Games of Deception: Chapters 13–18

As Jewish people and gentiles and newspapermen and community leaders questioned his commitment to his faith or his country in 1936, Sammy Balter already knew all about anti-Semitism—in his parents’ case, in Belarus rather than Germany—and how it could tear families apart.

He thought religion was fine for those who wanted it, but he believed many crimes had been committed in its name. He was skeptical of the fanaticism it bred.

His daughter later wrote that he “stood for humanity and not ideology.”

But those voices began to turn him off, he said later, when they became too personal and judgmental, “reduced from any high-minded debate to a bitter individual rebuke.”

Whatever the cause, the ’36 Chevy went careening off the highway, tumbling over several times before coming to a stop in a ditch.

Schmidt recalled that eating—and not just eating, but eating frequently; and not just eating frequently, but eating copious amounts of delicious food, frequently—so quickly became part of the shipboard routine that he was seated in the dining room devouring his first meal when he realized the Manhattan hadn’t even passed the Statue of Liberty yet.

As they gathered in the station, another German band bleated out military tunes.

Spec Towns, a hurdler from Georgia, couldn’t resist pulling a prank, grabbing the conductor’s baton and leading everyone in song. Turns out Towns’s lark wasn’t the only mischief the Americans got into on their first day in Germany.

Several Olympians had taken the antique champagne glasses as souvenirs, continuing the pilfering that had begun on the Manhattan.

When the train arrived at the palatial Lehrter Bahnhof station in Berlin, the great Jesse Owens was startled.

Even over the din of a brass band he could hear teenage girls shouting, “Wo ist Jesse?! Wo ist Jesse?!” (Where is Jesse?!)

When Owens finally emerged from the train, he was besieged by German girls with scissors who began snipping off pieces of his suit.

When Velma Dunn, a seventeen-year-old diver from Los Angeles, looked out her window at the throngs of Germans lining the streets, she was impressed with how many men she saw in military uniform.

Each lodge could sleep up to forty men (women stayed at their own quarters, the Friesenhaus, closer to the Olympic Stadium) and was named for a different village in Germany.

Brundage had addressed the U.S. athletes on deck, blasting opponents of American participation in the Games as misguided mischief makers out to thwart a noble cause.

To Balter, Brundage’s comments sounded deferential to the Nazis and dismissive of the legitimate concerns of many Americans.

When Balter first arrived at the Olympic Village, he was taken aback by the heavy Nazi presence: men in shiny black boots and military uniforms emblazoned with swastikas, a nonstop barrage of Hitler salutes.

When Balter first arrived at the Olympic Village, he was taken aback by the heavy Nazi presence: men in shiny black boots and military uniforms emblazoned with swastikas, a nonstop barrage of Hitler salutes.

While the Nazis had not yet arrived at their “Final Solution” to murder all Jewish men, women, and children, their aim at this point was to eliminate any semblance of Jewish influence on German society, to make life miserable, to encourage emigration, and to confiscate Jewish property.

Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels had no concern for telling the truth when influencing the German masses. In an interview with the New York Times in 1934, he cynically admitted as much.

The worth of propaganda cannot be judged by esthetic standards but only by reference to the results.

Propaganda is a means to an end. If that end is attained, the means are good. Whether they satisfy exigent esthetic requirements is immaterial.

Gretel and Rudy felt safe meeting only under the cover of night, in the sanctuary of a friend’s garden, the insane whims of a dictator tearing their hearts apart.

“The press and radio depicted Jews as ugly, groveling, lecherous, power-hungry, and devious,” wrote Michael Meyer in an introduction to Prinz’s autobiography.

“All of us cried,” Prinz recalled, “but, nevertheless, we sang. We sang through our tears, and although it may not have been musically perfect, the singing was like a great Jewish symphony that underscored our fate—that we were going to bear it with pride and dignity, and that come what may, we would fight for our lives.”

The crowd was held back from the rain-slick roads by thousands of uniformed Nazis, who formed a human retaining wall, locking arms along the city’s main thoroughfare in preparation for the arrival of Hitler’s motorcade. Here was the ultimate visual expression of the Nazi state, a festival of militarism, nationalism, and totalitarian precision and symbolism.

As an early Nazi admirer, Hanfstaengl aided the cause by composing marches for the brownshirts and Hitler Youth and suggested the Sieg Heil (Hail Victory) chant, which he patterned after a Harvard football cheer.

Sylvia Weaver, a society and fashion correspondent from the Los Angeles Times dispatched to Berlin to report on the social scene, sat in awe in the press box, surrounded by blue hydrangeas, marveling at the spectacle taking shape before her eyes.

She was impressed by the colors of unbridled power and aristocracy, noting how the “handsome blue, green and black uniforms of the German army, the [Führer's] private bodyguard and the air force mingle with the brown of the storm troops and the gold of the Olympic chains worn by the International Olympic Committee.”

Before the people of LA could read the words of Henry and Weaver in the next day’s paper, however, they gathered around their radios, tuned to KECA and KHJ, and listened live to the ceremonies, hearing a mix of whistles and cheers when American gymnast Al Jochim led the U.S. delegation into the stadium just behind the team from Uruguay.

The boys were assigned to group seven of the eight American marching contingents, striding side by side with members of the soccer and field hockey teams, a lowly position ahead of only the canoeing, field handball, and baseball squads.

A day that began with a sweet and symbolic imperfection, the oblivious cyclist, ended with a flourish of spontaneous rebellion, too.

The enchanted forest of birch trees surrounding the athletes’ lodges, with its gently sloping hills and meandering paths, its ducks, deer, and rabbits, had all been created from scratch—like a movie set at Carl Laemmle’s Universal City—in the months leading up to the Games.

If the trappings surrounding the 1936 Olympics were one gigantic exercise in subterfuge, a bright shining lie, it was in the Olympic Village where the deception was most orchestrated and, in many cases, the most transparent.

If the trappings surrounding the 1936 Olympics were one gigantic exercise in subterfuge, a bright shining lie, it was in the Olympic Village where the deception was most orchestrated and, in many cases, the most transparent.

The Australians may have brought their own kangaroo to the Village, but virtually everything else imaginable was provided by the Germans, even a dentist’s office where sprinter Archie Williams had a tooth filled.

The first car came skidding to a halt, and a portly military official stepped out.

Sam Balter saw it in the newspapers on Berlin's newsstands, with their stereotypical caricatures of Jewish people and headlines blaming them for the world's problems.

Iris Cummings saw it when she counted the soldiers goose-stepping past her each day and listened to how the girl guides spoke with such nationalistic fervor: We are trained! We are ready! We are dominant!

The Olympics were a celebration of movement, a testament to precise measurement.