The Golden Calf Idols of the World Cup, The Olympics, and What Happened in Berlin, 1936
by Norman Berdichevsky (August 2010)
The International Olympic Committee has been led by such individuals as hearts and minds today are heavy with the thought that there is something wrong with mankind." What was wrong then and what is wrong now is the lack of the ability to call evil by its name, face it and destroy it.
In order to prevent any mishap at the games, Nazi Germany soft-pedaled its anti-Semitic platform and pretended that Jewish athletes would not be treated differently. By the time of the selection of the participants, all Jews had been excluded from German sports associations and so were not involved in the selection process although they were “allowed” to form their own associations and were left with the most inferior equipment and training facilities.
Attempts by athletes to boycott the Olympics were frowned upon by Olympic selection committees in the United States and other democracies. On May 13, 1931 (before the Nazis' ascension to power), the International Olympic Committee awarded the 1936 Summer Olympics to Berlin and was the first real international signal that Germany had returned to the “community of nations.” A close colleague of Hitler and rabid Nazi,
The German Boxing Association expelled Jewish amateur champion Eric Seelig in April 1933 who later resumed his boxing career in the United States. Another Jew, Daniel Prenn, Germany's top-ranked tennis player, was excluded by Germany's Davis Cup Team. Gypsies, were also purged from German sports.
Avery Brundage, president of the American Olympic Committee originally criticized Germany’s policies and questioned the validity of the 1936 games, but when criticism of Germany threatened to interefere with the planned games, he then went on to publicly state that Jewish athletes were being treated fairly and that the Games should go on, as planned. Brundage opposed a boycott, arguing that “politics had no place in sport’ and that “The Olympic Games belong to the athletes and not to the politicians.” When he was put in the hot seat by his policy, he responded by writing in the American Olympic Committee pamphlet “Fair Play for American Athletes," that “American athletes should not become involved in “the present Jew-Nazi altercation” (as if the two sides were wholly equivalent). As the Olympics controversy heated up in 1935, Brundage alleged the existence of a “Jewish-Communist conspiracy” to keep the United States out of the Games.
A boycott of the games was supported by Judge Jeremiah Mahoney, president of the Amateur Athletic Union, Al Smith, Governor of New York, and James Curley, Governor of Massachusetts, The Catholic journal The Commonweal (November 8, 1935) advised boycotting an Olympics that would “set the seal of approval upon the radically anti-Christian Nazi doctrine." The American Jewish Congress and the Jewish Labor Committee, joined by the non-sectarian Anti-Nazi League, staged mass rallies to protest Nazi persecution of Jews and called for a boycott as early as 1933. Individual Jewish athletes made their own decisions. Milton Green, captain of the Harvard University track team, took first place in the 110-meter high hurdles in regional pre-Olympic trials and his fellow Jewish teammate, Norman Cahners, qualified for the final Olympics trials as well. Both chose to boycott the national Olympic trials.
The same dilemma of particpation or a boycott of the games faced Black athletes. Many Black journalists expressed their view that the first issue to be addressed was discrimination against their own athletes in the United States who were still excluded from professional baseball. Writers for such papers as The Philadelphia Tribune and The Chicago Defender responded however that athletic victories by Blacks would contradict and refute Nazi racial views of “Aryan” supremacy and foster a new sense of Black pride at home.
A total of 18 African Americans — 16 men and 2 women — went to Berlin, triple the number who had competed for the United States in the 1932 Los Angeles Games. All of them came from predominantly white universities, a fact that demonstrated to everyone the inferiority of training equipment and facilities at black colleges where the vast majority of African American student athletes were educated in the 1930s. The achievements of Owens at the 1936 games in Hitler's face, and the great American pride in the victory of boxer Joe Louis over German champion Max Schmelling paved the way for the integration of major league baseball in the United States after the war. It had simply become wholly anachronistic and absurd to exclude African-Americans.
The story of Denmark’s participation and the outcome of the games in Berlin deserve mention and an appreciation of how the lure of fame, fortune and “national prestige” for the athletes has been a fatal attraction. In the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, two Danish teenage girls, the 15 year old Ragnhild Hveger, won a silver medal and the 12 year old Inge Sorensen, won bronze. All of Denmark hailed them as heroines and great patriots. They were greeted on their return to Denmark by a crowd of 30,000 Danes at the train station in Copenhagen. Hitler sent them a congratulatory telegram which so flattered them that both of them became eager exponents of friendly relations with the New Germany and during the war, fraternized openly with German occupation troops. The older girl even let herself be actively used in Nazi propaganda.
In the 1932 Olympics in Los Angeles, Denmark's Greco-Roman wrestling champion Abraham Kurland, a member of the HaKoah Jewish Sports fraternity, won a silver medal that garnered scant attention but all those professionals in his sport confidently predicted that he was the heavy odds-on favorite and would easily win GOLD in the 1936 Olympics. Kurland did not participate however - as a Jewish athlete - he knew full well that the 1936 games violated every ethical precept that the initiators of the Olympic Games had established and hoped for in previous years.
His decision relieved the Danish Olympic Committee who were fearful that Kurland might win the Gold Medal and "embarrass Denmark." Of course, this is what Jesse Owens did causing Hitler to leave the stadium in a huff rather than watch the Black American athlete stand on the winner’s podium and receive his gold medal. Kurland and his brother fled Denmark in 1943 to Sweden along with almost the entire Jewish community. They returned at the end of the war and continued their sports activities in many matches which they won but by the 1948 games Abraham Kurland, although a participant, was by then “too old" (age 45 by then) to have a chance.
Several brief attempts were made in 1936 by athletes in Great Britain, France, Sweden, Czechoslovakia, and the Netherlands to boycott the Berlin games. German Socialists and Communists in exile expressed opposition to the games and boycott proponents supported a counter-Olympics, known as the “People's Olympiad” planned for summer 1936 in Barcelona, Spain. It had to be cancelled after the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in July 1936, just as thousands of athletes had begun to arrive.
Those who tried to demolish the golden calf of Olympic Medals in 1936 had failed. Sports then as now was mass entertainment and a “circus” for the masses with enormous economic and political interests that would not let anything stand in their way.
Use of the two photos are courtesy of Ruth and Henrik, www.gravsted.dk
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