July 25, 2024 • 36 mins
A German Jewish high-jumper is determined to get her shot at Olympic greatness. And an idealist faces an existential choice. In the fifth episode of Hilter’s Olympics, Avery Brundage faces the reality for Jewish athletes in Nazi Germany and makes a critical decision.
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Speaker 1 (00:06):
Pushkin.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
My name is Margaret Lambert. I was born a name
that I hate, Gretel it's too Teutonic. I hate that
name and Gretel Bergmann. And I was born i Bohn twelfth,
nineteen fourteen in a very small town in the south
(00:34):
of Germany. And it was a great life.
Speaker 3 (00:39):
In nineteen ninety six, Margaret Lambert sat down for an
interview with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. She was
eighty two years old. She looked at least fifteen years younger.
Being an Olympic level athlete will do that to you.
She started out talking about her childhood in a little
German town called Laupim.
Speaker 2 (00:59):
That was this club in that town. You just went there.
I could go there and unescorted because it was close
to my house. And I'm as happy as a lark.
What did you like about sports? I just loved it,
and you were good at it, and that was good
at it. There was nothing different at that stage about
(01:21):
being a Jewish athlete, none whatsoever.
Speaker 3 (01:25):
By the nineteen thirties, Lambert's sport of choice was the
high jump, one of the more graceful Olympic sports. You've
probably seen it. It's the one where the jumper runs
up to an impossibly high bar and then rises effortlessly
above it.
Speaker 2 (01:39):
Great success in it thanks to my long legs and
my big feet, I suppose.
Speaker 3 (01:45):
In nineteen thirty three, the year Hitler came to power,
she jumped a little higher than one and a half
meters that's like four feet and nine inches. It was
one of the highest jumps in the country. She would
be a shoe in for the German Olympic team.
Speaker 2 (01:59):
Except once Hitler became chancellor. You started to worry a
little bit, you know, But everybody thought this is going
to blow over. He's not going to last.
Speaker 3 (02:12):
But it soon became very clear that this was not
going to blow over. Four days after becoming chancellor, Hitler
was already censoring the press. Things developed quickly from there,
and then later that year Lambert got a letter from
her sports club.
Speaker 2 (02:29):
You are no longer welcome here because you're Jewish, hil Hitler,
and that was the end of that. So they just
threw me out of the club and everybody commiserated, you know,
what are we going to do? What's going to happen here?
And it was a horrible life.
Speaker 3 (02:47):
But there was still one way that Margaret Lambert might
have a chance to compete at the nineteen thirty six
Olympic Games. The chance that had a lot to do
with one man, Avery.
Speaker 1 (03:05):
Welcome to Revisionist History, my show about things overlooked and misunderstood.
I'm Malcolm Gladwell. Today on the show, Ben the daf
Haffrey and I are back with Avery Brundage, the apostle
of Olympia, the kingpin of cognitive dissonance, the man who
made the modern Olympic Games happen. Brundage believed above all
(03:27):
in the values of the Olympic religion, amateurism, total equality
of opportunity, the only true meritocracy. Brundage wanted to become
an Olympic official, and by nineteen thirty four he had
almost done it. He was up for a seat on
the International Olympic Committee, something he must have wanted more
than anything else. And then Adolf Hitler got in the way.
(03:52):
So Avery Brundage had to make a choice to resolve
the dissonance of whether his pure games could be held
in an impure place. Today in the show Avery Brundage's
very consequential.
Speaker 3 (04:05):
Resolution, things started changing for Margaret Lambert and the rest
of Germany's Jewish population. As soon as Hitler came to.
Speaker 2 (04:17):
Power, you were banned for more public places. No theaters,
no restaurants, no swimming pools. You couldn't go any place,
and you could not associate with non Jewish people.
Speaker 3 (04:31):
Fitness was really important to the Nazi project, so important
that eventually, in the elite Adolf Hitler schools, students would
spend about as much and sometimes even more time playing
sports than they did on academics. Sports had a military function.
If Germany wanted to go to war again, a strong,
healthy population was going to be really important. Strength also
(04:53):
matters if you're trying to prove you're the master race,
so just emphasizing the weakness of outsiders you could make
week in part by denying them access to the same
training the arians had.
Speaker 2 (05:05):
But sports, for me, of course, was the thing I
wanted the most. Next to the Jewish school there was
a yard, and we tried to straighten that out, but
we had to fight the teacher's chickens, and they used
that same place for their activities and it was not
(05:26):
very appetizing, so we gave up on that pretty fast.
Speaker 3 (05:30):
While Margaret Lambert was chasing chickens around a bumpy field.
The Nazis were realizing just how badly they wanted the
Olympics for money and propaganda power are sure, but also
I think for a much stranger reason they worshiped the
ancient Greeks. When Gebels Hitler's fame Nazi minister of Propaganda,
(05:51):
goes to Sparta in the nineteen thirties, he says that
to him, it was just as if he were in
a German city. It's why leading brand and of German
sunscreen was called Sparta Crown. As the scholar Helen Rosch writes,
Nazi fascism was seeking the rebirth of a past so
mythic and so ancient that it predates the nation entirely.
(06:15):
So what better way to prove your connection to that
mythic in ancient past than to host the Olympic Games.
Speaker 2 (06:23):
Adolf Hitler tried to use these Olympics as his propaganda
vehicle to show the world how powerful he was, to
show the world how unified a Germany was, And I
think he tried to scare the world into not standing
(06:46):
up against him somehow. And he wanted, of course, the
United States and all the big nations to be there.
Speaker 3 (06:52):
So the crucial question for our purposes is, well, Hindsight's
twenty twenty, how much of all this could Avery Brandage
in the IOC have really known in nineteen thirty three.
The answer is not everything, but enough.
Speaker 4 (07:07):
The news parade goes forward.
Speaker 3 (07:12):
I mean, this is a national radio broadcast in the
US from March nineteen thirty three. That's just two months
after Hitler became Chancellor.
Speaker 4 (07:21):
At prosodies not being enacted daily in Germany by the Nazis.
Domed troops of Hitler, numerous Jewish citizens have been brutally
taut us. Horrified citizens in America look on in astonishment
as ruthless adult Hitler continues a savage campaign of anti
submitting brutality.
Speaker 3 (07:38):
That summer, a New York Times journalist read a report
on Germany put out by the American Jewish Committee and wrote,
it is impossible to read it without carrying away the
conviction that the Nazi leaders are guilty of something more
than employing violence and terror. Meanwhile, the Consul General for
the United States in Berlin was writing back home to
(08:01):
the State Department about how Germans were pushing an anti
Jewish sport agenda, how Berlin wasn't safe, and how even
if the Nazis had told Charles Cheryl they'd give the
Jews equal opportunity, they really weren't doing that. A movement
for the US to boycott the thirty six Olympics began
to gather momentum. Other countries were thinking about boycotting too.
(08:23):
But by then Avery Brandage was the president of the
US Olympic Committee, and he'd grown fond of saying things
like this.
Speaker 5 (08:31):
All the participants are equal before the starter's pistol, and
there are no social distinctions or family distinctions.
Speaker 3 (08:41):
That same year, he wrote to a colleague that the
very foundation of the modern Olympic revival will be undermined
if individual countries are allowed to restrict participation by reason
of class, creed, or race. The very foundation. So by
this logic, Mark A. Lambert that German Jewish high jumper
(09:02):
should have been Avery Brandage's ideal athlete, right, unpaid, highly skilled,
and obsessed with sport. If someone like her wasn't going
to get a fair shot at the Nazi Olympics, then
surely Avery Brundage would have to try and stop the
Nazi Olympics. But first he had to figure out if
the rumors about Germany were true. We'll be right back.
Speaker 5 (09:36):
I always start all my speeches with the statement that
the Olympic moment today is the most important social force
in the world. The word Olympic is the magic word.
Speaker 3 (09:52):
The year after Hitler came to power, Avery Brandage had
almost made it to the International Olympic Committee, his ticket
back to the most rarefied part of Olympia where he
could rub shoulders with all the princes and aristocrats in
that particular gentleman's club. And this is something I think
Avery Brandage really wanted.
Speaker 1 (10:11):
Why does he want to hang out with these kind
of Pots's.
Speaker 3 (10:17):
Malcolm and I once again psychoanalyzing Avery Brandage talking about
a letter he wrote to the IOC. There's one moment
that's quite telling in one of these when he's writing
to Edstrom, one of the members of the IOC, and
you see his typewritten note, anything may happen in these
perilous days, and then he crosses out perilous and he
handwrites in parlous, And there's a kind of like for Avery.
(10:40):
Brundage is not saying the word parless like he's second
guessing his own vocabulary to fit in with these guys.
Speaker 1 (10:47):
Yeah, and that is the world of the IOC, right.
The IOC is a fundamently nineteenth century institution. It's just
one count and baron after another kind of living out
the glory days of there. And then Brundage comes along
and he is an entirely different animal.
Speaker 3 (11:03):
He's like, yes, I may have done all these things
that you guys can never even dream of. I built
these buildings, I made my own fortune. I trained in
a ditch until I was good enough to compete in
the Olympics. But I still think Princess rock and I'll
go on the record as saying as much.
Speaker 5 (11:19):
And what kind of a world is this when it's
come to the point where being a prince is a
handicapped I ask.
Speaker 1 (11:25):
You, it's very gruteal MUCKs. I don't want to belong
to a club that would happen.
Speaker 3 (11:32):
But like he knows that the only way he's going
to get in that club is if he, as the
president of the American Olympic Committee, brings the Americans to
the Games.
Speaker 1 (11:41):
So why is that so?
Speaker 3 (11:43):
He he is at that point the most powerful man
in amateur sport in America, so he really like he
holds the cards, and the United States is both the
most significant participant in the Olympics. They're going to bring
a huge team. There's going to be a medals race
between them and the Germans that will be extremely dramatic
and make for really good viewing. But also they have
(12:04):
a lot of moral authority, and if the United States
substains from the Olympics, it majorly undermines the Olympic project.
Speaker 1 (12:11):
Has it been made explicit to Brundage that his future
in the IOC is contingent on him bringing Americans to Berlin.
Speaker 3 (12:19):
I haven't seen anything that states it explicitly, but I
think it is very clear that the members of the
IOC want the Olympics to happen. They want them to
happen in Germany. But as Americans learn more about what
the Nazis were up to, as the last traces of
Weimar Democracy vanished, the pressure in the US to boycott
(12:39):
the Games got really intense, and avery Rundage was right
in the middle of it. Publicly, he was pro going
to the Games, but he expressed at least some concern
about what was happening in Germany. And yet in his archives,
I've found private letters to the IOC from as early
as nineteen thirty three, and in them he frames the
(13:02):
boycott campaign as a Jewish plot to sabotage the Olympics,
and from the beginning he knew what crowd he was
playing to the President of the International Committee, count Enri
de bayer LeTour wrote to Avery Brundage saying they should
work together hand in hand while we are handling this
difficult question. I am not personally fond of Jews and
(13:24):
of the Jewish influence, but I will not have them molested.
So that's a clue. But then there's also the matter
of Brandage's lengthy correspondence with Siegfried Edstrom. Edstrom was sort
of like the Swedish Avery Brundage, an engineer who'd made good.
He was a member of the IOC. The two were friends.
(13:44):
He's the one who wrote the letter we talked about
in the last episode, suggesting that he nominate Brundage for
a seat on the IOC, and Brundage of course responded enthusiastically.
But how did he begin that letter accepting this most
precious of all prizes. He didn't lead with his enthusiasm. Instead,
he started by complaining about the boycotts. Undoubtedly, the International
(14:09):
Olympic Committee will be swamped with protests from Jews and
Jewish organizations from many different countries. I assume that the
IOC will take the same stand as the American Olympic
Committee will, to it that it is concerned with athletic
affairs only and that it will not be drawn into political, religious,
sociological or racial controversies of any kind. Then he said
(14:34):
how much he'd like to be on the IOC.
Speaker 1 (14:38):
Inside, deep inside that kind of engineer, self made man's
brain is this romantic streak. I want to be part
of this grand you know, sporting amateur enterprise. And it's
beautiful and it speaks to me, and it's you know,
it's this pure thing in an impure world. I really
(14:58):
do think that what how happens to him in nineteen
twelve at the Olympics, that failure remains with him for
the rest of his days. It's the thing that drives
him to save in his own mind, save the Olympics.
That is, he had failed once to live up to
the Olympic spirit, and he's not going to fail again.
Speaker 3 (15:22):
But the concerns weren't going away. Hitler had already made
himself a dictator, Germany was re arming, and war was
once again on the horizon in Europe. So the American
Olympic Committee decided they needed to send someone to Berlin
to figure out for themselves what was going on. They chose,
of course, Avery Brandage. On September twelfth, nineteen thirty four,
(15:49):
two days after the Nuremberg rally that year, Avery Brandage
arrived in eastern Germany. His plan was to meet with
Jewish sports officials to suss out just how bad things
had actually gotten. There was, however, one problem. He didn't
speak German, so he did this whole trip with Nazi interpreters,
including the head of all Nazi sports, the Reichschportfior, Hans
(16:13):
von Schamer and Austin von Schamer. And In Austin was
a rather severe looking Nazi official, a small man with thinning,
slit hair and a paralyzed right hand. He was meant
to assure every Brandage that the Nazis weren't discriminating against
Jewish athletes, which maybe would have been easier had all
the sports clubs in Nazi Germany not recently received a
(16:34):
copy of a book called the Spirit of Sport in
the National Socialist Ideology, which included passages like this, there
is no room in our German land for Jewish sports
leaders and their friends infested with the Talmud, for pacifists,
political Catholics, pan Europeans and the rest. They are worse
(16:55):
than cholera and syphilis, much worse than famine, drought and
poison gas. Do we want them in the Olympic Games
in Germany? Yes, we must have them. We think they
are important for international reasons. There could not be better
propaganda for Germany. What does it mean? It means they
(17:16):
would pretend that Jews could be allowed at the Games
in hopes that it would help the Nazis hoodwink the
world about how they were actually treating the Jews. You'd
think that Avery Brandage, champion of Olympic ideals like no
politics in sport, would hate to see the Olympics used
that way. Instead. Here's our second warning sign about this trip.
(17:37):
Brundage quickly saw von Schamer and Austin as a friend.
He spent six days exploring Germany with his various Nazi counterparts.
I have to imagine that he also visited the Reichs Sportsfeld,
the site of the giant new stadium being built for
the Games. Brundage new construction, after all, it was his
business in This stadium would be epic, big enough to
(18:00):
fit more than one hundred thousand people.
Speaker 1 (18:03):
This is what I can't get over. Every one of
the characters we've met so far have a meeting with
the Nazis. It's like Dorothy Thompson goes, you know, Charles
Cheryl has this big meeting with Hitler. Each makes this
pilgrimage to the Promised Land.
Speaker 2 (18:19):
Right.
Speaker 1 (18:20):
We don't know in thirty four exactly what Brundage is thinking.
He's playing his cards pretty close to his chest.
Speaker 3 (18:27):
Yeah, we actually not a lot is known about these meetings,
but we did find an archival account from a dentist
and Jewish sport official who is president at one of
these meetings at the hotel Kaiserhoff in nineteen thirty four.
We had it translated.
Speaker 1 (18:45):
Kaiserhoff. I would point out the same hotel where Dorothy
Thompson interviewed Adolf Hitler. Oh Man, I missed that this
is where it's all happening in Berlin. This is where
you when you have to do your Nazi meet and greets,
you go to the kaiser Off.
Speaker 3 (19:00):
The point is this was not friendly territory for the
Jewish sports officials. The Hotel kaiser Off was a grand
luxury hotel on Wilhelm Plotz, directly opposite the Chancellor's office.
Remember Hitler once had an office there. There were marble floors,
a dining room in a three story glass roofed atrium.
(19:22):
Brundage is in the lap of luxury at the seat
of Nazi power. Sigfried Edge from Brundage's IOC friend is
there with them. They were joined by a Nazi German
Organizing Committee member who was already a friend of Brundage's
from the nineteen twelve Olympics. The Deputy reichs sportsfure was
also there, dressed in full SS black boots and all.
Speaker 1 (19:45):
So what do we know about what happens at the meeting?
Speaker 3 (19:48):
So he begins to ask them a series of questions
about Jewish participation in sport. So he asks, are Jewish
boys allowed to play sport in large numbers? And the
right sport funer says yeah, absolutely, and the Jewish leaders
have to sit there and nod but then they say
they make a caveat. They're like, well, you know, maybe
(20:10):
they can play in large numbers, but there's a problem.
We don't actually have any municipal sports fields. And Brandage
immediately dismisses this and says, well, in the US, we
don't have municipal sports fields either. We just have our
own fields for each each athletic association. If you imagine
this from the perspective of the Jewish sports leaders, it's
a high wire act. Here sitting before them is Brandage
(20:32):
the man best position to put pressure on the Nazis
who are also seated at the table. But the Jewish
sports leaders have no sense really a Brandage's position on
all this. How could they?
Speaker 6 (20:43):
So?
Speaker 3 (20:44):
What do they do? They have to try and read
between the lines of every question he's asking. Then he
asks can Jews join the associations? They say yes, but
only if they're Jewish associations, and he's like, well, in
my club back in Chicago, we don't allow Jews either.
Next question, they say like, oh, well, you know, we
(21:06):
have our own sports fields, but they keep getting closed
down because the Nazi party is shutting down our sports fields.
They're breaking into our games. They're beating people up, and Brandage,
according to this account of the meeting, which I have
to believe is reliable, just seems kind of bored by
this and doesn't ask follow up questions about this this report.
But this dentist rites of Brandage is that it was
(21:28):
clear that Brundage wanted to save the Olympics in Berlin.
And there's one sort of glimmer of hope towards the
end where Brandage asks if a Jewish athlete runs one
hundred meters in ten point three seconds, would he then
be able to participate in the Olympics? And the Jewish
sport leaders reply, how is he supposed to do that
(21:49):
without having had the opportunity to train the rex sport?
Fewer says, we'll allow him to compete. Brandage sort of
times and then says, but how can he compete if
he doesn't have an opportunity to train the right sport?
Fewer says, Oh, don't worry, will definitely have Jewish people
on the teams, which is just kind of just like
blanket assurance that everything has shown is nonsense. It's a whitewash, Yeah,
it's a whitewash. And Brundage accepts this and moves on
(22:12):
from the meeting and declares that there's no problem. Soon
after that meeting, Avery Brendage heads back to the United
States with his verdict all good. So the day after
he gets back, the American Olympic Committee meets and votes
unanimously to go to Berlin. Brundage stuck to his guns.
Speaker 6 (22:36):
Participation in these games must not be construed to be
an endorsement of the policies or practices of the Nazi government.
Measures have been adopted to ensure that there will be
no violation of the fundamental principles of fair play and
good sportsmanship, all the Olympic standards of freedom and equality
(22:56):
to all.
Speaker 3 (22:58):
Later. Margaret Lambert Hewish high jumper had this to say
about Avery Brandage's trip.
Speaker 2 (23:05):
He just let himself being lulled into some false security
by these Nazis saying everything is fine, We're doing everything
we would saying we said we would do. And he
came back to the United States and said everything is
fabulous over there, and we'll be going.
Speaker 3 (23:23):
We'll be right back. There are two ways of understanding
what Avery Brandage did in nineteen thirty four. The first
in a chain of his actions that would lead irrevocably
to us participation in the Berlin Games. The most charitable
(23:47):
interpretation is basically what Margaret Lambert, the high Jumper said,
He let himself be lulled into some false security picture Brandage,
the hoodwinked idealist who maybe just believed so firmly that
the Olympics were a world apart from the universe of
politics and money that it didn't matter if they were
held in Nazi Germany. But another way to understand what
(24:09):
he did is to consider that his visit to Germany,
and his time with the Nazis, it may all have
seemed a little familiar to him. Remember Dorothy Thompson's nineteen
forty one essay Who Goes Nazi? The first time we
read it, we recognized Charles Cheryl as her mister B.
But Avery Brundage is the perfect incarnation of Thompson's mister C, do.
Speaker 1 (24:36):
You have in front of you? Her description of his
kind of fascist?
Speaker 3 (24:40):
Here we go. Mister C is a brilliant and a
bittered intellectual. He was a poor white, trash Southern boy,
or in our case, Midwestern boy, a scholarship student at
two universities, where he took all the scholastic honors, but
was never invited to join a fraternity. He has always
moved among important people, and all always been socially on
(25:01):
the periphery. His colleagues have admired his brains and exploited them,
but they have seldom invited him or his wife to dinner.
He is a snob, loathing his own snobbery, that's brandage.
He despises the men about him. He despises, for instance,
mister b because he knows what he has had to
achieve by relentless work. Men like Bee have won by
(25:21):
knowing the right people. But his contempt is inextricably mingled
with envy. Even more than he hates the class into
which he has insecurely risen does he hate the people
from whom he came. He hates his mother and his
father for being his parents. He loaths everything that reminds
him of his origins and his humiliations. He is bitterly
anti Semitic because the social insecurity of the Jews reminds
(25:43):
him of his own psychological insecurity hity. He is utterly
erased from his nature and enjoy He has never known.
He has an ambition bitter and burning. It is to
rise to such an eminence that no one can ever
again humiliate him. Not to rule, but to be the
secret ruler. He is courteous, the commands a distant in
cold respect, but he is a very dangerous man. Where
(26:04):
he primitive and brutals, he would be a criminal, a murderer,
but he is subtle and cruel. He would rise high
in a Nazi regime. It would need men just like him,
intellectual and ruthless.
Speaker 1 (26:13):
That's him, that is him.
Speaker 3 (26:17):
And this is the key part quote. But mister c
is not a born Nazi. He is the product of
a democracy hypocritically preaching social equality and practicing a carelessly
brutal snobbery. Averybrndage may have thought he had found himself
in Stockholm in nineteen twelve at the Olympics, but I
(26:39):
think he really found himself in nineteen thirty four at
the kaiser Off Hotel. Hundreds of thousands of people protested
the decision to go to the games. Avery Brandage didn't care.
He became even more convinced that the whole boycott was
just a Jewish plot to use the Olympics for their
(27:00):
their own political purposes. He kept a file of antisemitic propaganda.
It's labeled in his archives Jewish problem. Then, really, it's
not that surprising, because we know now from reading his
letters that while he was questioning Jewish sports leaders in
front of the Nazis at the Kaiserhoff, Averyrundage knew that
he was also being assessed by Sigfried Edstrom, the IOC
(27:23):
official sitting in the room with him, who had earlier
that year sent this note to Brundage. The Nazis' opposition
to the influence of Jews can only be understood if
you live over in Germany. In some of the more
important traits, the Jews governed the majority and stopped all
others from coming in. In the hospitals, most of the
doctors were Jews, and the Jews had preference in the
(27:47):
law courts. It was the same Many of these Jews
were of Polish or Russian origin, with minds entirely different
from the Western mind. An alteration of these conditions were
absolutely necessary if Germany should remain a white nation. The
only objection I have is that they made the alterations
(28:07):
so rashly and thereby caused a great deal of opposition.
I am not an anti Semite myself. On the contrary,
some of my best friends are Jews. But I try
to look upon the question from both sides. That is
why I have written this letter to you. It was
like Avery Brundage have been handed a script. A year
(28:30):
after that trip, Brundage wrote his own letter to the
president of the IOC quote, the picture of conditions in
Germany obtained from reading our newspapers is entirely different from
that gained by an inspection of the country. The great
Jewish merchant advertisers may have something to do with this.
The public mind has been poisoned against Germany, and highly
(28:52):
organized minorities are extremely effective on questions which are decided
by popular vote. Nobody fools, Avery Brandage. Avery Brandage knew
exactly what he was doing. He'd gone Nazi. Margaret Lambert,
the High Jumper, had been contacted again by the Nazis
(29:15):
a few months before Brandage's visit. According to that interview
she did with the Holocaust Museum, the Nazis had begun
threatening her family, trying to force her to try out
for the games so they could show how open they
were to having Jews on the team.
Speaker 2 (29:29):
To compete in the Olympic Games is trill of a lifetime,
I mean, and it doesn't happen to everybody. On the
other hand, I was so afraid supposing I am allowed
to compete, Supposing I win, and I was convinced that
I would win a medal and possibly the gold. Supposing
(29:50):
I do this, What do I do? I'm going to
stand on that podium and say, hile Hitler like all
the others, and this to do for Jewish girl would
never do. I was scarce, stiff, and this was going
around in my head day and night, day and night,
day and night. Well, what's going to happen? Am I
going to compete? Am I not going to compete? How
(30:13):
do I conduct myself if I do compete? I was
so torn apout about it. I didn't know what to do.
Speaker 3 (30:22):
The Nazis put Margaret Lambert, who was unnamed gretel Bergmann
on the provisional Olympic team trying out for the Games.
Vonshaimer Undastan wrote about this in a quite unconvincing letter
to Charles Cheryl. You will find from this that we
work entirely in the spirit of the Olympic statutes as before,
Miss Bergmann is being treated like all Olympic candidates in
(30:44):
spite of being a Jewish, in spite of being a Jewish,
pretty much covers it. The invitation was nonsense, but the
IOC knew that she had poor facilities to train in I.
Speaker 2 (30:56):
Still jew was not allowed to use any of this.
Speaker 3 (31:00):
But you could frame it as a kind of classic
Olympic story, right, like poor young Avery Brandage practicing with
his own discus in an abandoned lot, and Lambert didn't
even have anybody to compete against to make her sharper.
Speaker 2 (31:12):
You don't have any competition. It's you have to only
fight yourself.
Speaker 3 (31:17):
She made the nazison to her opponent. She pushed herself
to beat an idea that was so much bigger than her,
and at a meat just before the games.
Speaker 2 (31:26):
It worked, but it made me better because I was
so full of rage. The madder I got, the better
I jumped. When I was so mad that I equaled
the German record. I must have cleared it by fifteen
inches at the time.
Speaker 3 (31:41):
She left that meet and went home, waiting to hear
whether she'd made the team, and wondering what would happen
if she had.
Speaker 2 (31:48):
I looked for the mail every day. What's going to happen,
you know? And I was really scared. An't they going
to break my leg? What they gonna do to to
eliminate me? But it was very simple. One day letter
came and it said, in view of the fact that
you have been doing very poorly lately, we did not
select you for the Olympic team highlight. And that was
(32:12):
the end of it.
Speaker 3 (32:16):
To be clear, Margaret Lambert had not been doing poorly.
The Nazis were just keeping her off the team. I mean,
just think about how it would have looked to have
a Jewish woman win gold at the Nazi Olympics.
Speaker 2 (32:29):
And I sat I remember me sitting outside in the
stoop and I got this letter, and I must have
used every profanity I knew, and I knew a lot
of them. I think that was the first time I
really realized that my candidacy for as an Olympic athlete
(32:53):
was really all a shame I was. It was just
something that the Germans did to to fool the whole world.
Speaker 3 (33:03):
Of course, Avery Brundage hadn't needed fooling. I do believe
that he loved the idea of the Olympics. Amateurism and
pure competition, using sports to prove your worth a kind
of utopia, protected from the corruption of the real world.
But Margaret Lambert should have been his reality check. If
(33:23):
someone like her couldn't win in Nazi Germany, that should
have made him sit up and pay attention. Instead, in
that room at the kaiser Off Hotel when the worst
had come out, he just seemed bored. It's that indifference
that got him his seat on the International Olympic Committee
(33:43):
just a month before the Berlin Games. He took it
from the only IOC member who'd resisted having the Games
in Nazi Germany, who'd written in his last months on
the IOC, if our committee permits the Games to be
held in Nazi Germany, there will be nothing left to
distinguish it from the Nazi ideal. He was forced to resign.
(34:11):
On August first, nineteen thirty six, the Olympic torch was
carried by relay for the first time ever from Olympia
in Greece all the way to the Reichschwartzfeld in Berlin.
When it got to the stadium, Avery Brandage was in
the audience. The Olympic bell inscribed with the words I
call the youth of the world rang out. Meanwhile, Margaret
(34:32):
Lambert was applying for a visa that would allow her
to leave Germany. She would never again live in her
home country. Brundage had what he always wanted, a seat
in the ruling class of his perfect Olympia, just in
time to watch Adolf Hitler give the opening speech at
the Olympic Games.
Speaker 4 (34:54):
To speed it from fire, Noel tide rag.
Speaker 2 (35:05):
Hit I announcing it opened.
Speaker 6 (35:07):
Now that old kiddy him and I hope pad of
ragged the right Arm.
Speaker 3 (35:22):
Revisionist History is produced by me Bennattaphaffrey, Tolly Emlin, and
Nina Bird Lawrence. Our editor is Sarah Nix. Fact checking
by Arthur Gomberts and J. L. Goldfine. Original scoring by
Luis Gara, Mastering by FLAONN Williams, Sarah Roguer, and Jake Gorsky.
Engineering by Nina Bird Lawrence. Our executive producer is Jacob Smith.
(35:45):
Special thanks on this episode to Karen schakerji to the
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum into Alexander Wells for his
translation of the Kaiserhoff meeting. I'm ben Nataphaffree
Speaker 2 (36:06):
S
Pushkin.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
My name is Margaret Lambert. I was born a name
that I hate, Gretel it's too Teutonic. I hate that
name and Gretel Bergmann. And I was born i Bohn twelfth,
nineteen fourteen in a very small town in the south
(00:34):
of Germany. And it was a great life.
Speaker 3 (00:39):
In nineteen ninety six, Margaret Lambert sat down for an
interview with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. She was
eighty two years old. She looked at least fifteen years younger.
Being an Olympic level athlete will do that to you.
She started out talking about her childhood in a little
German town called Laupim.
Speaker 2 (00:59):
That was this club in that town. You just went there.
I could go there and unescorted because it was close
to my house. And I'm as happy as a lark.
What did you like about sports? I just loved it,
and you were good at it, and that was good
at it. There was nothing different at that stage about
(01:21):
being a Jewish athlete, none whatsoever.
Speaker 3 (01:25):
By the nineteen thirties, Lambert's sport of choice was the
high jump, one of the more graceful Olympic sports. You've
probably seen it. It's the one where the jumper runs
up to an impossibly high bar and then rises effortlessly
above it.
Speaker 2 (01:39):
Great success in it thanks to my long legs and
my big feet, I suppose.
Speaker 3 (01:45):
In nineteen thirty three, the year Hitler came to power,
she jumped a little higher than one and a half
meters that's like four feet and nine inches. It was
one of the highest jumps in the country. She would
be a shoe in for the German Olympic team.
Speaker 2 (01:59):
Except once Hitler became chancellor. You started to worry a
little bit, you know, But everybody thought this is going
to blow over. He's not going to last.
Speaker 3 (02:12):
But it soon became very clear that this was not
going to blow over. Four days after becoming chancellor, Hitler
was already censoring the press. Things developed quickly from there,
and then later that year Lambert got a letter from
her sports club.
Speaker 2 (02:29):
You are no longer welcome here because you're Jewish, hil Hitler,
and that was the end of that. So they just
threw me out of the club and everybody commiserated, you know,
what are we going to do? What's going to happen here?
And it was a horrible life.
Speaker 3 (02:47):
But there was still one way that Margaret Lambert might
have a chance to compete at the nineteen thirty six
Olympic Games. The chance that had a lot to do
with one man, Avery.
Speaker 1 (03:05):
Welcome to Revisionist History, my show about things overlooked and misunderstood.
I'm Malcolm Gladwell. Today on the show, Ben the daf
Haffrey and I are back with Avery Brundage, the apostle
of Olympia, the kingpin of cognitive dissonance, the man who
made the modern Olympic Games happen. Brundage believed above all
(03:27):
in the values of the Olympic religion, amateurism, total equality
of opportunity, the only true meritocracy. Brundage wanted to become
an Olympic official, and by nineteen thirty four he had
almost done it. He was up for a seat on
the International Olympic Committee, something he must have wanted more
than anything else. And then Adolf Hitler got in the way.
(03:52):
So Avery Brundage had to make a choice to resolve
the dissonance of whether his pure games could be held
in an impure place. Today in the show Avery Brundage's
very consequential.
Speaker 3 (04:05):
Resolution, things started changing for Margaret Lambert and the rest
of Germany's Jewish population. As soon as Hitler came to.
Speaker 2 (04:17):
Power, you were banned for more public places. No theaters,
no restaurants, no swimming pools. You couldn't go any place,
and you could not associate with non Jewish people.
Speaker 3 (04:31):
Fitness was really important to the Nazi project, so important
that eventually, in the elite Adolf Hitler schools, students would
spend about as much and sometimes even more time playing
sports than they did on academics. Sports had a military function.
If Germany wanted to go to war again, a strong,
healthy population was going to be really important. Strength also
(04:53):
matters if you're trying to prove you're the master race,
so just emphasizing the weakness of outsiders you could make
week in part by denying them access to the same
training the arians had.
Speaker 2 (05:05):
But sports, for me, of course, was the thing I
wanted the most. Next to the Jewish school there was
a yard, and we tried to straighten that out, but
we had to fight the teacher's chickens, and they used
that same place for their activities and it was not
(05:26):
very appetizing, so we gave up on that pretty fast.
Speaker 3 (05:30):
While Margaret Lambert was chasing chickens around a bumpy field.
The Nazis were realizing just how badly they wanted the
Olympics for money and propaganda power are sure, but also
I think for a much stranger reason they worshiped the
ancient Greeks. When Gebels Hitler's fame Nazi minister of Propaganda,
(05:51):
goes to Sparta in the nineteen thirties, he says that
to him, it was just as if he were in
a German city. It's why leading brand and of German
sunscreen was called Sparta Crown. As the scholar Helen Rosch writes,
Nazi fascism was seeking the rebirth of a past so
mythic and so ancient that it predates the nation entirely.
(06:15):
So what better way to prove your connection to that
mythic in ancient past than to host the Olympic Games.
Speaker 2 (06:23):
Adolf Hitler tried to use these Olympics as his propaganda
vehicle to show the world how powerful he was, to
show the world how unified a Germany was, And I
think he tried to scare the world into not standing
(06:46):
up against him somehow. And he wanted, of course, the
United States and all the big nations to be there.
Speaker 3 (06:52):
So the crucial question for our purposes is, well, Hindsight's
twenty twenty, how much of all this could Avery Brandage
in the IOC have really known in nineteen thirty three.
The answer is not everything, but enough.
Speaker 4 (07:07):
The news parade goes forward.
Speaker 3 (07:12):
I mean, this is a national radio broadcast in the
US from March nineteen thirty three. That's just two months
after Hitler became Chancellor.
Speaker 4 (07:21):
At prosodies not being enacted daily in Germany by the Nazis.
Domed troops of Hitler, numerous Jewish citizens have been brutally
taut us. Horrified citizens in America look on in astonishment
as ruthless adult Hitler continues a savage campaign of anti
submitting brutality.
Speaker 3 (07:38):
That summer, a New York Times journalist read a report
on Germany put out by the American Jewish Committee and wrote,
it is impossible to read it without carrying away the
conviction that the Nazi leaders are guilty of something more
than employing violence and terror. Meanwhile, the Consul General for
the United States in Berlin was writing back home to
(08:01):
the State Department about how Germans were pushing an anti
Jewish sport agenda, how Berlin wasn't safe, and how even
if the Nazis had told Charles Cheryl they'd give the
Jews equal opportunity, they really weren't doing that. A movement
for the US to boycott the thirty six Olympics began
to gather momentum. Other countries were thinking about boycotting too.
(08:23):
But by then Avery Brandage was the president of the
US Olympic Committee, and he'd grown fond of saying things
like this.
Speaker 5 (08:31):
All the participants are equal before the starter's pistol, and
there are no social distinctions or family distinctions.
Speaker 3 (08:41):
That same year, he wrote to a colleague that the
very foundation of the modern Olympic revival will be undermined
if individual countries are allowed to restrict participation by reason
of class, creed, or race. The very foundation. So by
this logic, Mark A. Lambert that German Jewish high jumper
(09:02):
should have been Avery Brandage's ideal athlete, right, unpaid, highly skilled,
and obsessed with sport. If someone like her wasn't going
to get a fair shot at the Nazi Olympics, then
surely Avery Brundage would have to try and stop the
Nazi Olympics. But first he had to figure out if
the rumors about Germany were true. We'll be right back.
Speaker 5 (09:36):
I always start all my speeches with the statement that
the Olympic moment today is the most important social force
in the world. The word Olympic is the magic word.
Speaker 3 (09:52):
The year after Hitler came to power, Avery Brandage had
almost made it to the International Olympic Committee, his ticket
back to the most rarefied part of Olympia where he
could rub shoulders with all the princes and aristocrats in
that particular gentleman's club. And this is something I think
Avery Brandage really wanted.
Speaker 1 (10:11):
Why does he want to hang out with these kind
of Pots's.
Speaker 3 (10:17):
Malcolm and I once again psychoanalyzing Avery Brandage talking about
a letter he wrote to the IOC. There's one moment
that's quite telling in one of these when he's writing
to Edstrom, one of the members of the IOC, and
you see his typewritten note, anything may happen in these
perilous days, and then he crosses out perilous and he
handwrites in parlous, And there's a kind of like for Avery.
(10:40):
Brundage is not saying the word parless like he's second
guessing his own vocabulary to fit in with these guys.
Speaker 1 (10:47):
Yeah, and that is the world of the IOC, right.
The IOC is a fundamently nineteenth century institution. It's just
one count and baron after another kind of living out
the glory days of there. And then Brundage comes along
and he is an entirely different animal.
Speaker 3 (11:03):
He's like, yes, I may have done all these things
that you guys can never even dream of. I built
these buildings, I made my own fortune. I trained in
a ditch until I was good enough to compete in
the Olympics. But I still think Princess rock and I'll
go on the record as saying as much.
Speaker 5 (11:19):
And what kind of a world is this when it's
come to the point where being a prince is a
handicapped I ask.
Speaker 1 (11:25):
You, it's very gruteal MUCKs. I don't want to belong
to a club that would happen.
Speaker 3 (11:32):
But like he knows that the only way he's going
to get in that club is if he, as the
president of the American Olympic Committee, brings the Americans to
the Games.
Speaker 1 (11:41):
So why is that so?
Speaker 3 (11:43):
He he is at that point the most powerful man
in amateur sport in America, so he really like he
holds the cards, and the United States is both the
most significant participant in the Olympics. They're going to bring
a huge team. There's going to be a medals race
between them and the Germans that will be extremely dramatic
and make for really good viewing. But also they have
(12:04):
a lot of moral authority, and if the United States
substains from the Olympics, it majorly undermines the Olympic project.
Speaker 1 (12:11):
Has it been made explicit to Brundage that his future
in the IOC is contingent on him bringing Americans to Berlin.
Speaker 3 (12:19):
I haven't seen anything that states it explicitly, but I
think it is very clear that the members of the
IOC want the Olympics to happen. They want them to
happen in Germany. But as Americans learn more about what
the Nazis were up to, as the last traces of
Weimar Democracy vanished, the pressure in the US to boycott
(12:39):
the Games got really intense, and avery Rundage was right
in the middle of it. Publicly, he was pro going
to the Games, but he expressed at least some concern
about what was happening in Germany. And yet in his archives,
I've found private letters to the IOC from as early
as nineteen thirty three, and in them he frames the
(13:02):
boycott campaign as a Jewish plot to sabotage the Olympics,
and from the beginning he knew what crowd he was
playing to the President of the International Committee, count Enri
de bayer LeTour wrote to Avery Brundage saying they should
work together hand in hand while we are handling this
difficult question. I am not personally fond of Jews and
(13:24):
of the Jewish influence, but I will not have them molested.
So that's a clue. But then there's also the matter
of Brandage's lengthy correspondence with Siegfried Edstrom. Edstrom was sort
of like the Swedish Avery Brundage, an engineer who'd made good.
He was a member of the IOC. The two were friends.
(13:44):
He's the one who wrote the letter we talked about
in the last episode, suggesting that he nominate Brundage for
a seat on the IOC, and Brundage of course responded enthusiastically.
But how did he begin that letter accepting this most
precious of all prizes. He didn't lead with his enthusiasm. Instead,
he started by complaining about the boycotts. Undoubtedly, the International
(14:09):
Olympic Committee will be swamped with protests from Jews and
Jewish organizations from many different countries. I assume that the
IOC will take the same stand as the American Olympic
Committee will, to it that it is concerned with athletic
affairs only and that it will not be drawn into political, religious,
sociological or racial controversies of any kind. Then he said
(14:34):
how much he'd like to be on the IOC.
Speaker 1 (14:38):
Inside, deep inside that kind of engineer, self made man's
brain is this romantic streak. I want to be part
of this grand you know, sporting amateur enterprise. And it's
beautiful and it speaks to me, and it's you know,
it's this pure thing in an impure world. I really
(14:58):
do think that what how happens to him in nineteen
twelve at the Olympics, that failure remains with him for
the rest of his days. It's the thing that drives
him to save in his own mind, save the Olympics.
That is, he had failed once to live up to
the Olympic spirit, and he's not going to fail again.
Speaker 3 (15:22):
But the concerns weren't going away. Hitler had already made
himself a dictator, Germany was re arming, and war was
once again on the horizon in Europe. So the American
Olympic Committee decided they needed to send someone to Berlin
to figure out for themselves what was going on. They chose,
of course, Avery Brandage. On September twelfth, nineteen thirty four,
(15:49):
two days after the Nuremberg rally that year, Avery Brandage
arrived in eastern Germany. His plan was to meet with
Jewish sports officials to suss out just how bad things
had actually gotten. There was, however, one problem. He didn't
speak German, so he did this whole trip with Nazi interpreters,
including the head of all Nazi sports, the Reichschportfior, Hans
(16:13):
von Schamer and Austin von Schamer. And In Austin was
a rather severe looking Nazi official, a small man with thinning,
slit hair and a paralyzed right hand. He was meant
to assure every Brandage that the Nazis weren't discriminating against
Jewish athletes, which maybe would have been easier had all
the sports clubs in Nazi Germany not recently received a
(16:34):
copy of a book called the Spirit of Sport in
the National Socialist Ideology, which included passages like this, there
is no room in our German land for Jewish sports
leaders and their friends infested with the Talmud, for pacifists,
political Catholics, pan Europeans and the rest. They are worse
(16:55):
than cholera and syphilis, much worse than famine, drought and
poison gas. Do we want them in the Olympic Games
in Germany? Yes, we must have them. We think they
are important for international reasons. There could not be better
propaganda for Germany. What does it mean? It means they
(17:16):
would pretend that Jews could be allowed at the Games
in hopes that it would help the Nazis hoodwink the
world about how they were actually treating the Jews. You'd
think that Avery Brandage, champion of Olympic ideals like no
politics in sport, would hate to see the Olympics used
that way. Instead. Here's our second warning sign about this trip.
(17:37):
Brundage quickly saw von Schamer and Austin as a friend.
He spent six days exploring Germany with his various Nazi counterparts.
I have to imagine that he also visited the Reichs Sportsfeld,
the site of the giant new stadium being built for
the Games. Brundage new construction, after all, it was his
business in This stadium would be epic, big enough to
(18:00):
fit more than one hundred thousand people.
Speaker 1 (18:03):
This is what I can't get over. Every one of
the characters we've met so far have a meeting with
the Nazis. It's like Dorothy Thompson goes, you know, Charles
Cheryl has this big meeting with Hitler. Each makes this
pilgrimage to the Promised Land.
Speaker 2 (18:19):
Right.
Speaker 1 (18:20):
We don't know in thirty four exactly what Brundage is thinking.
He's playing his cards pretty close to his chest.
Speaker 3 (18:27):
Yeah, we actually not a lot is known about these meetings,
but we did find an archival account from a dentist
and Jewish sport official who is president at one of
these meetings at the hotel Kaiserhoff in nineteen thirty four.
We had it translated.
Speaker 1 (18:45):
Kaiserhoff. I would point out the same hotel where Dorothy
Thompson interviewed Adolf Hitler. Oh Man, I missed that this
is where it's all happening in Berlin. This is where
you when you have to do your Nazi meet and greets,
you go to the kaiser Off.
Speaker 3 (19:00):
The point is this was not friendly territory for the
Jewish sports officials. The Hotel kaiser Off was a grand
luxury hotel on Wilhelm Plotz, directly opposite the Chancellor's office.
Remember Hitler once had an office there. There were marble floors,
a dining room in a three story glass roofed atrium.
(19:22):
Brundage is in the lap of luxury at the seat
of Nazi power. Sigfried Edge from Brundage's IOC friend is
there with them. They were joined by a Nazi German
Organizing Committee member who was already a friend of Brundage's
from the nineteen twelve Olympics. The Deputy reichs sportsfure was
also there, dressed in full SS black boots and all.
Speaker 1 (19:45):
So what do we know about what happens at the meeting?
Speaker 3 (19:48):
So he begins to ask them a series of questions
about Jewish participation in sport. So he asks, are Jewish
boys allowed to play sport in large numbers? And the
right sport funer says yeah, absolutely, and the Jewish leaders
have to sit there and nod but then they say
they make a caveat. They're like, well, you know, maybe
(20:10):
they can play in large numbers, but there's a problem.
We don't actually have any municipal sports fields. And Brandage
immediately dismisses this and says, well, in the US, we
don't have municipal sports fields either. We just have our
own fields for each each athletic association. If you imagine
this from the perspective of the Jewish sports leaders, it's
a high wire act. Here sitting before them is Brandage
(20:32):
the man best position to put pressure on the Nazis
who are also seated at the table. But the Jewish
sports leaders have no sense really a Brandage's position on
all this. How could they?
Speaker 6 (20:43):
So?
Speaker 3 (20:44):
What do they do? They have to try and read
between the lines of every question he's asking. Then he
asks can Jews join the associations? They say yes, but
only if they're Jewish associations, and he's like, well, in
my club back in Chicago, we don't allow Jews either.
Next question, they say like, oh, well, you know, we
(21:06):
have our own sports fields, but they keep getting closed
down because the Nazi party is shutting down our sports fields.
They're breaking into our games. They're beating people up, and Brandage,
according to this account of the meeting, which I have
to believe is reliable, just seems kind of bored by
this and doesn't ask follow up questions about this this report.
But this dentist rites of Brandage is that it was
(21:28):
clear that Brundage wanted to save the Olympics in Berlin.
And there's one sort of glimmer of hope towards the
end where Brandage asks if a Jewish athlete runs one
hundred meters in ten point three seconds, would he then
be able to participate in the Olympics? And the Jewish
sport leaders reply, how is he supposed to do that
(21:49):
without having had the opportunity to train the rex sport?
Fewer says, we'll allow him to compete. Brandage sort of
times and then says, but how can he compete if
he doesn't have an opportunity to train the right sport?
Fewer says, Oh, don't worry, will definitely have Jewish people
on the teams, which is just kind of just like
blanket assurance that everything has shown is nonsense. It's a whitewash, Yeah,
it's a whitewash. And Brundage accepts this and moves on
(22:12):
from the meeting and declares that there's no problem. Soon
after that meeting, Avery Brendage heads back to the United
States with his verdict all good. So the day after
he gets back, the American Olympic Committee meets and votes
unanimously to go to Berlin. Brundage stuck to his guns.
Speaker 6 (22:36):
Participation in these games must not be construed to be
an endorsement of the policies or practices of the Nazi government.
Measures have been adopted to ensure that there will be
no violation of the fundamental principles of fair play and
good sportsmanship, all the Olympic standards of freedom and equality
(22:56):
to all.
Speaker 3 (22:58):
Later. Margaret Lambert Hewish high jumper had this to say
about Avery Brandage's trip.
Speaker 2 (23:05):
He just let himself being lulled into some false security
by these Nazis saying everything is fine, We're doing everything
we would saying we said we would do. And he
came back to the United States and said everything is
fabulous over there, and we'll be going.
Speaker 3 (23:23):
We'll be right back. There are two ways of understanding
what Avery Brandage did in nineteen thirty four. The first
in a chain of his actions that would lead irrevocably
to us participation in the Berlin Games. The most charitable
(23:47):
interpretation is basically what Margaret Lambert, the high Jumper said,
He let himself be lulled into some false security picture Brandage,
the hoodwinked idealist who maybe just believed so firmly that
the Olympics were a world apart from the universe of
politics and money that it didn't matter if they were
held in Nazi Germany. But another way to understand what
(24:09):
he did is to consider that his visit to Germany,
and his time with the Nazis, it may all have
seemed a little familiar to him. Remember Dorothy Thompson's nineteen
forty one essay Who Goes Nazi? The first time we
read it, we recognized Charles Cheryl as her mister B.
But Avery Brundage is the perfect incarnation of Thompson's mister C, do.
Speaker 1 (24:36):
You have in front of you? Her description of his
kind of fascist?
Speaker 3 (24:40):
Here we go. Mister C is a brilliant and a
bittered intellectual. He was a poor white, trash Southern boy,
or in our case, Midwestern boy, a scholarship student at
two universities, where he took all the scholastic honors, but
was never invited to join a fraternity. He has always
moved among important people, and all always been socially on
(25:01):
the periphery. His colleagues have admired his brains and exploited them,
but they have seldom invited him or his wife to dinner.
He is a snob, loathing his own snobbery, that's brandage.
He despises the men about him. He despises, for instance,
mister b because he knows what he has had to
achieve by relentless work. Men like Bee have won by
(25:21):
knowing the right people. But his contempt is inextricably mingled
with envy. Even more than he hates the class into
which he has insecurely risen does he hate the people
from whom he came. He hates his mother and his
father for being his parents. He loaths everything that reminds
him of his origins and his humiliations. He is bitterly
anti Semitic because the social insecurity of the Jews reminds
(25:43):
him of his own psychological insecurity hity. He is utterly
erased from his nature and enjoy He has never known.
He has an ambition bitter and burning. It is to
rise to such an eminence that no one can ever
again humiliate him. Not to rule, but to be the
secret ruler. He is courteous, the commands a distant in
cold respect, but he is a very dangerous man. Where
(26:04):
he primitive and brutals, he would be a criminal, a murderer,
but he is subtle and cruel. He would rise high
in a Nazi regime. It would need men just like him,
intellectual and ruthless.
Speaker 1 (26:13):
That's him, that is him.
Speaker 3 (26:17):
And this is the key part quote. But mister c
is not a born Nazi. He is the product of
a democracy hypocritically preaching social equality and practicing a carelessly
brutal snobbery. Averybrndage may have thought he had found himself
in Stockholm in nineteen twelve at the Olympics, but I
(26:39):
think he really found himself in nineteen thirty four at
the kaiser Off Hotel. Hundreds of thousands of people protested
the decision to go to the games. Avery Brandage didn't care.
He became even more convinced that the whole boycott was
just a Jewish plot to use the Olympics for their
(27:00):
their own political purposes. He kept a file of antisemitic propaganda.
It's labeled in his archives Jewish problem. Then, really, it's
not that surprising, because we know now from reading his
letters that while he was questioning Jewish sports leaders in
front of the Nazis at the Kaiserhoff, Averyrundage knew that
he was also being assessed by Sigfried Edstrom, the IOC
(27:23):
official sitting in the room with him, who had earlier
that year sent this note to Brundage. The Nazis' opposition
to the influence of Jews can only be understood if
you live over in Germany. In some of the more
important traits, the Jews governed the majority and stopped all
others from coming in. In the hospitals, most of the
doctors were Jews, and the Jews had preference in the
(27:47):
law courts. It was the same Many of these Jews
were of Polish or Russian origin, with minds entirely different
from the Western mind. An alteration of these conditions were
absolutely necessary if Germany should remain a white nation. The
only objection I have is that they made the alterations
(28:07):
so rashly and thereby caused a great deal of opposition.
I am not an anti Semite myself. On the contrary,
some of my best friends are Jews. But I try
to look upon the question from both sides. That is
why I have written this letter to you. It was
like Avery Brundage have been handed a script. A year
(28:30):
after that trip, Brundage wrote his own letter to the
president of the IOC quote, the picture of conditions in
Germany obtained from reading our newspapers is entirely different from
that gained by an inspection of the country. The great
Jewish merchant advertisers may have something to do with this.
The public mind has been poisoned against Germany, and highly
(28:52):
organized minorities are extremely effective on questions which are decided
by popular vote. Nobody fools, Avery Brandage. Avery Brandage knew
exactly what he was doing. He'd gone Nazi. Margaret Lambert,
the High Jumper, had been contacted again by the Nazis
(29:15):
a few months before Brandage's visit. According to that interview
she did with the Holocaust Museum, the Nazis had begun
threatening her family, trying to force her to try out
for the games so they could show how open they
were to having Jews on the team.
Speaker 2 (29:29):
To compete in the Olympic Games is trill of a lifetime,
I mean, and it doesn't happen to everybody. On the
other hand, I was so afraid supposing I am allowed
to compete, Supposing I win, and I was convinced that
I would win a medal and possibly the gold. Supposing
(29:50):
I do this, What do I do? I'm going to
stand on that podium and say, hile Hitler like all
the others, and this to do for Jewish girl would
never do. I was scarce, stiff, and this was going
around in my head day and night, day and night,
day and night. Well, what's going to happen? Am I
going to compete? Am I not going to compete? How
(30:13):
do I conduct myself if I do compete? I was
so torn apout about it. I didn't know what to do.
Speaker 3 (30:22):
The Nazis put Margaret Lambert, who was unnamed gretel Bergmann
on the provisional Olympic team trying out for the Games.
Vonshaimer Undastan wrote about this in a quite unconvincing letter
to Charles Cheryl. You will find from this that we
work entirely in the spirit of the Olympic statutes as before,
Miss Bergmann is being treated like all Olympic candidates in
(30:44):
spite of being a Jewish, in spite of being a Jewish,
pretty much covers it. The invitation was nonsense, but the
IOC knew that she had poor facilities to train in I.
Speaker 2 (30:56):
Still jew was not allowed to use any of this.
Speaker 3 (31:00):
But you could frame it as a kind of classic
Olympic story, right, like poor young Avery Brandage practicing with
his own discus in an abandoned lot, and Lambert didn't
even have anybody to compete against to make her sharper.
Speaker 2 (31:12):
You don't have any competition. It's you have to only
fight yourself.
Speaker 3 (31:17):
She made the nazison to her opponent. She pushed herself
to beat an idea that was so much bigger than her,
and at a meat just before the games.
Speaker 2 (31:26):
It worked, but it made me better because I was
so full of rage. The madder I got, the better
I jumped. When I was so mad that I equaled
the German record. I must have cleared it by fifteen
inches at the time.
Speaker 3 (31:41):
She left that meet and went home, waiting to hear
whether she'd made the team, and wondering what would happen
if she had.
Speaker 2 (31:48):
I looked for the mail every day. What's going to happen,
you know? And I was really scared. An't they going
to break my leg? What they gonna do to to
eliminate me? But it was very simple. One day letter
came and it said, in view of the fact that
you have been doing very poorly lately, we did not
select you for the Olympic team highlight. And that was
(32:12):
the end of it.
Speaker 3 (32:16):
To be clear, Margaret Lambert had not been doing poorly.
The Nazis were just keeping her off the team. I mean,
just think about how it would have looked to have
a Jewish woman win gold at the Nazi Olympics.
Speaker 2 (32:29):
And I sat I remember me sitting outside in the
stoop and I got this letter, and I must have
used every profanity I knew, and I knew a lot
of them. I think that was the first time I
really realized that my candidacy for as an Olympic athlete
(32:53):
was really all a shame I was. It was just
something that the Germans did to to fool the whole world.
Speaker 3 (33:03):
Of course, Avery Brundage hadn't needed fooling. I do believe
that he loved the idea of the Olympics. Amateurism and
pure competition, using sports to prove your worth a kind
of utopia, protected from the corruption of the real world.
But Margaret Lambert should have been his reality check. If
(33:23):
someone like her couldn't win in Nazi Germany, that should
have made him sit up and pay attention. Instead, in
that room at the kaiser Off Hotel when the worst
had come out, he just seemed bored. It's that indifference
that got him his seat on the International Olympic Committee
(33:43):
just a month before the Berlin Games. He took it
from the only IOC member who'd resisted having the Games
in Nazi Germany, who'd written in his last months on
the IOC, if our committee permits the Games to be
held in Nazi Germany, there will be nothing left to
distinguish it from the Nazi ideal. He was forced to resign.
(34:11):
On August first, nineteen thirty six, the Olympic torch was
carried by relay for the first time ever from Olympia
in Greece all the way to the Reichschwartzfeld in Berlin.
When it got to the stadium, Avery Brandage was in
the audience. The Olympic bell inscribed with the words I
call the youth of the world rang out. Meanwhile, Margaret
(34:32):
Lambert was applying for a visa that would allow her
to leave Germany. She would never again live in her
home country. Brundage had what he always wanted, a seat
in the ruling class of his perfect Olympia, just in
time to watch Adolf Hitler give the opening speech at
the Olympic Games.
Speaker 4 (34:54):
To speed it from fire, Noel tide rag.
Speaker 2 (35:05):
Hit I announcing it opened.
Speaker 6 (35:07):
Now that old kiddy him and I hope pad of
ragged the right Arm.
Speaker 3 (35:22):
Revisionist History is produced by me Bennattaphaffrey, Tolly Emlin, and
Nina Bird Lawrence. Our editor is Sarah Nix. Fact checking
by Arthur Gomberts and J. L. Goldfine. Original scoring by
Luis Gara, Mastering by FLAONN Williams, Sarah Roguer, and Jake Gorsky.
Engineering by Nina Bird Lawrence. Our executive producer is Jacob Smith.
(35:45):
Special thanks on this episode to Karen schakerji to the
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum into Alexander Wells for his
translation of the Kaiserhoff meeting. I'm ben Nataphaffree
Speaker 2 (36:06):
S
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