nearly six months on a fellowship in Germany in 1935 and 1936, wrote: “Jesse Owens ran before the astonished eyes of the world. He was lauded and pictured and interviewed. He can scarcely take a step without being begged for his ‘autogramme.’ He is without doubt the most popular single athlete in the Olympic Games of 1936.” And while Hitler and other top Nazis bitterly complained about the black American Olympians, some of those athletes were invited by ordinary German citizens for coffee or dinner.
Little wonder that Owens and his black teammates returned from Germany with less bitterness than many of their countrymen expected—especially since these athletes all too often would see no change in the discrimination they faced at home. Richard Helms, the young United Press reporter in Berlin and future CIA chief, happened to be crossing the Atlantic on the
Reflecting on his stay, DuBois elaborated on the reasons why black Americans would have mixed feelings about their experiences in Hitler’s Germany. “I have been treated with uniform courtesy and consideration,” he reported. “It would have been impossible for me to have spent a similarly long time in any part of the United States, without some, if not frequent cases of personal insult or discrimination. I cannot record a single instance here.”
He observed that Germany felt “contented and prosperous” under its new rulers, but also that it was “silent, nervous, suppressed” and all opposition was banned. He certainly noticed the “campaign of race prejudice carried on openly, continuously and determinedly against all non-Nordic races, but specifically against the Jews, which surpasses in vindictive cruelty and public insult anything I have ever seen.” The situation, he added, was “so complicated that one cannot express it without seeming to convict one’s self of deliberate misstatement.” All of which got him back to the Olympics, concluding that “the testimony of the casual, non-German-speaking visitor to the Olympic Games is worse than valueless in any direction.”
Many of the American athletes, black or white, gave little or no thought to such considerations. They were there for the competition—and, just like the spectators, out for a good time. In at least one case, this led to a German-American personal drama that played itself out almost as publicly as the races on the field.
Leni Riefenstahl, Hitler’s favorite film director, who had already immortalized the Nuremberg Nazi rallies in
On the second day of the decathlon, the German champion Erwin Huber introduced Riefenstahl to Morris, who was lying on the grass resting with a towel over his head. “When Huber presented Morris to me, and we looked at one another, we both seemed transfixed,” the film director wrote in her autobiography, slipping into the tone of a sappy romance novel. “It was an incredible moment and I had never experienced anything like it. I tried to choke back the feelings surging up inside me…”
After Morris won the competition, breaking a world record, he stood with two other Americans on the podium for the medals ceremony. Riefenstahl watched, but was unable to film the ceremony because it was getting dark. As Morris came off the podium, he headed straight toward the film director. Here, her memoir goes from romance novel to bodice-ripper mode. “I held out my hand and congratulated him, but he grabbed me in his arms, tore off my blouse, and kissed my breasts, right in the middle of the stadium, in front of a hundred thousand spectators. A lunatic, I thought,” she wrote. “But I could not forget the wild look in his eyes…”
Riefenstahl claimed she tried to avoid Morris after that, but ended up encountering him again at the pole vault. “We couldn’t control our feelings,” she wrote, describing how they immediately became lovers in the midst of the Olympic events and her film shoots. “I had lost my head completely,” she confessed, and imagined he was the man she would marry. When Morris left to be feted for his triumphs in a New York ticker-tape parade, she was despondent. Then she read that he was engaged to an American teacher. He still wrote to Riefenstahl, and she still believed she loved him. Although she finally decided to break off their affair, she sent him her stills of him in action in Berlin, which helped him get the part of Tarzan in a Hollywood movie. Later, she learned he divorced in 1940 and died of alcohol and drug abuse in 1974.
By pointing out “his sad fate” in her memoir, Riefenstahl implied that Morris would have done better if he had stayed with her. In the midst of the pageantry of the Olympics, Hitler’s favorite film director had fanta-sized about a whole other life with the American who couldn’t have cared less what movement she was working for.
Truman Smith, who had been the first American official to meet Hitler, returned to Berlin in 1935 for a second tour, this time as the senior military attache. It wasn’t until a couple of years later that he met the Nazi leader again, although he had observed him from afar on several occasions, including at the Olympics. At an official function at the Chancellery, Smith worked his way through the reception line and shook Hitler’s hand. Preparing to move on, he felt Hitler’s hand on his sleeve.
“Have I not seen you before?” Hitler asked.
“Yes, Mr. Chancellor, in Munich in 1922,” the startled attache responded.
“Oh, yes, you introduced me to Hanfstaengl,” Hitler recalled.
It was a vivid demonstration that the German leader, like many skilled politicians, possessed an uncanny memory for significant faces and events in his life even after a long interval.
Returning to Berlin, Truman and his wife, Kay, were immediately struck by its transformation since the early 1920s. “Berlin was so familiar,” Kay wrote in her unpublished memoirs. “It was the same yet not the same. The streets, the buildings were all as I had known them. But now no more shabby fronts and broken fences. All was clean, freshly painted… It was as in a dream; all is familiar but changed… The crowds well dressed, the people looking well nourished, energetic.” Without any irony, she also observed: “Berlin was a very safe city at this time, as all the drunks, bums, homosexuals, etc. had been put in concentration camps.”
If such remarks betrayed her own prejudices, Kay wasn’t blind to what she characterized as “a certain tenseness” in the air, the product of a regime that was ready to target anyone. When she and Truman returned to the house one day, a servant told them that telephone repairmen had visited the house and insisted on “checking” their connections, despite her protestations that the phone was working well. After that, the Smiths made a habit of putting an overcoat over the phone to foil any listening devices, and postponing any sensitive conversations to when they took walks in the Grunewald, the forest on the outskirts of the city. The couple assumed that it wasn’t only the Nazis who could be spying on them. According to Kay, Truman tried to engineer the removal of an American secretary in his office, a longtime Berlin resident with strong leftist views who he suspected was giving information to the Russians.
Kay also pointed out parallels between the Nazis and the Communists. The Nazis, like the Communists, hoped to replace Christianity with another doctrine—what she identified as “the old Germanic religion,” but in reality was the idea that Nazism superseded all previous beliefs. According to one of Kay’s Catholic friends, a Nazi leader had ordered schoolchildren to replace the standard grace at meals with “Dear Jesus, stay away from us. We eat gladly without thee.” When Rochus von Rheinbabin, a German acquaintance from their first tour, arrived decked out in Nazi insignia, proudly boasting about his early membership in the party, Kay questioned him about the party’s beliefs. After he finished, she said, “But Rochus, what is then the difference between National Socialism and Communism?” Her German visitor threw up his hands. “Hush Katie,” he declared. “One may not say that.”
When Colonel Charles Bennett, the chief of the attache section of the Military Intelligence Division of the War Department, had asked Smith to return to Germany, he was counting on his getting privileged access to the new regime. “Your past relationship with Hitler, [Minister of War and Army Commander-in-Chief Werner von] Blomberg, and others who are at the head of affairs in Germany, would enable you to do a service that no one else, however well qualified they might be in other respects, could do,” he wrote. Of course, Smith could no longer drop in on Hitler the way he first had in Munich; in fact, his brief encounter with him on the reception line was the only time he spoke to him directly again. But his extensive contacts from those earlier days gave him a tremendous
