
written it up in his recent book Race Law in
the United States. It would become Krieger's great contribution to
Nazi ideology. He gave them a concrete understanding of the
American way of prejudice, a legal understanding, something he could
start from if you're interested in building a whole new
system of racism from scratch.
Speaker 2 (26:46):
The difficulty that the Nazis, the main difficulty that the
Nazis faced and trying to create a new race law
was that all of the traditions of European criminal law.
Jurisprudence insisted that you had to abide by a normal
of what we call formal equality, that you just speak
of the defendant and the state party the first part
(27:06):
party the second part. But there's no room from their
point of view in specifying characteristics of the individuals, including
specifying their membership in a particular race. And that was
the rule all through the world, but Americans didn't care.
Speaker 1 (27:21):
Then the Nazis had to make sense of all the
ways Americans banned into racial marriage and sex.
Speaker 2 (27:27):
So there were many many anti missiggenation statutes, and the
miss the anti misceggonation statutes took a huge variety of
views on who counted as a member of whatever race.
The most extreme view, of course, was the notorious one
drop rule.
Speaker 1 (27:42):
Among those states that used the one drop standard, meaning
even a single black ancestor made you count as black,
was Arkansas. Maybe that's why Heinrich Krieger ended up in Fayetteville.
You can Betty had many late night conversations about it
in some Fayetteville dive bar. In states where there was
no one drop rule, well, there was just a very
(28:04):
unteutonic patchwork of laws.
Speaker 2 (28:08):
But the others just came up with a huge variety
of as the as the Nazis said, politically determined judgments
about who was going to count. What's more, and very interestingly,
to the radical Nazis, the question was effectively left to
a kind of judicial discretion. Somebody appears in court in
the questions does everybody regard this person as.
Speaker 1 (28:31):
Black?
Speaker 2 (28:32):
Or or does this person kind of look that way
to me? And that seemed extremely appealing to the radical Nazis,
just just cut the whole knot by making a political
decision on the spot.
Speaker 1 (28:44):
Or yeah, yeah, so they're they're kind of liberated by
the by by American indifference to legal formalities on this questions.
Speaker 2 (28:55):
As many Europeans who come to study in this country
still are.
Speaker 1 (28:58):
Yeah, think about all the crucial meetings that led to
the American decision to send athletes to the Games. Charles
Cheryl goes to Vienna and convinces the German delegation to
commit in principle to including Jews on their team. Then,
when it seems like the Germans might not be keeping
their word, Avery Brundage goes over to visit them, and
(29:21):
the Nazis convince him that what they're doing to Jewish
athletes is no big deal. Then Cheryl goes back and
see the Nazis a second time, and Broker is the
grand bargain. Just put this half Jewish fencer, Helene Mayer
on your Olympic team and everything will be fine. Jesse
Owens decides to go to the games and gets hugged
on the field by his German competitor, loots long and
(29:44):
builds a myth out of it. We understand what is
motivating all of them. Brundage wants a seat on the
International Olympic Committee. Cheryl is surfing the endless waves of
his own ego. Jesse Owens is trying to justify his
decision to go to the game. But what are the
Nazis on the other side of the table. The easiest
(30:05):
answer is that they're con men. They played the Americans
first song. They meet Cheryl and Brundage and say to themselves,
oh my god, these guys are children puppets. But I
don't think that's right. The Nazis aren't rolling their eyes
at the Americans, They're learning from them. The Germans look
at Jesse Owens and Jimmy Laval and Archie Williams and
(30:27):
all the other black athletes, and they say they came
after all you put them through. You get to bask
in the glory of their success without having to treat
them like human beings. So this whole audacious project we're
launching where we want to take a portion of our
population and treat them like second class citizens and still
also win the respect of the world, be crowned as superpower.
(30:50):
Maybe it's possible. Maybe we don't even need some kind
of principal justification, some set of reasoned out laws. Maybe
we can just make it up as we go along.
The modern Olympics were created to bring cultures together to
promote international understanding, and Berlin maybe the potonic ideal of that,
because it's where the Germans learned to think like Americans.
(31:15):
Although there were some limits, These Germans, even quite serious Nazis,
were were quite alarmed to learn about the one drop rule.
Speaker 2 (31:25):
They were indeed, as they described it as inhumane. How
can you possibly visit all this discrimination on someone who
just somewhere way back in the ancestry, I had some
you know, a little bit of a drop of George blood.
Speaker 1 (31:41):
I mean, this is like this one of those insane
moments where I'm just curious when you how did you
when you were reading this and you come across those
moments where even the Nazis are you know, are taken
aback by what's going on? What's your reaction? My reaction was, well,
(32:04):
good lord, I mean, who would have imagined that there
was American racism that went too far for Nazis? And
where do you suppose Heinrich Kriger goes after he's done
with his mission to the American South South Africa to
study apartheid. Heinrich Krieger reminds us that you can't tell
(32:27):
the story of the nineteen thirty six Olympics by focusing
just on the nineteen thirty six Olympics. That's what Ben
and I started to understand. You have to broaden the lens.
And in our next episode, we turned the clock back
to nineteen thirty two and ask the same questions we've
been asking of Berlin about the games that came before Berlin.
(32:49):
A little thought experiment that will take us to Los
Angeles for a drive down Olympic Boulevard. Revisionist History is
produced by Benda daf Haffrey, Tally Emlin and Nina Bird Lawrence.
(33:13):
Our editor is Sarah Nix. Fact Checking by Arthur Gomperts
and Jail Goldfind Original scoring by Luis Kara, mastering by
Sarah Bruger and Jake Korski. Engineering by Nina Bird Lawrence.
Our executive producer is Jacob Smith. Special thanks to Karen Chakerji,
Laura Walker, and Zabina Schmidt. I'm Malcolm Gladwell.
Host
Malcolm Gladwell
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