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The Berlin
Olympiad was one of the Nazis’ greatest propaganda victories.
Visitors and journalists were impressed by Germany’s order,
discipline, and might. It even seemed that the Jews had vastly
overstated their suffering. Even the president of the United States
was misled. In a conversation with the president of the World Jewish
Congress, Stephen Wise, Roosevelt said that, according to two
witnesses who had been in Germany, the synagogues were full and
there seemed nothing especially grim about the situation at that
time. Indeed, the Nazis made every effort to portray Germany as a
respectable member of the community of nations and to soft-pedal the
persecution of Jews. In the buildup to the Winter Games, anti-Jewish
signs were removed from main streets and overt anti-Jewish activity
was restrained. In response to pressure from foreign Olympic
delegations, several Mischlinge and one full-blooded Jew, the
ice-hockey player Rudi Ball, were placed on the German team.
In the
United States, the question of participating in the Olympics became
a matter of public debate. On October 22, 1935, General Charles
Sherrill, a ranking American representative on the International
Olympic Committee, wrote the following in the The New York Times:
There is
grave danger in this Olympic agitation. Consider the effect on
several hundred-thousand youngsters training for this contest
throughout the United States, if the boycott movement gets so far
that they suddenly are confronted with the fact that somebody is
trying to defeat their ambition to get to Berlin and compete in the
Olympic Games. We are almost certain to have a wave of Anti-Semitism
among those who never before gave it a thought, and who may consider
that about 5,000,000 Jews in this country are using the athletes
representing 120,000,000 Americans to work out something to help the
German Jews.... This Anti-Semitism resulting here might last for
years. In response to Sherrill’s remarks, the Committee on Fair
Play in Sport made the following statement in the New York Times
of October 23, 1935:
He has
gratuitously attempted to make the Olympic Games a purely Jewish
issue. The issue is not Jewry against Germany, but fair play. It has
been denied not only Jewish athletes in Germany, but also to
Catholic and Protestant sport clubs which do not accept Nazi
doctrines of conscience. General Sherrill’s attitude that the Jews
should not stir up too much row lest they invite suppression in this
country, as well as in Germany, marks him as an unconscious
Anti-Semite, even conceding that he sincerely believes he is a
friend of the Jews. The Germans, in turn, considered sports one of
the arenas in which they should wage a struggle to justify their
doctrines. For example, Goebbels wrote in his diary on June 20,
shortly before the games began, about the victory of the German
boxer Max Schmeling over the American Joe Louis in the heavyweight
championships: "Schmeling fought and won for Germany. The white
trounced the black, and the white was a German." However,
Goebbels’s remarks on the first day of the games were less
jubilant: "We Germans won a gold medal and the Americans won
three, two of them by blacks. White humankind should be ashamed. But
for what does that count there, in that uncultured country?"
The person
who most angered the Germans was the black runner Jesse Owens, who
won four gold medals, set several world records, and earned the
following half-enraged, half-gloating headline in the The New
York Times: "Hitler Ignores Black Medallist."
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