SYMHC Classics: The Nazi Games and Jesse Owens

This 2012 episode covers the 1936 Berlin Olympics and African-American sprinter Jesse Owens, as well as the games as Nazi propaganda. More nations than ever participated, and the Olympic torch was used for the first time.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Happy Saturday. This week on the show, we talked about
anthropologist and anatomy professor W. Montague Cobb, and one of
the things that came up was his work debunking racist
interpretations of Jesse Owen's performance at the Olympic Games. Previous
host Sarah and Deblina has talked about this back on

(00:22):
August one that actually came out during the twelve Summer
Olympic Games, so we are sharing that episode again today.
One thing we did want to note before we get
into this episode. If we were recording this today, we
would update some of the language in it, particularly when
referencing the Romani who were persecuted under the Nazis and

(00:42):
excluded from the Games. So enjoy. Welcome to Stuff You
Missed in History Class, a production of I Heart Radio. Hello,
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Sarah Dowdy and I'm
Deblina Truck reporting and Dablina and I are continuing on

(01:05):
with our Olympic series. And when I first started thinking,
all right, we're going to cover some sports Olympics history
for this twelve Olympic Games, I've been thinking about a
podcast on African American track star Jesse Owens who of
course won four gold medals in the nineteen thirty six
Berlin Games and very famously proved that Hitler's ideas of

(01:26):
Arian superiority were just playing wrong. But Owen's story is
so personally compelling. It's the main thing that most folks,
I think have taken away from the nineteen thirty six Games.
It's what it's what you think of if you're thinking
of the Berlin Olympics, and if you look up a
clip of Owen's flying past his competitors or standing proudly

(01:47):
for the national anthem, it seems really easy to believe
that the thirty six Games must have just been a
complete failure for the Nazis and a huge embarrassment for Hitler. Yeah,
but once you start reading more about the Berlin Games,
which are sometimes called the Nazi Olympics, you realize that
that's not really the case. What's often overlooked is how

(02:07):
successful the games were in terms of Nazi propaganda. For example,
they bolstered German pride, they threw off the suspicions of
the international community, at least temporarily and in a more
long lasting way, and away less tied up with the
war to come. They shaped the modern Olympic Games. Frank Afford,

(02:28):
Sports Illustrated writer and NPR commentator, calls them quote the
most fascinating and historically influential game. And Frank Afford knows
the sports too, so that's a pretty high statement. So
today we're going to be looking at both Jesse Owen's
story and the story of the nineteen thirty six Games
as a whole. The boycotts, the propaganda, the smoke and mirrors,

(02:49):
the athletes, whether they were African, American or German Jewish.
And one thing to just just consider before we even
get into this is why was the United States there?
Why was Great Britain or France there? And it's something
that we're going to be discussing throughout the podcast. So first,
let's start out with the initial irony of the story,
which was the International Olympic Game Committee awarded Berlin the

(03:11):
Games one as a sign of acceptances. It was a
welcome back in a way to the inspecial community. Right.
The second irony here, Hitler, who became Chancellor two years
after this decision, wasn't really interested in the Olympics at
all at first. Now and and today, because Hitler's reputation
is so tied up to pageantry in these mass public displays.

(03:34):
Think Lenny Reef install Her films. It seems odd that
Hitler wouldn't have immediately seen the Games as an opportunity
for a grand public show. But according to the US
Holocaust Memorial Museum, he initially just didn't see the appeal
of the Olympic vision. And that makes sense too. After all,
it's about internationalism, it's about fair competition. It's something that's

(03:56):
meant to promote peace between nations. You can you can
see how Hitler wouldn't be into that, but Joseph Goebbel's,
Hitler's minister of propaganda, ultimately convinced him that the games
would make great propaganda and prepared German youth for war.
As Goebbels himself said in thirty three, German sport has
only one task to strengthen the character of the German people,

(04:18):
imbuing it with the fighting spirit and steadfast camaraderie necessary
in the struggle for its existence. That doesn't make you
want to break out the ball and play a game
or something, No, it takes some of the fun out
of it, I think. But right from the start, the
Nazis controlled the games, The German Olympic Committee was supervised
by the Reich Sports Office and a new stadium was

(04:38):
built in Berlin. Colorful posters drew comparisons between ancient Greece
and modern Germany and featured Arian ideal athletes, so it
was a very political thing right from the start. But
to make that Arian ideal that they were glorifying on
the posters a reality for the Berlin Olympics, Jewish athletes,
of course, had to be excluded from competition in and

(05:00):
Hitler's anti Semitic policies, which started as soon as he
assumed power, also extended to sports right from the start,
and one very high level example of this was the
high jumper Gretel Bergmann, who found herself kicked out of
her athletic club in nineteen thirty three. She was a
star athlete, participated in lots of different sports and had

(05:21):
been linked to this athletic club for years. Immediately kicked out,
she started training with a club under the Jewish Association
of War Veterans, with a lot of other Jewish athletes
as well as Gypsy athletes um But in many cases
these alternate groups for for Jewish athletes to practice and
compete in just didn't have as good equipment, didn't have

(05:43):
as good facilities. They were subpar, and ultimately Bergmann was
strung along until just before the Games, when she was
ultimately thrown off the team. The international sports community caught
onto that discrimination, though, and talk started focusing on relocating
the games. Perhaps. The president of the American Olympic Committee,

(06:03):
Avery Brundage, even said that quote, the very foundation of
the modern Olympic revival will be undermined if individual countries
are allowed to restrict participation by reason of class, creed,
or race. So that takes a pretty strong stance on this.
This is not about your politics. It's about an international

(06:24):
sporting event. But unfortunately Brundage had a bit too much
sway in this matter, because in nineteen thirty four, with
a position like that out there, he was invited to
Berlin to investigate the situation for himself, and in a
tightly managed visit, you know, only seeing exactly what people
wanted him to see, he inspected facilities, met with athletes,

(06:46):
and came home convinced that Jewish athletes weren't being discriminated against.
After all that that things were going to be fine
in Germany, and that Berlin should certainly go ahead with
the games. Yeah, but not everyone was so convinced. Many
American newspapers, for example, called for a boycott. Much of
the Jewish community was in favor of skipping the games,

(07:07):
as were many US Catholic leaders. One of the most
prominent was Judge Jeremiah Mahoney, who was president of the
Amateur Athletic Union, and he argued that Germany was violating
key Olympic rules and that attending the games would basically
endorse the Reich, something that became more and more evident
when the Nuremberg Laws were announced in ninety five, stripping

(07:29):
Jews of citizenship. So it wasn't it was clearly not
just about athletes. There was a statement about the whole regime,
about the whole country at this point. But by December
nineteen thirty five, after a campaign from Brundage suggesting as
far as uh the boycott being part of a Jewish
communist conspiracy quote that's that's how far he he took this,

(07:54):
the Amateur Athletic Union finally voted down a boycott. And
I find it interesting that people up in at the
very end saw it both ways bringedge, for instance, belief
that the boycott was politicizing the games and the games
were not something meant to be political. Those in favor
of the boycott, though, really saw the games themselves as
political and that was the problem. Um So. For example,

(08:16):
a month before the Amateur Athletic Union vote, the Committee
on Fair Play and Sports said quote, sport is prostituted
when sport loses its independent and democratic character and becomes
a political institution. Nazi Germany is endeavoring to use the
Eleventh Olympia to serve the necessities and interests of the
Nazi regime rather than the Olympic ideals. Strong feelings both ways,

(08:38):
very strong feelings. The American Athletic Unions vote kind of
set the tone internationally as well. Though there had been
boycott interest in France and Great Britain and Sweden, the
Netherlands and Czechoslovakia, nothing in pay and Out. A few

(09:01):
alternative games were planned, one on Long Island, one in Barcelona,
but these had to be canceled because of the One
in Barcelona at least had to be canceled because of
the Spanish Civil War, but individual athletes could have of
course still boycott the games if they chose to so.
Several Jewish American athletes did so, including much of the
Long Island University basketball team, considered one of the best

(09:23):
teams in the country at the time, plus sprinters from
Tulane and Harvard. There was um we already mentioned. The
US Holocaust Memorial Museum site. They have a lot of
interviews with athletes, American athletes and German athletes, and one
is with sprinter Milton Green, who was the captain of
the Harvard team. And he decided to boycott after his
rabbi called him, called him in to tell him all

(09:46):
about what was happening to Jews in Germany, and he
felt like this was the right thing to do. And
he talked about how surprised he was that his decision
to boycott. He thought it would be a big deal.
He was one of the best runners in the country.
It didn't really resonate with anybody. Nobody really was even
aware that he had chosen to boycott. And he talked
also about how every Olympics that he had watched since then,

(10:10):
he would picture himself competing in his familiar events, missing
that chance, not really feeling bad or regretful about what
he had done, but just sort of wondering what could
have been to it seemed well missing that chance, and
then on top of it, feeling like nobody was really
paying attention. I'm sure it is like twice his heartbreaking.
But the African American community, however, had a very different

(10:31):
take on this boycott. They saw it as hypocritical since
for many blacks in the US, the idea of separate
and unequal sporting opportunities was pretty much old news. There
was a quote in the Philadelphia Tribune right before the
Amateur Athletic Union vote that went, quote, the Amateur Athletic
Union shouts against the cruelties of the other nations and

(10:52):
the brutalities and foreign climates, but conveniently forgets the things
that sit on its own doorstep. And plus there was
sort of an indication of what was gonna happen if
black athletes were allowed to go. Black victories would show
people just how wrong that area and ideal was. Eighteen
Black Olympians ended up competing on the US team and

(11:13):
ten metaled, so it was worth it for them to
not boycott, and and something to that sort of ties
into that. Jesse Owens victory was expected or some of
his victories were expected. You know, he was the fastest
runner in the country, and a lot of these other
athletes were clear shoe ins for for these competitions. So yeah,

(11:34):
the Black community knew if these guys were allowed to compete,
they they've had a very high chance of winning. Ultimately, though,
you know, despite these um these attempts to boycott, despite
these individual boycotts, forty nine nations chose to attend the games.
But we need to talk a little bit about what
the games were like, why were they the Nazi Olympics?

(11:56):
And one thing to get out there is by all
the else, they were incredibly impressive in every way. The
athletes competing were dazzled and that was that was part
of the point. Impressed the athletes. They'll go home with
a positive experience of the games. So just some examples
of what made these games so impressive. The forty nine
countries that attended, that was more countries than it ever

(12:18):
participated before. The opening ceremonies also featured for the first
time the lone runner carrying a torch that was lit
in Olympia, and the games were televised for the first time,
you could visit these viewing stations throughout Berlin to watch
Zeppelin's race newsreels around Europe for updated coverage. Lenny reef
Install filmed the Games for the movie Olympia, which was

(12:41):
released in night, and the German people were actually very welcoming.
Marty Glickman, a Jewish American athlete who chose not to boycott,
called it all a carnival though so of course a
lot of the success or the perceived success from the Games,
was from what was concealed rather than what was promoted.

(13:03):
So swastika's were bedecking all of the arenas and monuments,
but a lot of the anti Semitic signs had come
down around Berlin, at least on the heavily traffic streets.
Eight hundred Gypsies had been moved to a camp on
the outskirts of town, and just eighteen miles north of Berlin,
the Saxon Housen concentration camp was actually under construction during

(13:26):
the Games. I think I find this part maybe the
most extraordinary aspect of this, that it was so close
by um. Within months two of the closing ceremonies, that
concentration camp was open began accepting Jeovah's witnesses and political opponents,
so they were carrying on just not so overtly. In
in Berlin, Goebbels was acutely aware of what needed to

(13:50):
be hidden or avoided. Here in the Pink Triangle episode,
we talked about how Himmler was instructed to quote clean
up the town before visitors arrived, but under no circumstances
arrest gay foreigners under a paragraph one. So they hid
that part of their policy during that time because they
knew how people would view it. The same idea extended

(14:12):
to the press. The Reich press Chamber controlled all coverage
and forbade stories focused on race or religion, So a
quote from July ninety six, the racial point of view
should not be used in any way in reporting sports results.
Above all, negro should not be insensitively reported. Negroes are
American citizens and must be treated with respect as Americans,

(14:35):
so don't publish anything that's gonna get get the whole
country into trouble. That dictate, though specifically regarding African Americans,
proved impossible for the German press to maintain. Though after
the stunning success of the black members of the US
track team, the pro Nazi paper called the attack just

(14:56):
couldn't resist calling the black members of the team auxiliaries.
But to the rest of the world and including the
German public, we've gotta gotta say that the talent of
the track team was really captivating, and Owens especially was
a star. People were interested in in reading about them,
even if pro Nazi papers were calling them auxiliary. So

(15:18):
we've got to talk about the Owens story a little bit,
just because he is the main figure of this game's
and um his his background makes his accomplishments all the
more impressive. He was born in nineteen thirteen. He was
the son of a sharecropper and the grandson of slaves.
Born in Danville, Alabama, he moved to Cleveland when he
was nine years old. Interestingly, his name was not His

(15:41):
given name was not Jesse, was a nickname. He Um
told the teacher his initials were Tour j C. And
in his Alabama accent, she mistook it for Jesse and
and it's stuck. You got to be careful of those
accents when you're from the South. We know that. But
he started racing at thirteen, and by his sophomore year
of college at Ohio State, Jesse broke five world records

(16:02):
and equaled a six in forty five minutes at his
first Big ten Championship with an injured back. He had
been horsing around or wrestling with some of his fraternity
brothers and couldn't even get dressed by himself, but he
was able to break five world records. According to his
New York Times obituary, the Big Ten commissioner Tug Wilson said, quote,

(16:24):
he is a floating wonder, just like he had wings.
So and we alluded to this earlier. Clearly, Jesse Owens
was a favorite in the Berlin Games with that record.
He had sat at the Big ten uh competition just
a year before, and he really did deliver. He won
the gold in the hundred meter, the two D the
four hundred meter relay, and the broad jump which is

(16:46):
now called the long jump. And those last two events
are especially notable, the four dred relay because Owens and
his fellow black American teammate Ralph Metcalfe, we're not supposed
is to compete in it at all. There were two
American Jewish athletes, Marty Glickman, who we quoted earlier, and
Sam Stoller they were pulled out at the last minute

(17:09):
by Avery Brundage, and it's possible that Owens and Mattcalf
were substituted because they were the team's fastest sprinters, but
it's also possible that Glickman and Stoller were pulled out
because they were Jewish, and Brundage may not have wanted
to offend Hitler with a Jewish victory. The other event,

(17:36):
the broad jump, is really notable because Owens was coached
on and encouraged by his top German competitor, Loots Long.
Footage of Long rushing to congratulate and hug Owens really
contrast with the more familiar scenes of Hitler watching Owen's
victories disapprovingly. And Long and Owens stayed friends until Long's
death in action at the Allied invasion of Sicily. Owens

(17:59):
later said, quote, it took a lot of courage for
him to befriend me in front of Hitler. You can
melt down all the medals and cups I have and
they wouldn't be a plating on the twenty four caret
friendship that I felt for Looks Long at that moment,
Hitler must have gone crazy watching us embrace, and I
would urge you, guys, if you're going to look up
one video clip from this Olympics, that's the one to

(18:20):
to see if you sort of want to more stirring,
heartwarming sort of Olympic moment. So the American press loved
the long Owens friendship as much as as we do still,
but they also devoted a lot of coverage to the
fact that Hitler didn't shake Owens's hand. It was considered
a huge snub at the time, even though it's kind

(18:41):
of more of a myth and truth in reality. Hitler
had already been taken to task by the IOC the
very first day of competition for leaving after all of
the German competitors had been eliminated in the final round.
For that day, he had only shook the hands of
a few athletes, all of them were either German or finish,
and the IOC basically said, police, don't do that. Either

(19:02):
shake everybody's hands or shake no one's hands. He decided
to shake nobody's hand publicly, and Owens himself later said
kind of um, not directly challenging this myth that had
been built up about the handshake, but he said quote
it was all right with me. I didn't go to
Berlin to shake hands with him anyway. All I know
is that I'm here now. And Hitler isn't the bigger

(19:25):
issue for Owens though, really, and a lot of the
African American athletes, wasn't that Hitler didn't acknowledge them. That
was just a temporary issue. It was that they weren't
acknowledged back home. None of the black medalists were invited
to the White House or congratulated by President Roosevelt. According
to Smithsonian Magazine and UM, a lot of the last

(19:46):
famous ones just kind of had to end up slipping
into obscurity. Owens ended up doing stunt races. He would
race horses, he would race cars. Eventually, though he did
become a pr man, a motivational speaker, somebody who was
able to make a living from his Olympic record. I
really liked one thing he said about jogging. Though. He

(20:08):
was asked, as an older man whether he still enjoyed jogging,
and he said, quote, I don't jog because I can't
run flat footed. It just shows you how fast somebody
would be if you can only run on your toes.
Despite Owen's story, though, and the victories of the other
black US medalists and the competition of Jewish athletes from

(20:29):
the US and Europe. Hitler clearly saw the Olympics as
a victory. The closing ceremony featured Beethoven, searchlights, and blonde
dressed in white to represent competing nations. German athletes won
the most medals of anyone, and the organization of the
event was praised highly. Yeah, they actually won the most
medals by far, to almost double that of the U

(20:52):
s which was number two. UM and it did work
in the pr sense to The New York Times even
said that the games put Germany quote back in the
fold of nations. And Hitler thought that things had gone
so well and that everybody approved of the game so highly.
He fully expected that after the nineteen forty Games, which

(21:13):
were already slated to take place in Tokyo, the Olympics
would take place in Berlin forever. There wouldn't be any
other cities that hosted the Olympics. UM, just Berlin year
after year after year. Reminded me a little bit of
our early discussion of the modern Olympics, and in Paris
and Athens and debates about where the Olympics should happen.
But that's a that's a bold opinion and a lot

(21:36):
of confidence there. Some people, though, saw how hoodwinked the
world had been during this time, and how a major
opportunity to censure the Nazi regime before the war was
basically lost. Others feared the end of the charade. US
Ambassador to Germany William E. Dodd wrote that Jews were
expecting the end of the Games with fear and trembling.

(21:58):
Just two days after the Games ended, the head of
the Olympic village, who was of Jewish descent, was dismissed
from military service and killed himself. Yeah. So, so people
were afraid what the back to business kind of regime
would be like now that the world had gone home.
What was regular life going to be like. One example

(22:20):
of this kind of return to normal being intolerable for
people's Gretel Bergmann, the high jumper who we mentioned earlier,
who was used as an example of how Germans were
including Jews on their teams and then was ultimately booted
off the team at the last minute. She immigrated to
the United States just a year after the Games. Ultimately,

(22:40):
only two Jewish athletes competed for Germany. One was Rudy Ball.
He competed in ice hockey in the Winter Games, back
when the country would host both the Winter and the
Summer Games. The other was Helene Meyer, who was a
half Jewish blonde. You know, she was considered to look
very area. Uh. She competed in fencing. She actually had

(23:03):
already fled Germany before the Games, but came back to compete.
Saluted Hitler, ultimately left again. I think you can look
at a lot of these athletes stories and again, the
Holocaust Memorial Museum has a really sad page talking about
a lot of Olympians from as early as the first

(23:25):
Games and their fate during the Holocaust. Um. But a
bigger picture thing to think about, too is that this
was the last Olympics for a very long time. The
of course, the nineteen forty Tokyo Games didn't happen, the
nineteen four Games didn't happen. So it's not on the
same scale, of course as people losing their lives. But

(23:47):
one thing I can't help thinking about is that your
professional athletic window is pretty narrow, um, and if you
weren't able to compete in this game's whether because you
protested it, you boycotted it, or you weren't allowed to
it very likely would have been your very last chance
because you weren't going to get another one for twelve years.

(24:10):
Bringing it back to athletics a little bit again, like
he said, Um, we have a quote from Owens on
preparing to run the one. He said, it's a nervous,
terrible feeling you feel as you stand there, as if
your legs can't carry the weight of your body. Your
stomach isn't there, and your mouth is dry, and your
hands are wet with perspiration, and you begin to think

(24:31):
in terms of all those years that you've worked, in
my particular case, the one hundred meters, as you look
down the field one hundred nine yards two feet away,
and recognizing that after eight years of hard work, this
is the point that I had reached and that all
was going to be over in ten seconds. Those are
the great moments in the lives of individuals. So I

(24:52):
thought that was a good way to wrap this up,
because it is an individual story as much as it
is a story of forty nine countries coming from around
the world to compete in Berlin. Yeah, and you can't
really separate those stories. You can't tell Owen's story without
telling the story of these very unique games and what
he had to go through. So we realize time. Yeah, so,

(25:15):
which is why we did that. Thanks so much for
joining us on this Saturday. Since this episode is out
of the archive, if you heard an email address or
Facebook U r L or something similar over the course
of the show, that could be obsolete now. Our current
email address is History Podcast at i heart radio dot com.

(25:39):
Our old health stuff works email address no longer works,
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(26:01):
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