June 27, 2024 • 35 mins
In the early 1930s, Adolf Hitler granted a rare interview to the American journalist Dorothy Thompson. When Hitler later came to power, and prepared to stage the 1936 Berlin Olympics, Thompson’s warning about the man she’d met would frame the central debate over the games: Should we go?
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Speaker 1 (00:08):
Pushkin, I think that Hitler is appreciably nearer shooting us,
and therefore I think we're appreciably nearer replying.
Speaker 2 (00:26):
It's the beginning of the Sycamore War. Just before the
United States joins the fight. The journalist named Dorothy Thompson
is speaking to a British television crew. She's standing behind
a dark wood table, wearing a nipped way suit and blouse,
one hand perched in her pocket, perfect posture, shoulder length
hair with a strand of premature white. You can see
(00:49):
her thinking while she's talking.
Speaker 1 (00:52):
We're very much interested in the part East, We're interested
in the Pacific, and we're interested in the Atlantic.
Speaker 2 (00:58):
Thompson was a foreign cars despondent in the nineteen twenties Vienna, Berlin, Dublin, Paris.
This is the heyday of newspapers. Every paper of consequence
across the Western world had somewhere in Europe, and they
all knew each other, drank together, descended on war zones together,
and Dorothy Thompson was the star.
Speaker 1 (01:19):
And as this war becomes more and more becomes more
and more clear that this war is going to be
a world war, we come nearer to being actively involved.
Speaker 2 (01:29):
Because these were different times. There was always discussion of
Thompson's physical beauty, the flawless skin, her radiance. One of
her nicknames was the blue eyed Tornado. She was brilliant, indefatigable,
unshakably self assured, and that voice.
Speaker 1 (01:46):
But after all, the ideological basis of this war was
very well set by mister Nevill Chamberlain at the very
beginning of it when he said, if I remember correctly,
if I should think that one man and one nation
should wish to dominate the world, I should think he
ought to be stopped. That's the way America feels about.
Speaker 3 (02:02):
It, too.
Speaker 2 (02:04):
Remember that voice. Over the course of the next eight episodes,
you're going to hear the voices of a lot of
people from that same era, the long years before the
Second World War, some more powerful than Dorothy Thompson, more
self important, more strident, but none who saw the world
so clearly. Dorothy Thompson is our north star. One of
(02:30):
my strongest childhood memories was the nineteen seventy six Olympics
in Montreal, my homeland's first Olympic Games. I was a kid.
My family didn't have a television, but we rented one
just for the occasion two rabbit ears on top of
a grainy black and white set. We put the TV
in the fireplace because there was no other place for it,
(02:51):
and I watched everything. The Romanian Nadya Komenitch bewitching the world.
In gymnastics, my running hero John Walker powering away around
the final curve to win the men's fifteen hundred meters.
I still get nervous thinking about that race, Lassie Van's
improbable double in the five thousand meters and the ten
(03:14):
thousand meters. Alberto want to rena Cornelia ender don Qurey
on the women's forby one hundred freestyle relay, maybe the
greatest swimming race ever. I was a little kid and
I fell in love with the Olympics, and I've been
in love ever since. This summer in Paris, I will
(03:38):
be glued to my television again, and this thing that
I love and that so many millions of people around
the world love, would not exist if the Olympics had
not been held in nineteen thirty six in Adolf Hitler's Germany.
The modern Olympics started in eighteen ninety six, and if
(04:01):
you've gone to any of those early games, you'd think
you were at some kind of side show. They never
really took off. Forty six countries showed up for the
nineteen twenty eight Games, Thirty seven showed up with the
next Games. Only one country applied to hosts the nineteen
thirty two Games. No one else wanted it. The Olympic
dream was fading, but then came Berlin. It was the
(04:25):
Nazis who gave us the Olympics we have today. They
were really really good at putting on a big show.
Berlin was the first Olympics to be televised, the first
to have a torch relay at the opening ceremony, the
first to create a genuine international star Jesse Owens, the
first to understand that the Games were a spectacle.
Speaker 4 (04:45):
At first, Hitler himself was opposed to the Olympics.
Speaker 2 (04:49):
The historian David Walachinski.
Speaker 4 (04:51):
It didn't interest in him. It was an international event
people from all over. But Joseph Gerbels said, no, we
can use this. This will be good propaganda for us,
and so they began promoting the Olympics.
Speaker 2 (05:07):
Hitler used the Games to demonstrate his theories of Aryan supremacy,
to rally the German people to give legitimacy to the
band of thugs he had gathered about him to make
the case that Germany was a true world power, and
the United States went along with all of it. Why
(05:28):
that's the story of Hitler's Olympics. H I'm Malcolm Gladwell.
You're listening to Revisionist History, my podcast about things overlooked
and misunderstood. Welcome to Hitler's Olympics, the story of how
we ended up with the Nazi Olympics. Over the next
(05:49):
eight weeks, my colleague bend At A. F. Haffrey and
I will tell the story of the games behind the
greatest of all Olympic Games. Not who won what, not
what's stirring? Come from behind, burst of effort led to
an improbable victory. Instead, I want to talk about the
furious machinations leading up to the Olympics and the genuinely
(06:10):
difficult moral questions that surrounded the Berlin Games, questions that
I think we're still trying to make sense of. And
along the way, we're going to introduce you to an
oddcast of characters, people who tried and largely failed to
resolve those questions. Heroes and villains, the clear eyed and
the deluded, the forgotten, and the misunderstood. But we have
(06:35):
to begin with the person who may have seen the
problem of nineteen thirty six more clearly than anyone else.
Dorothy Thompson. Thompson was born in western New York in
(06:56):
eighteen ninety three, just outside of Buffalo. Her mother died
when she was Her father was a Methodist minister, but
a bad one who drifted from church to church. Her
childhood was hand in mouth. She hated her stepmother. Somehow,
she ended up at Syracuse University at a time when
not a lot of women were going to college. After graduation,
she threw herself into the women's suffrage movement, the great
(07:18):
social cause of progressives of that generation.
Speaker 3 (07:21):
She was committed, passionate advocate of women getting the vote,
and when they got the vote in nineteen twenty, soon
afterwards she wanted to pursue a career as a journalist.
Speaker 2 (07:30):
The historian Sarah church Well, she sailed for Europe, didn't
have anything lined up in advance. She just packed up
her bags one day and left.
Speaker 3 (07:38):
Suddenly, here she is exposed to this whole host of
international and global projects and initiatives.
Speaker 2 (07:45):
She makes her mark right away, goes to Ireland, tracks
down a leader of the Irish independence movement and gets
the last interview with him before he dies of a
hunger strike. Next, she goes to Vienna, where she convinces
the Philadelphia Public Ledger to highire her as a correspondent.
Dorothy learns German gets promoted to Berlin bureau chief. Then
(08:05):
comes another step, and another step, and by the end
of the nineteen thirties, Thompson's column was read by eight
to ten million people a day, at a time when
the population of the United States was one hundred and
thirty million. She was a fixture on the radio, too,
toured the country the way rock bands to today. During
one week in nineteen thirty seven, she turned down seven
(08:27):
hundred speaking requests seven hundred.
Speaker 3 (08:31):
She was so famous that Catherine Hepburn played her in
the effectively in the first movie that Hepburn made with
Spencer Tracy, called Woman of the Year is basically the
story of a Hollywood version of Dorothy Thompson.
Speaker 2 (08:44):
Dorothy Thompson became such a public figure that quips about
her were part of the culture. She snips her nails
with indignation. She's discovered the secret of perpetual emotion, and
most famously this from Alice Roosevelt Longworth, Ted Bell's daughter,
who said that Thompson is quote the only woman in
history who has had her menopause in public and made
(09:05):
it pay, a line, incidentally that Dorothy Thompson found hilarious.
This is my favorite Dorothy Thompson's story. One night in
nineteen twenty six, She's coming back from the opera in
Vienna when she hears there's been a coup in Poland,
there's a knight trained to warsaw, and the whole foreign
correspondent crew is racing niked on it. Dorothy doesn't have
(09:27):
time to get back to her apartment, so she has
her secretary fetch her typewriter and a traveling bag. The
bigger problem is she doesn't have any money for the
journey and the banks are closed. So who does she call, Remember,
it's Vienna in nineteen twenty six. Sigmund Freud. Of course,
he's a good friend. And by the way, everyone who
(09:48):
is anyone was friends with Dorothy Thompson. So Freud pulls
a stack of cash out of his safe and sends
his driver to the train station. Dorothy jumps on the
train biqu She's made it.
Speaker 3 (10:00):
Oh.
Speaker 2 (10:00):
They crossed the border into Poland and the train tracks
are blown out. Dorothy jumps out, Hell's a big damler.
The driver demands a king's ransom, so Dorothy jumps in
a ford. The second driver refuses to enter Warsaw when
he hears the gunfire. Meanwhile, the driver of the first car,
the Damler, runs into heavy gunfire. His car is riddled
(10:21):
with bullets. The other correspondents witness the attack and they're inconsolable.
Dorothy's dead. They wire her obituary back to Vienna, but
Dorothy is not dead. She's left the ford behind and
is walking the final few miles into Warsaw, still in
her ball gown and slippers, and legend has it swearing
(10:44):
like a sailor. Dorothy had everyone's attention. And what was
she talking and riding about? Over and over again? In
the nineteen thirties Adolf Hitler. Long before the world became
obsessed with Hitler, Dorothy Thompson was obsessed with Hitler.
Speaker 3 (11:01):
So yeah, she always saw that Hitler was a thing
and that he was the one to watch, and that
you needed to understand where that was going is. She
read a lot of history, She read a lot of politics.
She interviewed everybody to try to get a sense of
what it was that was going on, and so she
got to the heart of it in a way that few,
if any, of her of her contemporaries did.
Speaker 2 (11:21):
A journalist once calculated that by the spring of nineteen
forty she had written a total of two hundred and
thirty eight thousand words for her column in the Herald Tribune,
and one hundred and forty seven thousand of those were
about Hitler. If I ever divorced Dorothy, her husband, once said,
I'll name Adolf Hitler as correspondent. Hitler Hitler, Hitler. She
(11:44):
had to meet the man coming up, the first of
what will be many meetings with Hitler over the course
of this series. Before we go any further, I want
(12:04):
to present an idea that will be useful over the
next nine episodes. It's one of the most famous psychological
theories of the twentieth century, Leon Festinger's cognitive dissonance. We've
talked about it before in the show. It's a psychological
state of discomfort that occurs when a person holds two
or more conflicting thoughts, beliefs, or behaviors. Chocolate cake is
(12:28):
bad for me. I desperately want a piece of chocolate cake.
That's cognitive dissonance. It's a contradiction between what I believe
and how I behave infesting and believed that cognitive dissonance
makes us so uncomfortable that we are compelled to resolve it.
So you change your behavior to align with your belief
You say, I'm just not going to eat the cake,
(12:49):
or I'm going to take just one bite, or I'm
going to go to the gym afterwards, or you change
your beliefs to align with your behavior. You tell yourself
I read somewhere that chocolate cake isn't that fattening. Or
maybe you try and make the world change its mind
so they can't judge you. You stand up and say,
this looks like cake, but it's not actually cake. It's
(13:09):
cocopatter and sweetener and whipped low calorie cream cheese. If
you go online, you could find a ton of old,
black and white videos of psychologists working through the implications
of Festinger's idea.
Speaker 5 (13:23):
Psychological story of decision making doesn't end, however, when a
decision has been made.
Speaker 2 (13:28):
That's Philip Simbardo, one of the many psychologists inspired by Festinger's.
Speaker 5 (13:32):
Work, the act of making a decision can trigger a
flood of other prophecies. According to psychologists Leon Festinger, whenever
we choose to do something that conflicts with our prior beliefs, feelings,
or values, a state of cognitive dissonance is created in
us attention. You change what we think and what we do.
Speaker 2 (13:53):
The Berlin Olympics created cognitive dissonance on a grand geopolitical scale.
Were an ideal, pure competition, unencumbered by politics, high minded,
an event created for cross cultural understanding, young men and
women in perfect physical condition coming together from around the world.
The founder of the modern Olympic movement was Pierre de Coubertin,
(14:17):
who would always say, the important thing in life is
not the triumph of the struggle. The essential thing is
not to have conquered, but to have fought well. That
was the belief. But in nineteen thirty six, what was
the action to participate in the Berlin Games meant? Going
to Germany, competing in a stadium built by Nazi architects,
(14:41):
being fodder for Hitler's propaganda chief Joseph Goebels, and helping
to legitimize a regime that had already started on the
long anti Semitic path that would end in the Holocaust.
The Berlin Olympics were brutally dissonant, and in each of
these episodes, Ben and I will follow how a a
different person resolved the contradiction, starting with someone who pretty
(15:04):
much said, if there's a problem with the cake, then
don't eat the cake. Dorothy Thompson. As early as nineteen
twenty three, Dorothy Thompson had her sight set on an
interview with Hitler. This was a decade before he'd come
to power. Early days in Munich after the so called
beerhal Putsch, when the young Hitler tried to launch a
(15:26):
coup against the German government. When that failed, he escaped
to a hideaway in the Bavarian Alps. Thompson followed him there,
arriving only two hours after Hitler did, but he had
already moved on. For the next seven years, she pursued
him to no avail, but then Hitler's party started gaining
traction his movement grew. He set up office in the
(15:47):
Kaiserhaf Hotel in Berlin, right across the street from the
Reich Chancellery. The state of power in Germany. All the
top Nazis hung out at the Kaiseraff with his grand
awning wrought iron balconies. They ate in the three story
dining room under its great glass ceiling. It was luxurious,
It felt like power. Hitler could look out his window
(16:07):
at the Reich Chancellery and dream. Hitler had a press
officer named Ernst Hampstengel. Everyone called him Putsy, which meant
little fellow, though it translates literally as cute. Putsy was
half German, half American. His mother was a Sedgewick, one
of the grand old New England families. He grew up
(16:28):
in Germany, but went to Harvard, where he was classmates
with T. S. Eliot and with Theodore Roosevelt's son. One day,
Putsy ran into Hitler in a bar in Munich, holding
the crowd's spellbound, and he fell in love. Putsy was
a great musician, and whenever Hitler got a little lonesome,
he would have Putsy bang out some Wagner on the
piano or some other little diddy that he'd written. Many
(16:54):
years after the war, Putsy wrote his memoirs, which I
would wholeheartedly recommend, in law part because of passages like this.
By the time he and Adolf were over to Friend's house.
They're so good that we had to reenact them.
Speaker 6 (17:09):
I started playing some of the football marches I had
picked up at Harvard. I explained to Hitler all the
business about the cheerleaders and college songs and the deliberate
whipping up of hysterical.
Speaker 2 (17:21):
Enthusiasms sound familiar.
Speaker 6 (17:24):
I told him about the thousands of spectators being made
to raw Harvard Harvard, Harvard rah rah rah in unison,
and the hypnotic effect of this sort of thing. I
played him some of the Sousa marches and my own
falorah to show how it could be done by adapting
German tunes, gave them all that buoyant beat so characteristic
(17:47):
of American brass band music. I had Hitler fairly shouting
with enthusiasm, that's it, Hanstenger, that is what we need
for the movement, and he pranced up and down the
room like a drum major. After that he had the
SA band practicing the same thing. Rah rah rah became
z hien z Hei. That is the origin of it.
(18:11):
And I suppose I must take my share of the blame.
Speaker 2 (18:16):
Putsy ends the war as an adviser to Franklin Roosevelt,
making him the only person to serve the leadership of
both sides of the Second World War. But I digress
so Putsy convinces Hitler that he needs to have more
of an international profile, so he starts inviting people to
come and meet Herr Hitler at the kaiser Hoff, the
New York Times, an Italian journalist, a Japanese journalist, a
(18:39):
legendary foreign correspondent with the memorable name Hubert Renfro Knickerbocker,
and finally, Dorothy Thompson. Is she prepared for the interview?
Of course, she's Dorothy Thompson. When he was in prison
in nineteen twenty four, years before the kaiser Hoff, Hitler
had written his men off Testo Mine Kamf. It was
(19:02):
a best seller in Germany, and trust me, Dorothy Thompson
had read Mine Kamf in the German all seven hundred
nutty pages of it, including passages like with Satanic joy
in his face, the black haired Jewish youth lurks in
wait for the unsuspecting girl, whom he defiles with his blood,
thus stealing her from her people. There's a lot of
(19:24):
stuff like this in Mine comp it was, and it
is Jews who bring the Negroes into the Rhineland, always
with the same secret thought and clear aim of ruining
the hated white race by the necessarily resulting bastardization, throwing
it down from its cultural em political height, and himself
rising to be its master. Dorothy Thompson knows just who
(19:49):
she's going to meet when she walks into the Kaiserhof.
She walks through the marble lobby, waits and puts his's office.
She would say later that there was a lot of
fussiness of the final preper for the interview. She was
limited to three questions, which she had to submit twenty
four hours in advance. Hitler did not like thinking on
his feet. Before the interview, she spots Hitler going to
(20:12):
his rooms, accompanied by someone who she says, looks like
al Capone. She waits for an hour. Finally she's ushered in.
She would say later, I was a little nervous. I
considered taking smelling salts. Understand that's a joke. Dorothy Thompson
wasn't afraid of anyone. This was the woman who marched
(20:33):
into Warsaw wearing her ball room slippers. We don't have
a recording of the interview, but I want you to
imagine it. Her voice, her presence, those piercing blue eyes,
Hitler's never met her before. And Hitler, to put it nicely,
did not exactly have relationships of any real meaning with women,
unless you count photo opportunities with little German girls. So
(20:57):
maybe he's the nervous one because he just starts babbling.
Thompson would later write up the interview in an essay
called I Saw Hitler. He is formless, almost faceless, a
man whose countenance is a caricature, a man whose framework
seems cartilaginous without bones. He is inconsequent and voluble, ill poised, insecure.
(21:24):
He is the very prototype of the little man ouch.
A lock of lank hair falls over an insignificant and
slightly retreating forehead. The backhead is shallow, the face is
broad in the cheekbones. The nose is large, but badly
shaped and without character. His movements are awkward, almost undignified,
(21:45):
and most unmartial. There is in his face no trace
of any inner conflict or self discipline. I mean, how good,
how true, how vicious is this? And then she backhands him,
And yet he is not without a certain charm, but
it is the soft, almost feminine charm of the Austrian.
(22:08):
The eyes alone are notable, dark gray and hyperthyroid. They
have the peculiar shine which often distinguishes geniuses, alcoholics, and hysterics.
When Hitler becomes Chancellor of Germany a year later, one
of the first things he does is kick Dorothy Thompson
(22:28):
out of the country because he's been humiliated by a woman.
I think the thing that really sticks in his craw
is the line that follows that little bit about geniuses,
alcoholics and hysterics. There is something irritatingly refined about him.
I bet he crooks his little finger when he drinks
(22:49):
a cup of tea. Is adolf with aspirations of being
a badass dictator, and Dorothy Thompson has him drinking tea
like your grandmother. Now you might say it's not surprising
(23:11):
she looks at Hitler this way. He's Hitler. But the
truth is that lots and lots of people who go
to see him in those years don't see the real Hitler.
Like the Canadian Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King. Here
is his diary entry after meeting Hitler. My sizing up
of the man as I sat and talked with him,
was that he is really one who truly loves his
(23:33):
fellow man and his country, and would make any sacrifice
for their good. That he feels himself to be a
deliverer of his people from tyranny. It gets worse. His
face is much more prepossessing than his pictures would give
the impression of It's not that of a fiery, overstrained nature,
but of a calm, passive man, deeply and thoughtfully in earnest.
(23:58):
His eyes impressed me most of all. There was a
liquid quality about them which indicate keen perception and profound sympathy.
Dorothy Thompson saw the particular sheen of geniuses, alcoholics and hysterics.
King saw keen perspective and profound sympathy. I'm sorry, I
(24:19):
can't resist. Here's a little more from the diary entry.
As I talked to him, I could not but think
of Joan of Arc. Joan of Arc I would point
out that Mackenzie King was the longest serving Prime minister
in Canadian history. He did as much to shape twentieth
century Canada as anyone. He's not some naive, but he
sits down next to Hitler for an hour and a
(24:40):
half and totally loses his marbles. He is particularly strong
on beauty, love's flowers, and will spend more of the
money of the state on gardens and flowers than on
most other things. It was really, really easy to be
sed by Adolf Hitler. The German people were seduced by
(25:03):
Adolf Hitler. Even Neville Chamberlain, the British Prime Minister, would
be seduced by him.
Speaker 1 (25:08):
This morning.
Speaker 7 (25:10):
I had another talk with the German Chancellor Hey Hitler.
Speaker 2 (25:16):
In nineteen thirty eight, when everyone was worried that Hitler
was going to invade Czechoslovakia. Hitler looked Neville Chamberlain in
the eye and said, I'm not going to invade anyone anymore,
and Chamberlain, a politician of more than twenty years at
that point, believed him.
Speaker 7 (25:31):
We regard the agreement signed last night and the Anglo
German naval agreement a symbolic of the desire of our
two peoples never to go to war with one another again.
Speaker 2 (25:46):
But who isn't seduced by Hitler? Dorothy Thompson.
Speaker 3 (25:50):
I mean, look, let's just not underestimate just how smart
she was.
Speaker 2 (25:53):
Sarah church well again.
Speaker 3 (25:54):
But her intelligence was emotional intelligence as well, and I
think she saw earlier than anybody else I've read. She
understood that Hitler was an emotional movement. She was very
alert to when she was being emotionally manipulated. We may
want to trace that back to her childhood being raised by,
as you said, you know, a kind of ineffective preacher,
(26:14):
a bad preacher. She was onto it. You know, she
knew when people were trying to manipulate her, and she
was allergic to it.
Speaker 2 (26:23):
This makes me think there should be a kind of
a you know how people. This is a weird analogy,
but there's all this kind of literature about the particular
ways in which children of alcoholics make sense of their
childhood there growing up with someone who was emotionally unpredictable.
I think there's a parallel thing with Preacher's kids. You
grew up with someone whose job it is on a
(26:44):
weekly basis to reach out and connect to an intimate
group of people, and you're sitting in the church observing
that every Sunday. For it's like a It's a really
interesting education for a child to see your father up.
Speaker 3 (26:58):
There, right, It's like, yeah, the Wizard of Oz. Right,
you constantly see the man behind the curtain, and so yeah,
I think that you are. Yeah, you're onto them, She
writes in and I saw Hitler, that she could see
that it was starting to become a religion, that he
functioned like a religious leader.
Speaker 2 (27:18):
Now, if you are Mackenzie King and you go and
see Hitler and see a man who just wants to
plant lots of flowers, then of course you're going to
send a team of athletes to the Nazi Olympics. You
change your beliefs to make them consistent with your actions.
You stand up and say this looks like cake. It's
not actually cake. It's coco patter and sweetener and whipped
(27:39):
localorie cream cheese. But if you're honest with yourself, you
can't do that. If you're Dorothy Thompson, you say, there's
a conflict here between the kind of things the Olympics
stood for and what the Nazi Party stood for, and
for her, the correct path to resolving that conflict is
to change our behavior. When she writes up her interview
(27:59):
with Hitler, Thompson has a crucial paragraph at the end and.
Speaker 3 (28:03):
So yeah, so she says, take the Jews out of
his program and it collapses. She says, it's based entirely
on a hatred of the Jewish people. And she says,
and the argument is simple, and she sees straight to
the heart of it, which is the Jews are responsible
for everything.
Speaker 2 (28:21):
She read that passage in Mankomff about black haired Jewish
youth raping German girls, and she doesn't explain it away
or ignore it or creates some elaborate rationalization about how
he doesn't really believe that anymore, that he was young
and those were different times, blah blah blah. No. Dorothy
Thompson says that Minkomf is exactly what Hitler stands for,
(28:44):
and we have to watch out because the German public
are starting to agree.
Speaker 3 (28:49):
She says, you know right. In that same section, she
says that the reason for his appeal is that the
people listening to him have somebody to blame. They have
an outlet for their resentment and their frustration.
Speaker 2 (29:02):
It's nineteen thirty two. Hitler isn't even in power yet,
and one of the most famous journalists in America is
laying it all out. There's a monster lurking on the
ground floor of the KAISERHF and he has a dangerous
obsession with the Jews. We can't sign up for his
propaganda show, we can't go to the Olympics, and what
happens we go. I'd never heard of Dorothy Thompson before
(29:39):
we started this project, but midway through, like everyone else,
I fell in love with her. And I think my
favorite of the many things she wrote is an article
in Harper's magazine in nineteen forty one, a few months
before Pearl Harbor It begins. It is an interesting and
somewhat acar parlor game to play at a large gathering
(29:59):
of one acquaintances, to speculate who, in a showdown would
go Nazi. Going Nazi, of course, is the easiest way
to resolve the cognitive dissonance of the Berlin Games. I
have come to know the types the born Nazis, the
Nazis whom democracy itself has created, the certain to be
fellow travelers, And so she lays out the types. Here
(30:22):
is her, mister b a man of his own class,
graduate of the same preparatory school and university, rich, a sportsman,
owner of a famous racing stable, vice president of a bank,
married to a well known society belle. He is a
good fellow and extremely popular. But if America were going Nazi,
he would certainly join up and early. Why mister B
(30:46):
has risen beyond his real abilities by virtue of health,
good looks, and being a good mixer. He married for money,
and he has done lots of other things for money.
His code is not his own, It is that of
his class, no worse, no better. He fits easily into
whatever pattern is successful. That is his sole measure of value. Success.
(31:09):
Nazism as a minority movement would not attract him as
a movement likely to attain power. It would. We're going
to meet a real mister B, and another Thompson type too,
a mister C, who she describes like this. Mister C
is not a born Nazi. He is the product of
a democracy hypocritically preaching social equality and practicing a carelessly
(31:34):
brutal snobbery. He is a sensitive, gifted man who has
been humiliated into nihilism. He would laugh to see heads roll.
We're going to meet the perfect mister C, as well
A lot of people in that brief window before the
Olympics and before the war that would engulf the world
went Nazi. How did that happen? That's the real story
(31:58):
of the Games, Behind the Games. Welcome to Hitler's Olympics.
Over the next eight episodes, we'll meet all kinds of
people from the lead up to the nineteen thirty six Games.
We'll talk about Charles Cheryl, diplomatic athlete, internationalist, man of parts,
(32:23):
the ranking American member of the International Olympic Committee. Ben,
Is it not safe to say that we became obsessed
with Charles Cheryl? Is this project?
Speaker 1 (32:35):
Ben?
Speaker 2 (32:36):
I believe the only two people in the history of
mankind to maintain a Charles Cheryl text chain.
Speaker 8 (32:41):
Certainly technologically and circumstantially, that's got to be true.
Speaker 2 (32:46):
We'll spend some time with Avery Brundage, a champion athlete,
a self made millionaire who saw in the nineteen thirty
six Games a chance to expel his personal demons and
seize control of the entire Olympic movement.
Speaker 8 (33:00):
Rarely encountered someone so single minded and who also has
such a profound lack of self awareness.
Speaker 2 (33:08):
Then there's Jesse Owens, winner of four gold medals, the
African American star of the nineteen thirty six Games.
Speaker 3 (33:15):
That was the beginning to the end of a very
long dream.
Speaker 2 (33:19):
I'm sure you've heard of Jesse Owens, but we're going
to tell you a story about Owens but you haven't heard.
And then the strange tale of a very proper German
law student named Heinrich Krieger who embarked on an epic
fact finding mission to Arkansas. This is almost a comic
notion to someone's coming from this, from the cradle of
(33:41):
European civilization to Fadville in the early nineteen thirties. I mean,
it's like, I don't know how he ended up there.
I truly don't. Billy Garland a real estate tycoon with
a grand vision, lots of counts and barons and assorted
European aristocrats who in the nineteen thirties used the Olympic
movement to cling to their past glory the way a
(34:02):
toddler clings to a teddy bear. Not to mention side
trips to a small town in Alabama, a lesson from
a legendary triple jumper, and a seminar on a crucial
but all but forgotten Supreme Court case called Giles v. Harris.
But in the next episode, we start with a man
who claims, among other things, to have invented the crouching start.
(34:26):
Charles Hitchcock. Cheryl are mister b.
Speaker 6 (34:32):
I have led the happiest life of anybody you ever
met in your life.
Speaker 2 (34:46):
Religionous History is produced by Ben n Daph Haffrey, Tolly Emlin,
and Nina Bird Lawrence. Our editor is Sarah Nix. Fact
checking by Arthur Gomperts and Jail Goldfein, Original scoring by
Luis Garra, mastering by Flaw Williams, Sarah Buger and Jake Gorsky.
Engineering by Nina Bird Lawrence. Our executive producer is Jacob Smith.
(35:11):
Special thanks to Karen Chakerji, special thanks to rufus Wright
for reading us our putsy in this episode, and a
big thank you to Jacob Goldstein for introducing us to
Dorothy Thompson. I'm Malcolm Gladwell.
Pushkin, I think that Hitler is appreciably nearer shooting us,
and therefore I think we're appreciably nearer replying.
Speaker 2 (00:26):
It's the beginning of the Sycamore War. Just before the
United States joins the fight. The journalist named Dorothy Thompson
is speaking to a British television crew. She's standing behind
a dark wood table, wearing a nipped way suit and blouse,
one hand perched in her pocket, perfect posture, shoulder length
hair with a strand of premature white. You can see
(00:49):
her thinking while she's talking.
Speaker 1 (00:52):
We're very much interested in the part East, We're interested
in the Pacific, and we're interested in the Atlantic.
Speaker 2 (00:58):
Thompson was a foreign cars despondent in the nineteen twenties Vienna, Berlin, Dublin, Paris.
This is the heyday of newspapers. Every paper of consequence
across the Western world had somewhere in Europe, and they
all knew each other, drank together, descended on war zones together,
and Dorothy Thompson was the star.
Speaker 1 (01:19):
And as this war becomes more and more becomes more
and more clear that this war is going to be
a world war, we come nearer to being actively involved.
Speaker 2 (01:29):
Because these were different times. There was always discussion of
Thompson's physical beauty, the flawless skin, her radiance. One of
her nicknames was the blue eyed Tornado. She was brilliant, indefatigable,
unshakably self assured, and that voice.
Speaker 1 (01:46):
But after all, the ideological basis of this war was
very well set by mister Nevill Chamberlain at the very
beginning of it when he said, if I remember correctly,
if I should think that one man and one nation
should wish to dominate the world, I should think he
ought to be stopped. That's the way America feels about.
Speaker 3 (02:02):
It, too.
Speaker 2 (02:04):
Remember that voice. Over the course of the next eight episodes,
you're going to hear the voices of a lot of
people from that same era, the long years before the
Second World War, some more powerful than Dorothy Thompson, more
self important, more strident, but none who saw the world
so clearly. Dorothy Thompson is our north star. One of
(02:30):
my strongest childhood memories was the nineteen seventy six Olympics
in Montreal, my homeland's first Olympic Games. I was a kid.
My family didn't have a television, but we rented one
just for the occasion two rabbit ears on top of
a grainy black and white set. We put the TV
in the fireplace because there was no other place for it,
(02:51):
and I watched everything. The Romanian Nadya Komenitch bewitching the world.
In gymnastics, my running hero John Walker powering away around
the final curve to win the men's fifteen hundred meters.
I still get nervous thinking about that race, Lassie Van's
improbable double in the five thousand meters and the ten
(03:14):
thousand meters. Alberto want to rena Cornelia ender don Qurey
on the women's forby one hundred freestyle relay, maybe the
greatest swimming race ever. I was a little kid and
I fell in love with the Olympics, and I've been
in love ever since. This summer in Paris, I will
(03:38):
be glued to my television again, and this thing that
I love and that so many millions of people around
the world love, would not exist if the Olympics had
not been held in nineteen thirty six in Adolf Hitler's Germany.
The modern Olympics started in eighteen ninety six, and if
(04:01):
you've gone to any of those early games, you'd think
you were at some kind of side show. They never
really took off. Forty six countries showed up for the
nineteen twenty eight Games, Thirty seven showed up with the
next Games. Only one country applied to hosts the nineteen
thirty two Games. No one else wanted it. The Olympic
dream was fading, but then came Berlin. It was the
(04:25):
Nazis who gave us the Olympics we have today. They
were really really good at putting on a big show.
Berlin was the first Olympics to be televised, the first
to have a torch relay at the opening ceremony, the
first to create a genuine international star Jesse Owens, the
first to understand that the Games were a spectacle.
Speaker 4 (04:45):
At first, Hitler himself was opposed to the Olympics.
Speaker 2 (04:49):
The historian David Walachinski.
Speaker 4 (04:51):
It didn't interest in him. It was an international event
people from all over. But Joseph Gerbels said, no, we
can use this. This will be good propaganda for us,
and so they began promoting the Olympics.
Speaker 2 (05:07):
Hitler used the Games to demonstrate his theories of Aryan supremacy,
to rally the German people to give legitimacy to the
band of thugs he had gathered about him to make
the case that Germany was a true world power, and
the United States went along with all of it. Why
(05:28):
that's the story of Hitler's Olympics. H I'm Malcolm Gladwell.
You're listening to Revisionist History, my podcast about things overlooked
and misunderstood. Welcome to Hitler's Olympics, the story of how
we ended up with the Nazi Olympics. Over the next
(05:49):
eight weeks, my colleague bend At A. F. Haffrey and
I will tell the story of the games behind the
greatest of all Olympic Games. Not who won what, not
what's stirring? Come from behind, burst of effort led to
an improbable victory. Instead, I want to talk about the
furious machinations leading up to the Olympics and the genuinely
(06:10):
difficult moral questions that surrounded the Berlin Games, questions that
I think we're still trying to make sense of. And
along the way, we're going to introduce you to an
oddcast of characters, people who tried and largely failed to
resolve those questions. Heroes and villains, the clear eyed and
the deluded, the forgotten, and the misunderstood. But we have
(06:35):
to begin with the person who may have seen the
problem of nineteen thirty six more clearly than anyone else.
Dorothy Thompson. Thompson was born in western New York in
(06:56):
eighteen ninety three, just outside of Buffalo. Her mother died
when she was Her father was a Methodist minister, but
a bad one who drifted from church to church. Her
childhood was hand in mouth. She hated her stepmother. Somehow,
she ended up at Syracuse University at a time when
not a lot of women were going to college. After graduation,
she threw herself into the women's suffrage movement, the great
(07:18):
social cause of progressives of that generation.
Speaker 3 (07:21):
She was committed, passionate advocate of women getting the vote,
and when they got the vote in nineteen twenty, soon
afterwards she wanted to pursue a career as a journalist.
Speaker 2 (07:30):
The historian Sarah church Well, she sailed for Europe, didn't
have anything lined up in advance. She just packed up
her bags one day and left.
Speaker 3 (07:38):
Suddenly, here she is exposed to this whole host of
international and global projects and initiatives.
Speaker 2 (07:45):
She makes her mark right away, goes to Ireland, tracks
down a leader of the Irish independence movement and gets
the last interview with him before he dies of a
hunger strike. Next, she goes to Vienna, where she convinces
the Philadelphia Public Ledger to highire her as a correspondent.
Dorothy learns German gets promoted to Berlin bureau chief. Then
(08:05):
comes another step, and another step, and by the end
of the nineteen thirties, Thompson's column was read by eight
to ten million people a day, at a time when
the population of the United States was one hundred and
thirty million. She was a fixture on the radio, too,
toured the country the way rock bands to today. During
one week in nineteen thirty seven, she turned down seven
(08:27):
hundred speaking requests seven hundred.
Speaker 3 (08:31):
She was so famous that Catherine Hepburn played her in
the effectively in the first movie that Hepburn made with
Spencer Tracy, called Woman of the Year is basically the
story of a Hollywood version of Dorothy Thompson.
Speaker 2 (08:44):
Dorothy Thompson became such a public figure that quips about
her were part of the culture. She snips her nails
with indignation. She's discovered the secret of perpetual emotion, and
most famously this from Alice Roosevelt Longworth, Ted Bell's daughter,
who said that Thompson is quote the only woman in
history who has had her menopause in public and made
(09:05):
it pay, a line, incidentally that Dorothy Thompson found hilarious.
This is my favorite Dorothy Thompson's story. One night in
nineteen twenty six, She's coming back from the opera in
Vienna when she hears there's been a coup in Poland,
there's a knight trained to warsaw, and the whole foreign
correspondent crew is racing niked on it. Dorothy doesn't have
(09:27):
time to get back to her apartment, so she has
her secretary fetch her typewriter and a traveling bag. The
bigger problem is she doesn't have any money for the
journey and the banks are closed. So who does she call, Remember,
it's Vienna in nineteen twenty six. Sigmund Freud. Of course,
he's a good friend. And by the way, everyone who
(09:48):
is anyone was friends with Dorothy Thompson. So Freud pulls
a stack of cash out of his safe and sends
his driver to the train station. Dorothy jumps on the
train biqu She's made it.
Speaker 3 (10:00):
Oh.
Speaker 2 (10:00):
They crossed the border into Poland and the train tracks
are blown out. Dorothy jumps out, Hell's a big damler.
The driver demands a king's ransom, so Dorothy jumps in
a ford. The second driver refuses to enter Warsaw when
he hears the gunfire. Meanwhile, the driver of the first car,
the Damler, runs into heavy gunfire. His car is riddled
(10:21):
with bullets. The other correspondents witness the attack and they're inconsolable.
Dorothy's dead. They wire her obituary back to Vienna, but
Dorothy is not dead. She's left the ford behind and
is walking the final few miles into Warsaw, still in
her ball gown and slippers, and legend has it swearing
(10:44):
like a sailor. Dorothy had everyone's attention. And what was
she talking and riding about? Over and over again? In
the nineteen thirties Adolf Hitler. Long before the world became
obsessed with Hitler, Dorothy Thompson was obsessed with Hitler.
Speaker 3 (11:01):
So yeah, she always saw that Hitler was a thing
and that he was the one to watch, and that
you needed to understand where that was going is. She
read a lot of history, She read a lot of politics.
She interviewed everybody to try to get a sense of
what it was that was going on, and so she
got to the heart of it in a way that few,
if any, of her of her contemporaries did.
Speaker 2 (11:21):
A journalist once calculated that by the spring of nineteen
forty she had written a total of two hundred and
thirty eight thousand words for her column in the Herald Tribune,
and one hundred and forty seven thousand of those were
about Hitler. If I ever divorced Dorothy, her husband, once said,
I'll name Adolf Hitler as correspondent. Hitler Hitler, Hitler. She
(11:44):
had to meet the man coming up, the first of
what will be many meetings with Hitler over the course
of this series. Before we go any further, I want
(12:04):
to present an idea that will be useful over the
next nine episodes. It's one of the most famous psychological
theories of the twentieth century, Leon Festinger's cognitive dissonance. We've
talked about it before in the show. It's a psychological
state of discomfort that occurs when a person holds two
or more conflicting thoughts, beliefs, or behaviors. Chocolate cake is
(12:28):
bad for me. I desperately want a piece of chocolate cake.
That's cognitive dissonance. It's a contradiction between what I believe
and how I behave infesting and believed that cognitive dissonance
makes us so uncomfortable that we are compelled to resolve it.
So you change your behavior to align with your belief
You say, I'm just not going to eat the cake,
(12:49):
or I'm going to take just one bite, or I'm
going to go to the gym afterwards, or you change
your beliefs to align with your behavior. You tell yourself
I read somewhere that chocolate cake isn't that fattening. Or
maybe you try and make the world change its mind
so they can't judge you. You stand up and say,
this looks like cake, but it's not actually cake. It's
(13:09):
cocopatter and sweetener and whipped low calorie cream cheese. If
you go online, you could find a ton of old,
black and white videos of psychologists working through the implications
of Festinger's idea.
Speaker 5 (13:23):
Psychological story of decision making doesn't end, however, when a
decision has been made.
Speaker 2 (13:28):
That's Philip Simbardo, one of the many psychologists inspired by Festinger's.
Speaker 5 (13:32):
Work, the act of making a decision can trigger a
flood of other prophecies. According to psychologists Leon Festinger, whenever
we choose to do something that conflicts with our prior beliefs, feelings,
or values, a state of cognitive dissonance is created in
us attention. You change what we think and what we do.
Speaker 2 (13:53):
The Berlin Olympics created cognitive dissonance on a grand geopolitical scale.
Were an ideal, pure competition, unencumbered by politics, high minded,
an event created for cross cultural understanding, young men and
women in perfect physical condition coming together from around the world.
The founder of the modern Olympic movement was Pierre de Coubertin,
(14:17):
who would always say, the important thing in life is
not the triumph of the struggle. The essential thing is
not to have conquered, but to have fought well. That
was the belief. But in nineteen thirty six, what was
the action to participate in the Berlin Games meant? Going
to Germany, competing in a stadium built by Nazi architects,
(14:41):
being fodder for Hitler's propaganda chief Joseph Goebels, and helping
to legitimize a regime that had already started on the
long anti Semitic path that would end in the Holocaust.
The Berlin Olympics were brutally dissonant, and in each of
these episodes, Ben and I will follow how a a
different person resolved the contradiction, starting with someone who pretty
(15:04):
much said, if there's a problem with the cake, then
don't eat the cake. Dorothy Thompson. As early as nineteen
twenty three, Dorothy Thompson had her sight set on an
interview with Hitler. This was a decade before he'd come
to power. Early days in Munich after the so called
beerhal Putsch, when the young Hitler tried to launch a
(15:26):
coup against the German government. When that failed, he escaped
to a hideaway in the Bavarian Alps. Thompson followed him there,
arriving only two hours after Hitler did, but he had
already moved on. For the next seven years, she pursued
him to no avail, but then Hitler's party started gaining
traction his movement grew. He set up office in the
(15:47):
Kaiserhaf Hotel in Berlin, right across the street from the
Reich Chancellery. The state of power in Germany. All the
top Nazis hung out at the Kaiseraff with his grand
awning wrought iron balconies. They ate in the three story
dining room under its great glass ceiling. It was luxurious,
It felt like power. Hitler could look out his window
(16:07):
at the Reich Chancellery and dream. Hitler had a press
officer named Ernst Hampstengel. Everyone called him Putsy, which meant
little fellow, though it translates literally as cute. Putsy was
half German, half American. His mother was a Sedgewick, one
of the grand old New England families. He grew up
(16:28):
in Germany, but went to Harvard, where he was classmates
with T. S. Eliot and with Theodore Roosevelt's son. One day,
Putsy ran into Hitler in a bar in Munich, holding
the crowd's spellbound, and he fell in love. Putsy was
a great musician, and whenever Hitler got a little lonesome,
he would have Putsy bang out some Wagner on the
piano or some other little diddy that he'd written. Many
(16:54):
years after the war, Putsy wrote his memoirs, which I
would wholeheartedly recommend, in law part because of passages like this.
By the time he and Adolf were over to Friend's house.
They're so good that we had to reenact them.
Speaker 6 (17:09):
I started playing some of the football marches I had
picked up at Harvard. I explained to Hitler all the
business about the cheerleaders and college songs and the deliberate
whipping up of hysterical.
Speaker 2 (17:21):
Enthusiasms sound familiar.
Speaker 6 (17:24):
I told him about the thousands of spectators being made
to raw Harvard Harvard, Harvard rah rah rah in unison,
and the hypnotic effect of this sort of thing. I
played him some of the Sousa marches and my own
falorah to show how it could be done by adapting
German tunes, gave them all that buoyant beat so characteristic
(17:47):
of American brass band music. I had Hitler fairly shouting
with enthusiasm, that's it, Hanstenger, that is what we need
for the movement, and he pranced up and down the
room like a drum major. After that he had the
SA band practicing the same thing. Rah rah rah became
z hien z Hei. That is the origin of it.
(18:11):
And I suppose I must take my share of the blame.
Speaker 2 (18:16):
Putsy ends the war as an adviser to Franklin Roosevelt,
making him the only person to serve the leadership of
both sides of the Second World War. But I digress
so Putsy convinces Hitler that he needs to have more
of an international profile, so he starts inviting people to
come and meet Herr Hitler at the kaiser Hoff, the
New York Times, an Italian journalist, a Japanese journalist, a
(18:39):
legendary foreign correspondent with the memorable name Hubert Renfro Knickerbocker,
and finally, Dorothy Thompson. Is she prepared for the interview?
Of course, she's Dorothy Thompson. When he was in prison
in nineteen twenty four, years before the kaiser Hoff, Hitler
had written his men off Testo Mine Kamf. It was
(19:02):
a best seller in Germany, and trust me, Dorothy Thompson
had read Mine Kamf in the German all seven hundred
nutty pages of it, including passages like with Satanic joy
in his face, the black haired Jewish youth lurks in
wait for the unsuspecting girl, whom he defiles with his blood,
thus stealing her from her people. There's a lot of
(19:24):
stuff like this in Mine comp it was, and it
is Jews who bring the Negroes into the Rhineland, always
with the same secret thought and clear aim of ruining
the hated white race by the necessarily resulting bastardization, throwing
it down from its cultural em political height, and himself
rising to be its master. Dorothy Thompson knows just who
(19:49):
she's going to meet when she walks into the Kaiserhof.
She walks through the marble lobby, waits and puts his's office.
She would say later that there was a lot of
fussiness of the final preper for the interview. She was
limited to three questions, which she had to submit twenty
four hours in advance. Hitler did not like thinking on
his feet. Before the interview, she spots Hitler going to
(20:12):
his rooms, accompanied by someone who she says, looks like
al Capone. She waits for an hour. Finally she's ushered in.
She would say later, I was a little nervous. I
considered taking smelling salts. Understand that's a joke. Dorothy Thompson
wasn't afraid of anyone. This was the woman who marched
(20:33):
into Warsaw wearing her ball room slippers. We don't have
a recording of the interview, but I want you to
imagine it. Her voice, her presence, those piercing blue eyes,
Hitler's never met her before. And Hitler, to put it nicely,
did not exactly have relationships of any real meaning with women,
unless you count photo opportunities with little German girls. So
(20:57):
maybe he's the nervous one because he just starts babbling.
Thompson would later write up the interview in an essay
called I Saw Hitler. He is formless, almost faceless, a
man whose countenance is a caricature, a man whose framework
seems cartilaginous without bones. He is inconsequent and voluble, ill poised, insecure.
(21:24):
He is the very prototype of the little man ouch.
A lock of lank hair falls over an insignificant and
slightly retreating forehead. The backhead is shallow, the face is
broad in the cheekbones. The nose is large, but badly
shaped and without character. His movements are awkward, almost undignified,
(21:45):
and most unmartial. There is in his face no trace
of any inner conflict or self discipline. I mean, how good,
how true, how vicious is this? And then she backhands him,
And yet he is not without a certain charm, but
it is the soft, almost feminine charm of the Austrian.
(22:08):
The eyes alone are notable, dark gray and hyperthyroid. They
have the peculiar shine which often distinguishes geniuses, alcoholics, and hysterics.
When Hitler becomes Chancellor of Germany a year later, one
of the first things he does is kick Dorothy Thompson
(22:28):
out of the country because he's been humiliated by a woman.
I think the thing that really sticks in his craw
is the line that follows that little bit about geniuses,
alcoholics and hysterics. There is something irritatingly refined about him.
I bet he crooks his little finger when he drinks
(22:49):
a cup of tea. Is adolf with aspirations of being
a badass dictator, and Dorothy Thompson has him drinking tea
like your grandmother. Now you might say it's not surprising
(23:11):
she looks at Hitler this way. He's Hitler. But the
truth is that lots and lots of people who go
to see him in those years don't see the real Hitler.
Like the Canadian Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King. Here
is his diary entry after meeting Hitler. My sizing up
of the man as I sat and talked with him,
was that he is really one who truly loves his
(23:33):
fellow man and his country, and would make any sacrifice
for their good. That he feels himself to be a
deliverer of his people from tyranny. It gets worse. His
face is much more prepossessing than his pictures would give
the impression of It's not that of a fiery, overstrained nature,
but of a calm, passive man, deeply and thoughtfully in earnest.
(23:58):
His eyes impressed me most of all. There was a
liquid quality about them which indicate keen perception and profound sympathy.
Dorothy Thompson saw the particular sheen of geniuses, alcoholics and hysterics.
King saw keen perspective and profound sympathy. I'm sorry, I
(24:19):
can't resist. Here's a little more from the diary entry.
As I talked to him, I could not but think
of Joan of Arc. Joan of Arc I would point
out that Mackenzie King was the longest serving Prime minister
in Canadian history. He did as much to shape twentieth
century Canada as anyone. He's not some naive, but he
sits down next to Hitler for an hour and a
(24:40):
half and totally loses his marbles. He is particularly strong
on beauty, love's flowers, and will spend more of the
money of the state on gardens and flowers than on
most other things. It was really, really easy to be
sed by Adolf Hitler. The German people were seduced by
(25:03):
Adolf Hitler. Even Neville Chamberlain, the British Prime Minister, would
be seduced by him.
Speaker 1 (25:08):
This morning.
Speaker 7 (25:10):
I had another talk with the German Chancellor Hey Hitler.
Speaker 2 (25:16):
In nineteen thirty eight, when everyone was worried that Hitler
was going to invade Czechoslovakia. Hitler looked Neville Chamberlain in
the eye and said, I'm not going to invade anyone anymore,
and Chamberlain, a politician of more than twenty years at
that point, believed him.
Speaker 7 (25:31):
We regard the agreement signed last night and the Anglo
German naval agreement a symbolic of the desire of our
two peoples never to go to war with one another again.
Speaker 2 (25:46):
But who isn't seduced by Hitler? Dorothy Thompson.
Speaker 3 (25:50):
I mean, look, let's just not underestimate just how smart
she was.
Speaker 2 (25:53):
Sarah church well again.
Speaker 3 (25:54):
But her intelligence was emotional intelligence as well, and I
think she saw earlier than anybody else I've read. She
understood that Hitler was an emotional movement. She was very
alert to when she was being emotionally manipulated. We may
want to trace that back to her childhood being raised by,
as you said, you know, a kind of ineffective preacher,
(26:14):
a bad preacher. She was onto it. You know, she
knew when people were trying to manipulate her, and she
was allergic to it.
Speaker 2 (26:23):
This makes me think there should be a kind of
a you know how people. This is a weird analogy,
but there's all this kind of literature about the particular
ways in which children of alcoholics make sense of their
childhood there growing up with someone who was emotionally unpredictable.
I think there's a parallel thing with Preacher's kids. You
grew up with someone whose job it is on a
(26:44):
weekly basis to reach out and connect to an intimate
group of people, and you're sitting in the church observing
that every Sunday. For it's like a It's a really
interesting education for a child to see your father up.
Speaker 3 (26:58):
There, right, It's like, yeah, the Wizard of Oz. Right,
you constantly see the man behind the curtain, and so yeah,
I think that you are. Yeah, you're onto them, She
writes in and I saw Hitler, that she could see
that it was starting to become a religion, that he
functioned like a religious leader.
Speaker 2 (27:18):
Now, if you are Mackenzie King and you go and
see Hitler and see a man who just wants to
plant lots of flowers, then of course you're going to
send a team of athletes to the Nazi Olympics. You
change your beliefs to make them consistent with your actions.
You stand up and say this looks like cake. It's
not actually cake. It's coco patter and sweetener and whipped
(27:39):
localorie cream cheese. But if you're honest with yourself, you
can't do that. If you're Dorothy Thompson, you say, there's
a conflict here between the kind of things the Olympics
stood for and what the Nazi Party stood for, and
for her, the correct path to resolving that conflict is
to change our behavior. When she writes up her interview
(27:59):
with Hitler, Thompson has a crucial paragraph at the end and.
Speaker 3 (28:03):
So yeah, so she says, take the Jews out of
his program and it collapses. She says, it's based entirely
on a hatred of the Jewish people. And she says,
and the argument is simple, and she sees straight to
the heart of it, which is the Jews are responsible
for everything.
Speaker 2 (28:21):
She read that passage in Mankomff about black haired Jewish
youth raping German girls, and she doesn't explain it away
or ignore it or creates some elaborate rationalization about how
he doesn't really believe that anymore, that he was young
and those were different times, blah blah blah. No. Dorothy
Thompson says that Minkomf is exactly what Hitler stands for,
(28:44):
and we have to watch out because the German public
are starting to agree.
Speaker 3 (28:49):
She says, you know right. In that same section, she
says that the reason for his appeal is that the
people listening to him have somebody to blame. They have
an outlet for their resentment and their frustration.
Speaker 2 (29:02):
It's nineteen thirty two. Hitler isn't even in power yet,
and one of the most famous journalists in America is
laying it all out. There's a monster lurking on the
ground floor of the KAISERHF and he has a dangerous
obsession with the Jews. We can't sign up for his
propaganda show, we can't go to the Olympics, and what
happens we go. I'd never heard of Dorothy Thompson before
(29:39):
we started this project, but midway through, like everyone else,
I fell in love with her. And I think my
favorite of the many things she wrote is an article
in Harper's magazine in nineteen forty one, a few months
before Pearl Harbor It begins. It is an interesting and
somewhat acar parlor game to play at a large gathering
(29:59):
of one acquaintances, to speculate who, in a showdown would
go Nazi. Going Nazi, of course, is the easiest way
to resolve the cognitive dissonance of the Berlin Games. I
have come to know the types the born Nazis, the
Nazis whom democracy itself has created, the certain to be
fellow travelers, And so she lays out the types. Here
(30:22):
is her, mister b a man of his own class,
graduate of the same preparatory school and university, rich, a sportsman,
owner of a famous racing stable, vice president of a bank,
married to a well known society belle. He is a
good fellow and extremely popular. But if America were going Nazi,
he would certainly join up and early. Why mister B
(30:46):
has risen beyond his real abilities by virtue of health,
good looks, and being a good mixer. He married for money,
and he has done lots of other things for money.
His code is not his own, It is that of
his class, no worse, no better. He fits easily into
whatever pattern is successful. That is his sole measure of value. Success.
(31:09):
Nazism as a minority movement would not attract him as
a movement likely to attain power. It would. We're going
to meet a real mister B, and another Thompson type too,
a mister C, who she describes like this. Mister C
is not a born Nazi. He is the product of
a democracy hypocritically preaching social equality and practicing a carelessly
(31:34):
brutal snobbery. He is a sensitive, gifted man who has
been humiliated into nihilism. He would laugh to see heads roll.
We're going to meet the perfect mister C, as well
A lot of people in that brief window before the
Olympics and before the war that would engulf the world
went Nazi. How did that happen? That's the real story
(31:58):
of the Games, Behind the Games. Welcome to Hitler's Olympics.
Over the next eight episodes, we'll meet all kinds of
people from the lead up to the nineteen thirty six Games.
We'll talk about Charles Cheryl, diplomatic athlete, internationalist, man of parts,
(32:23):
the ranking American member of the International Olympic Committee. Ben,
Is it not safe to say that we became obsessed
with Charles Cheryl? Is this project?
Speaker 1 (32:35):
Ben?
Speaker 2 (32:36):
I believe the only two people in the history of
mankind to maintain a Charles Cheryl text chain.
Speaker 8 (32:41):
Certainly technologically and circumstantially, that's got to be true.
Speaker 2 (32:46):
We'll spend some time with Avery Brundage, a champion athlete,
a self made millionaire who saw in the nineteen thirty
six Games a chance to expel his personal demons and
seize control of the entire Olympic movement.
Speaker 8 (33:00):
Rarely encountered someone so single minded and who also has
such a profound lack of self awareness.
Speaker 2 (33:08):
Then there's Jesse Owens, winner of four gold medals, the
African American star of the nineteen thirty six Games.
Speaker 3 (33:15):
That was the beginning to the end of a very
long dream.
Speaker 2 (33:19):
I'm sure you've heard of Jesse Owens, but we're going
to tell you a story about Owens but you haven't heard.
And then the strange tale of a very proper German
law student named Heinrich Krieger who embarked on an epic
fact finding mission to Arkansas. This is almost a comic
notion to someone's coming from this, from the cradle of
(33:41):
European civilization to Fadville in the early nineteen thirties. I mean,
it's like, I don't know how he ended up there.
I truly don't. Billy Garland a real estate tycoon with
a grand vision, lots of counts and barons and assorted
European aristocrats who in the nineteen thirties used the Olympic
movement to cling to their past glory the way a
(34:02):
toddler clings to a teddy bear. Not to mention side
trips to a small town in Alabama, a lesson from
a legendary triple jumper, and a seminar on a crucial
but all but forgotten Supreme Court case called Giles v. Harris.
But in the next episode, we start with a man
who claims, among other things, to have invented the crouching start.
(34:26):
Charles Hitchcock. Cheryl are mister b.
Speaker 6 (34:32):
I have led the happiest life of anybody you ever
met in your life.
Speaker 2 (34:46):
Religionous History is produced by Ben n Daph Haffrey, Tolly Emlin,
and Nina Bird Lawrence. Our editor is Sarah Nix. Fact
checking by Arthur Gomperts and Jail Goldfein, Original scoring by
Luis Garra, mastering by Flaw Williams, Sarah Buger and Jake Gorsky.
Engineering by Nina Bird Lawrence. Our executive producer is Jacob Smith.
(35:11):
Special thanks to Karen Chakerji, special thanks to rufus Wright
for reading us our putsy in this episode, and a
big thank you to Jacob Goldstein for introducing us to
Dorothy Thompson. I'm Malcolm Gladwell.
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