Category Archives: 1936 Olympic Games
1936 Berlin Olympics
“The sportive, knightly battle awakens the best human characteristics. It doesn’t separate but unites the combatants in understanding and respect. It also helps to connect the countries in the spirit of peace. That’s why the Olympic Flame should never die.”
One could be forgiven for thinking that the words above were uttered by someone with noble intentions. However, that would assumption would be wrong. Those were words by Adolf Hitler, commenting on the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games. Those exact words are also a clear indication that the primary aim of the 1936 Olympic Games was propaganda.
One of the elements was the Olympics Torch Relay, which is still a part of the Olympics.
The 1936 Summer Olympics torch relay was the first of its kind, following the reintroduction of the Olympic Flame at the 1928 Games. It pioneered the modern convention of moving the flame via a relay system from Greece to the Olympic venue. Adolf Hitler saw the link with the ancient Games as the perfect way to illustrate his belief that classical Greece was an Aryan forerunner of the modern German Reich.
For a fortnight in August 1936, between the 1st and 16th, the Adolf Hitler Nazi dictatorship camouflaged its racist, militaristic character while hosting the Summer Olympics. It played down its anti-Semitic agenda and plans for territorial expansion. The regime exploited the Games to impress foreign spectators and journalists with an image of a peaceful, tolerant Germany.
The construction of the Olympic Village was to be overseen by Hauptmann Wolfgang Fürstner.
However, less than two months before the start of the Olympic Games, Fürstner was abruptly demoted to a vice commander position and was replaced by Oberstleutnant Werner von Gilsa, Commander of the Berlin Guard Regiment. The official reason for the replacement was, Fürstner had not acted with the necessary energy to prevent damage to the site, as 370,000 visitors passed through between 1 May and 15 June. However, this was a cover story to explain the sudden demotion of the half-Jewish officer. When the 1935 Nuremberg Laws passed, Fürstner oversaw the Olympic Village. They had classified him as a Jew.
Fürstner committed suicide by pistol on 19 August 1936, three days after the end of the games. He had been awarded the Olympic Medal First Class and attended the banquet for his successor, Gilsa. Fürstner, a career officer, had learned that according to the Nuremberg Laws, he was classified as a Jew and was to be dismissed from the Wehrmacht. His grandfather Dr Karl Fürstner had been a Jew who converted to Christianity. The government covered up the suicide to protect the international reputation of Germany. The official Nazi report read that Fürstner had died in a car accident.
In 1931, two years before the Nazis acquired power, the International Olympic Committee awarded the 1936 Summer Olympics to Berlin. The choice signalled Germany’s return to the world community after its isolation in the aftermath of defeat in World War I.
As a token gesture to placate international opinion, German authorities allowed the star fencer Helene Mayer to represent Germany at the Olympic Games in Berlin. Mayer was viewed as a non-Aryan because her father was Jewish. She won a silver medal in the women‘s individual fencing and, like all other medalists for Germany, gave the Nazi salute on the podium. No other Jewish athlete competed for Germany in the Summer Games.
Despite the pomp & ceremony and the glorification of Hitler, all did not go according to plan. There was a rather humorous aspect in the opening ceremony—the U.S. distance runner Louis Zamperini, one of the athletes present, recalled this incident:
“They released 25,000 pigeons, the sky was clouded with pigeons, the pigeons circled overhead, and then they shot a cannon, and they scared the poop out of the pigeons, and we had straw hats, flat straw hats, and you could heard the pitter-patter on our straw hats, but we felt sorry for the women, for they got it in their hair, but I mean there were a mass of droppings, and I say it was so funny.”
Zamperini himself had several miraculous escapes during World War II, which were chronicled in the book, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption and in the 2014 movie Unbroken, directed by Angelina Jolie.
Hitler saw the Games as an opportunity to promote his government and ideals of racial supremacy. The official Nazi party paper, the Völkischer Beobachter, wrote in the strongest terms—that Jewish and black people should not be allowed to participate in the games. However, when threatened with a boycott of the Games by other nations, he relented and allowed black and Jews to participate. In their attempt to clean up the host city, the German Ministry of the Interior authorized the chief of police to arrest all Romani and keep them in a special camp, the Berlin-Marzahn Concentration Camp.
Nine athletes who were Jewish or of Jewish parentage won medals in the Berlin Olympics, including Mayer and five Hungarians. Seven Jewish male athletes from the United States went to Berlin. Like some of the European Jewish competitors at the Olympics, many of these young men were pressured by Jewish organizations to boycott the Games. These athletes chose to compete for a variety of reasons. Most did not fully grasp at the time the extent and purpose of Nazi persecution of Jews and other groups.
sources
https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/the-nazi-olympics-berlin-1936
https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/photo/camp-for-roma-gypsies-at-marzahn
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1936 Winter Olympics—The Forgotten Games in Photographs
Garmisch-Partenkirchen 1936
Date: 6–16 FEBRUARY
sources
https://olympics.com/en/olympic-games/garmisch-partenkirchen-1936
The Survival Story of Ben Bril
It’s hard to believe that the only time the Olympics were held in the Netherlands, was nearly 100 years ago at the 1928 Amsterdam Olympics. One of the competing Dutch athletes was Ben Bril.
Ben (Barend) Bril was born on 16 July 16 1912, in Amsterdam, the host city for the 1928 Summer Olympics. He was one of seven children to Jewish parents Klaartie Moffie and Abraham Bril, who worked as a fish monger.
He grew up in one of the poorest parts of Amsterdam as the second youngest of seven children. It was a hard upbringing, according to Steven Rosenfeld, a relative of Bril’s through his wife Celia and has written a book about his life: Dansen om te overleven (Dancing to Survive). They lived in tenements, he didn’t sleep in a bed, he slept on straw, they didn’t have a toilet, he had to carry buckets down to the street,” Rosenfeld says.
Bril competed as a boxer in the 1928 Summer Olympics at age 15 in his home town, finishing fifth in the flyweight class, just out of medal contention. In his Olympic competition, after a first-round, he defeated Myles McDonagh from Ireland, before losing to Buddy Lebanon of South Africa.
McDonagh was 23. Bril had just turned 16 that day. He was the youngest ever boxer to take part in the Olympic Games.
For the young Bril, fighting was a part of daily life. There were scraps with friends, of course, and clashes with rival groups from different communities in the tightly packed city. Politics, discrimination and Bril’s Jewish faith were the reasons for 1928 being Bril’s only Olympic matches. He was not chosen for the 1932 squad, because the head of the boxing committee was a member of the NSB, the Dutch Nazi party. Bril boycotted the 1936 Berlin games being held in Nazi Germany, on his own accord.
As he got older, Bril found work in a butcher’s shop and used his new job to help develop his sport. Bril reached a milestone in his career by winning the gold medal at the Maccabi Games in 1935. He won the Dutch title in his division eight times. Years before it became mandatory for Jews, the proud champion Ben Bril had himself photographed with a Star of David on his boxing kit.
In 1934, Bril went with a Dutch Jewish group to compete in Germany.
The Nazis had been in power for a year. The state had already begun to discriminate officially against Jews. The atmosphere was hostile and daily life was being made increasingly difficult.
Bril was appalled by what he saw.
“We saw brown uniforms everywhere, swastika flags, the word ‘Jew’ on Jewish people’s businesses,” Bril told a Dutch newspaper many years later.
“I said then, as long as this regime is in power, I will never go to Germany.”
In May 1940 Germany invaded the Netherlands. Initially little changed, but gradually life for Dutch Jews became more restricted, and increasingly under threat.
There were restrictions on which public spaces Jewish people could enter, and in particular an attempt to force bars and cafes to ban Jews from their premises, which often ended in violence.
This sparked the creation of several Jewish defence groups, some centred around sports clubs like the one of which Bril was a member. On 11 February 1941, Dutch Nazis marched into the Jewish district of Amsterdam. A previous incursion two days earlier had resulted in attacks on Jewish homes and businesses.
In 1942, Bril, who was Jewish, was arrested by Jan Olij, the son of Sam Olij, a former 1928 Olympic teammate. He was first sent to the Vught Transit Camp, a concentration camp in Southern Holland with deplorable conditions, located Southeast of his home in Amsterdam. Once deported to Northern Germany and interned at the Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp, Bril was able to get a job, and then a promotion to the position of Blockälteste, which put him in charge of his barrack. Looking to survive, he was selected to box at the camp, where he let known German boxers defeat him. Four of his brothers and a sister died in the camps.
There is one moment that stands out from Bril’s life during the war beyond all others. It was a moment fraught with danger, but one in which he acted instinctively. It came at the Nazi concentration camp at Vught, and we can hear about it through Bril’s own words because he told the story to Braber in the 1980s.
“A boy had attempted to escape, but they caught him,” said Bril.
“They placed him on a rack, and he was to get 25 lashes of a whip. Suddenly the commander called out: ‘Boxer – step forward!’
“I had to carry out the punishment, but I refused. The commander said that if I didn’t I would get 50 lashes, so I took the whip but when I hit him, I aimed to strike too high.
“The commander got mad: ‘Not so!’ he cried. He grabbed the whip and started beating like mad. I walked back to my line.”
Why Bril suffered no consequences for his refusal to carry out the order is not known, but those who witnessed it were under no doubt as to what they had seen.
“Ben Bril was the only man I saw during two and a half years in concentration camps or heard of, who risked refusing to carry out a formal order of the SS,” according to historian Braber who quotes the head of Vught’s Jewish administration as testifying after the war.
In January 1945, from Bergen-Belsen, the family were included in a prisoner exchange that saw them taken first to Switzerland, then to a United Nations camp in Algeria, before making it back to Utrecht.
Bril didn’t return to the ring as a fighter after the war, but he couldn’t leave boxing.
He became a senior official in the sport, acting as a referee and judge at fights around the world, all the way into the 1970s.
Bril went to the Olympic Games in Tokyo in 1964 (where he once again showed his character by leaping into the ring to protect a fellow referee who had been punched by a competitor), Mexico City in 1968 and Montreal in 1976.
He missed the 1972 Games in Munich, and its own tragic story, only because of a dispute with the boxing authorities in the Netherlands.
Ringside or on the canvas, he played a small role at the start of the careers of some of the greats, officiating in fights involving world champions Joe Frazier, George Foreman and Sugar Ray Leonard.
Thank you, Michele Kupfer Yerman for pointing out the story to me.
sources
https://www.europeana.eu/en/blog/ben-bril-the-youngest-ever-olympic-boxer
1936 Winter Olympics
The 1936 Olympic summer games are a well-documented event. However, the 1936 Winter Olympics was not commonly discussed, yet it was just as controversial and steeped in propaganda as the summer games. From February 6 to February 16, 1936, Germany hosted the Winter Olympics at Garmisch-Partenkirchen in the Bavarian Alps. It was held six months before the Berlin Summer Olympics
The 1936 Winter Games were organized on behalf of the German League of the Reich for Physical Exercise (DRL) by Karl Ritter von Halt, who had been named president of the committee for the organization of the Fourth Winter Olympics in Garmisch-Partenkirchen by Reichssportführer Hans von Tschammer und Osten.
Yielding to international Olympic leaders’ insistence on “fair play,” German officials allowed Rudi Ball, who was half-Jewish, to compete on the nation’s ice hockey team. Hitler also ordered anti-Jewish signs temporarily removed from public view. Still, Nazi deceptions for propaganda purposes were not wholly successful. Western journalists observed and reported troop manoeuvres at Garmisch. As a result, the Nazi regime would minimize the military’s presence at the Summer Olympics.
28 nations sent athletes to compete in Germany. Australia, Bulgaria, Greece, Liechtenstein, Spain, and Turkey all made their Winter Olympic debut in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Estonia, Latvia, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and Yugoslavia all returned to the Games after having missed the 1932 Winter Olympics.
Rudi Ball initially did not qualify for selection in the German ice hockey team, due to his Jewish background. His good friend and teammate, Gustav Jaenecke, refused to play unless Ball was included. Ball also believed a deal could be struck to save his family in Germany if he returned to play in the games. The German selectors also realized that without Ball and Jaenecke the team would not stand a chance of winning. Another factor was that the Nazi party could not overlook the fact that Ball was without a doubt one of the leading athletes in his sport. With much controversy, Ball was included in the German team to play at the 1936 Olympic games. One report of the time proposed that Ball was playing against his will.[8] The deal for Ball’s family to leave Germany was also agreed upon. After Ball was injured, the Germans took 5th place in the Olympic tournament. Ball played four matches and scored two goals.
Ball followed his brother, Heinz, to South Africa in 1948. He died in Johannesburg in 1975.
Two other athletes who competed at the Winter Olympics ended up in concentration camps during World War 2. Polish skier Bronisław Czech, and
Norwegian ski jumper Birger Ruud.
Bronisław “Bronek” Czech was a Polish sportsman and artist. In 1934. He wrote a book about “Skiing and Ski Jumping Style”. In addition, he ran a sporting goods store in Zakopane. He also had musical and artistic talents, played violin and accordion, painted on paper and glass, carved wood and wrote poems. When war broke out in 1939, he joined the Polish resistance movement as a courier to Hungary. He was arrested by the German Gestapo in 1940 and was one of the first victims to be transported to the Auschwitz concentration camp. During his imprisonment, he continued to paint landscapes of the Tatras from memory. He died in 1944 in the camp’s hospital ward.
Birger Ruud, with his brothers Sigmund and Asbjørn, dominated international jumping in the 1930s. At the Winter Olympics of 1936 at Garmisch-Partenkirchen in Germany, 90,000 people watched Birger Ruud fly. Ninety thousand faces turned up towards him as the Norwegian added a second gold medal to the one he’d secured at Lake Placid four years earlier.
At the 1936 Olympic Winter Games, Ruud attempted an unusual double, competing in both Alpine and ski jumping events. The inaugural Alpine contest was the combined ski jumping and slalom. Ruud led the downhill race by 4.4 seconds, but when he missed a gate in the slalom, he was assigned a six-second penalty and ended up in fourth place. A week later, Ruud won the gold medal in the ski jump.
He was also part of a group of Norwegians holding their own clandestine events and competitions until in 1943 a Quisling sympathiser reported the skiers to the Gestapo and the three Ruud brothers were sent to the Grini concentration camp. Released after a year Ruud returned immediately to resistance activities, becoming close to one of its key leaders Ahlert Horn.
Amid preparations for the Games, the Garmisch-Partenkirchen town council passed an order to expel all Jews in its jurisdiction but decided to wait until after the Olympics to implement the decree. Anti-semitic signs and publications were removed from the region for the duration of the Games, as a concession to the International Olympic Committee.
It was the last year in which the Summer and Winter Games both took place in the same country (the cancelled 1940 Olympics would have been held in Japan, with Tokyo hosting the Summer Games and Sapporo hosting the Winter Games).
sources
https://vhec.org/1936_olympics/the_winter_games.htm
https://olympics.com/en/athletes/bronislaw-czech
https://olympics.com/en/athletes/birger-ruud
https://www.theneweuropean.co.uk/brexit-news-europe-news-the-life-of-birger-ruud-8025912/
A Butterfly in Hell
A caterpillar sneaks into a gate. It looks around and sees empty barracks.
It is there for the next phase in its life.
It really is something magical, a miracle of nature—from hairy caterpillar to chrysalis to butterfly.
The butterfly emerges, it has been more than two years since it was a caterpillar.
It flies around and sees so many people in the barracks. They are divided into groups, all wearing different markings. Not like the beautiful markings on its wings.
There is neither happiness nor is there beauty here.
People are being hurt, by other people in uniforms. Why? The butterfly does not know.
It flies on and sees another camp in the distance. Train tracks lead to it.
The butterfly is curious and flies towards the camp.
Men in uniforms again, on something that looks like a platform. They scream to the people in lines to the left and to the right.
One line is elderly people, young mothers, and babies. The uniforms tell them to walk towards a building, and the butterfly follows them.
It sees them enter the building and take off their clothes. It is a strange side, the bodies of people who clearly do not feel comfortable with it. Why? Again, the butterfly doesn’t know.
The people enter a second chamber, the doors close, for a second eerie silence, and then screams, the sounds of agony. Then the silence again.
The people go into the building, the doors close, for a second eerie silence, and then screams, the sounds of agony. Then the silence again.
The butterfly decides to hover around a bit, its curiosity gets the better of it— it wants to know what will follow.
Another group of people arrive a much smaller group. Men with carts approach the building. The doors open.
The butterfly no longer sees naked people—but corpses. Their hair was now cut, and some shiny teeth were pulled. It seems to be gold. The dead were placed onto the carts.
The men roll the carts to a place with a chimney.
Within a few minutes, smoke comes from the chimney—the smell is putrid.
Suddenly, the butterfly realizes—it is in hell. Quickly it flies away.
Tinus Osendarp—Medal Winning Olympian and Nazi Collaborator
Without a shadow of a doubt, the star of the 1936 Olympic Games was Jesse Owens. But there was another medal winner who became more infamous than famous. He came 3rd behind in the Men’s 100 metres sprint behind Jesse Owens and Ralph Metcalfe and third place in the Men’s 200 metres sprint behind Jesse Owens and Mack Robinson. The name of this double bronze medal winner is Tinus Osendarp.
In the 100 m final, Tinus Osendarp ran 10.5 s just behind the American Jesse Owens’ 10.3 s and Ralph Metcalfe’s 10.4 s. During the medal ceremony Osendarp raised his arm in the Nazi salute. Upon his return home, Osendarp was called “the best white sprinter” by the Dutch press.
Tinus (Martinus) Osendarp was born on 21 May 1916 in Delft, the son of Bernardus Osendarp, owner of a fruit and vegetable export company. The Osendarp family moved to Rijswijk when the VUC football association was flourishing there, with a small athletics department. However, Tinus wanted to become a famous footballer above all else. With his innate speed, he ascribed to a great future on the football field.
Tinus Osendarp started sprinting for fun, and one day a talent scout discovered him. His first success came in 1934, when he placed third in the 200 m at the inaugural European Championships, won by compatriot Chris Berger. Osendarp finished fifth in the 100 metres and won a second bronze medal in the 4×100 metres relay (with Tjeerd Boersma, Chris Berger, and the non-Olympian Robert Jansen).
He increased his popularity by winning the 100 m and the 200 m at the 1938 European Championships in Paris.
He first came under the influence of SS propaganda in Berlin. That became the foundation for his future involvement in National Socialism.
Working as a policeman in The Hague, Osendarp joined the NSB (the Dutch National Socialist Party) in 1941 and the SS in 1943. Working for the Sicherheitsdienst (SD), he was involved with the arrests of various resistance fighters and helping with the deportation of Dutch Jews. The payment for each captured Jewish man or woman was 7.50 Dutch Guilders, [the equivalent of $50 or €42 today]. Many he arrested/betrayed the Nazis murdered.
In 1948, Osendarp’s sentence was 12 years in prison. Instead, he was allowed to carry out his sentence by working in the coal mines in the Southeast of the Netherlands to support his family.
Osendarp was released in early 1953 and moved to Limburg to work in the mines. In 1958, he became an athletics coach at Kimbria in Maastricht, and then from 1972 on, he was a coach at Achilles-Top in Kerkrade. He died in 2002 at the age of 86 in Heerlen. Although he was a relatively minor perpetrator—I think the sentence was too lenient. I would have sentenced him to life in prison with no chance of parole.
sources
http://www.olympedia.org/athletes/73863
Martinus “Tinus” Bernardus Osendarp, Dutch 1936 top athlete and Nazi collaborator.
https://hyperleap.com/topic/Tinus_Osendarp
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The German Jews at the 1936 Berlin Olympics.
The 1936 Berlin were probably the biggest propaganda tool ever to be created by the Nazi regime, but I won’t go into the details of the actual games. I will focus on 3 people of Jewish descent. Two who survived the war and one who did a few days after the games.
In 1935 teh Nazis had introduced the Nuremberg Laws.One of the consequences of these laws was that the Jewish people no longer were allowed to participate in social activities together with ‘Aryan’ people.
Concerned that international opinion would be adversely swayed by the new laws, the Interior Ministry did not actively enforce them until after the 1936 Summer Olympics, held in Berlin that August. Also some of the best athletes were Jewish.
Rudi Ball
Because he was Jewish, Ball was initially not consideed for selection in the German ice hockey team. Because of that Ball’s good friend and teammate, Gustav Jaenecke, refused to play unless Ball was included. Ball also believed a deal could be struck to save his family in Germany if he returned to play in the games.Realizing the team would not be competitive without their stars and attempting to win as many as possible to propagate their political machine, the Nazis and Ball struck a deal. By playing, Rudi’s family would be able to emigrate from Germany.His parents were allowed to leave and emigrated to South Africa.Although not verified it is believed that Ball had met directly with Hitler.
What I find intriguing and truly amazes me, Ball and also his brothers had already been in safety. In 1933 they played Ice hockey in Switzerland.
After the games Ball resumed playing for his old team in Berlin and, (this is something that truly amazes me) continued in the team in several capacities until 1944.
Ball died in September 1975 and was inducted into the IIHF Hall of Fame in 2004.
Helene Mayer
Helene Mayer is a bit of an enigma I suppose. Many see her as a traitor and although I can understand why,I don’t necessarily subscribe to that point of view.
She was, by definition of German law at the time of the Olympics, part-Jewish, which had cost her most of her citizenship rights.Although she did not really consider herself to be Jewish, her Father was Jewish and had died from a heart attack in 1931. Her mother was christian and Helene was more or less raised as a Christian, but that did not matter to the Nazis.
Mayer won a gold medal in fencing at the age of 17 at the 1928 Summer Olympics in 1932 at the 1932 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles, having learned, two hours prior to the match, that her boyfriend had died in a military training exercise in Germany.She remained in the USA to study.
In April 1933, she was kicked out of the Offenbach Fencing Club, even though as a private organization it was then under no legal obligation to expunge its Jews. Later on in 1933 the Germans withdrew her scholarship. She managed to get a job teaching German at Mills College in Oakland, California, and later taught at San Francisco City College.She lost her German citizenship in 1935 because of the Nuremberg Laws, which considered her non-German.Rejected by her home country and unable to fence for the US, Mayer’s Olympic career should have been over.However out of fear for an American boycott to the Olympic games, the Nazis decided to include Helene mayer in the team, Partially because she looked Aryan.Goebbels required of the press that “no comments were to be made about Helene Mayer’s Jewish ancestry.
Controversially she gave a Nazi salute on the podium, and later said it might have protected her family. After the games she returned to the US.Her brothers stayed in Germany where, they were forced into hiding before eventually being they were captured and were forced into slave labor in a factory. It was only because of the war’s end they survived not because of Helene’s salute or participation in the games. Having that said though I can understand why she did it. It is very easy for us to judge but we were never put in that situation..
Wolfgang Fürstner
Wolfgang Fürstner was a German Wehrmacht captain initially appointed as commander, of Berlin’s Olympic village during the 1936 Summer Olympics.
He had been tasked with building and organizing the Olympic village. Howver shortly before the games commenced he was replaced and demoted to vice commander.
His Grandfather was Jewish but had converted to Christianity but as with Helen Mayer this didn’t matter to the Nazis, nor did the fact that he was an officer in the Wehrmacht.
Fürstner, found out that he was going to be classified as a Jew and was to be dismissed from the Wehrmacht.On on 19 August 1936, 3 days after the end of the games he shot himself. The Nazis tried to cover up his suicide by claiming he had died in a car accident. But the truth of his suicide soon leaked to the international press. The Sydney Morning Herald an Australian newspaper, reported Fürstner had been found dead with a gun by his side.
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I am passionate about my site and I know you all like reading my blogs. I have been doing this at no cost and will continue to do so. All I ask is for a voluntary donation of $2, however if you are not in a position to do so I can fully understand, maybe next time then. Thank you. To donate click on the credit/debit card icon of the card you will use. If you want to donate more then $2 just add a higher number in the box left from the PayPal link. Many thanks.
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Sources
https://web.archive.org/web/20180112100839/http://www.sihss.se/RudiBallbiography.htm
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2016/jul/28/helene-mayer-nazi-germanys-jewish-champion-fencer
https://www.ushmm.org/exhibition/olympics/?content=continuing_persecution&lang=en
Helene Mayer-Caught between a Rock and a hard place.
The Olympic Games are the biggest sporting events in the world. But more then a sporting event is is also a political event filled with propaganda. This was never more clear then in 1936 during the Berlin Olympic Games.
On July 26,1935,German sports commissioner Hans von Tschammer und Osten advised that no Jews would represent Germany at the 1936 Berlin Olympics. He claimed that Jews had competed in the qualifying events but none made the grade. In November 1935 Germany would make a bit of a u-turn after mounting international pressure and allow the half-Jewish fencer Helene Mayer onto the team.
In 1936 the Nazi politics which enabled the Holocaust were already in full swing, three years prior the first concentration camp, Dachau, had already gone in operation.
The first Jewish person to die in Dachau was Arthur Kahn, a 21-year-old Jewish German medical student had enrolled in Edinburgh University in Scotland, he had returned to , Germany to pick up his student records at the University of Wurzburg.He was killed on April 12 1933.
In the U.S, there were those who believed that the country should boycott the 1936 Olympics due to Hitler’s stand towards Jewish athletes and his obvious discrimination towards athletes of African-American descent.
Helen Mayer had already won a gold medal in fencing at the age of 17 at the 1928 Summer Olympics in Amsterdam, representing Germany, winning 18 bouts and losing only 2. She became a national hero in Germany and was celebrated, with her photo plastered everyone. According to a profile in The Guardian, “She was tall, blonde, elegant and vivacious. The fact that she was tall,blonde and blue eyed were taken in consideration to include her in the Olympic squad.
In 1931, her father died of a heart attack. She finished fifth at the 1932 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles, having learned, two hours prior to the match, that her boyfriend had died in a military training exercise in Germany.Two years later Helene Mayer lost her German citizenship. Luckily for her, she managed to enroll into Berkley and to compete for the USC Fencing Club.
In 1936, however, it appeared that the same people who stripped her of citizenship and humiliated her to the point of complete ostracization, wanted her to perform once again for Germany.
Reluctantly she decided to accept the invitation although she was caught between a rock and a hard place between her professional career and her dignity and pride.
Goebbels requested of the press that no comments were to be made regarding Helene Mayer’s non-Aryan ancestry She won a silver medal in individual women’s foil. She gave a Nazi salute on the podium, and later said it might have protected her family that was still in Germany, in labor camps.
There are some who have called her a traitor. I don’t describe to that point of view, in fact I think what she did was heroic. She was safe in the USA but yet she decided to represent her country at the major sporting tournament, risking being imprisoned after the tournament and especially if she hadn’t won a medal. Although the politics of her country failed her she still felt German, she had no political agenda. And I believe she competed for Germany in the hope of securing better treatment for her family, who were still living in Germany. It is easy to judge when you are not put in that position.
At the end of the day she was used as a pawn of the Nazi regime and the International Olympic Committee.
After the Olympics, she returned to the United States and became a nine-time U.S. champion. She received citizenship in 1941 but returned to Germany in 1952.Where she married an old friend, Erwin Falkner von Sonnenburg, in a quiet May ceremony in Munich. The couple moved to the hills above Stuttgart before setting in Heidelberg where she died of breast cancer in October 1953, two months before her 43rd birthday.
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I am passionate about my site and I know you all like reading my blogs. I have been doing this at no cost and will continue to do so. All I ask is for a voluntary donation of $2, however if you are not in a position to do so I can fully understand, maybe next time then. Thank you. To donate click on the credit/debit card icon of the card you will use. If you want to donate more then $2 just add a higher number in the box left from the PayPal link. Many thanks.
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Sources
The Guardian
Irish Times
Vintage News
Mashable
The weird case of Violette Morris
Of all stories relating to spies and collaborators during WWII this most be one of the most intriguing ones.
When I first read about Violette Morris and saw the date she died,26 April 1944, I assumed she was killed for being a member of the French resistance. Why I thought that I don’t know.
Born in France on 18 April 1893. She was a French athlete who won two gold and one silver medals at the Women’s World Games in 1922 and the Women’s Olympiad in 1924.
She excelled in those sports that require strength and power such as shot put and javelin.However those weren’t the only sports she was involved in.
She partook in football,water polo ,road bicycle racing, motorcycle racing, airplane racing, horseback riding, tennis, archery, diving, swimming,weightlifting, and Greco-Roman wrestling,boxing and car racing.
She loved car racing so much that she had her breasts removed to fit better in the car.
She married Cyprien Edouard Joseph Gouraud on 22 August 1914 in Paris. They divorced in May 1923. She had served in World War I as a military nurse during the Battle of the Somme and a courier during the Battle of Verdun.
Although she had been married, she was attracted to women.
Her motto was “Anything A Man Can Do, Violette Can Do, Too”
Her lifestyle was of no shame to her. She lived as a man and made no secret of the fact that her lovers were women. This was considered really scandalous behaviour in 1920’s France.
In 1928, she was refused license renewal by the Fédération française sportive féminine and as a result was not allowed to compete in the 1928 Olympic Games.
Despite her being openly gay she had a big fan in Adolf Hitler. This one of the anomalies in the Nazi policies,according to the Nazi doctrine women could not be gay.
In 1935 she was approached an recruited by by the Sicherheitsdienst. On the personal behest she was invited to attend the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin.
She provided the Nazi regime in Germany with partial plans of the Maginot Line, detailed plans of strategic points within the city of Paris, and schematics of the French army’s main tank, the Somua S35. Her information was vital to the German invasion of Paris in 1940.
After the Nazi invasion, Morris remained close to the Germans and started working for the French Gestapo, the Carlingue. She had the nickname, ‘The Hyena of the Gestapo,’ because apparently she got a lot of sadistic pleasure by torturing people and extracting information.
On 26 April 1944, when she went for a drive in her Citroën Traction Avant car with two friends and their two children for a spin on a country road.
Her engine sputtered and the car came to a halt. Earlier tha day, the engine had been tampered with by the French Resistance Maquis Surcouf group. Members of the group then emerged from a hiding spot and opened fired on the car. Although Morris was the target, all five people in the car were killed. Morris’ body, riddled with bullets.
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History of Sorts 
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