SATURDAY The England footballers shamed by Hitler and why Putin’s won the World Cup before a ball’s been kicked
ESSAY
THE Berlin Olympic Games of 1936 are remembered in the sporting record books for Jesse Owens, who defied racial prejudice to return to his native United States with four gold medals. But in the history books, they are remembered for something rather darker. For these were ‘Hitler’s Olympics’, played out beneath the shadow of the swastika.
They were a colossal propaganda coup for a regime that was already persecuting thousands of its own people and which would soon murder millions.
You might have thought that the world would have learned from the chilling sham of what happened in Berlin that summer. But, with just days to go until the first match of the football World Cup in Russia, it is clear that in 2018, as in 1936, sport has become a showcase for boorish, strutting, violent nationalism.
Of course, Vladimir Putin is not Hitler and his Russian ultra-nationalists are not the Nazis. But to deny that there are parallels is to be blind to reality. Putin’s Russia, chosen to host this bloated football festival, is a gangster state that routinely rigs elections, terrorises its neighbours and persecutes gays, journalists and political dissenters. It has invaded eastern Ukraine and illegally seized Crimea.
What is more, its government stands accused of using a chemical weapon, the Novichok nerve agent, against a former Russian spy and his daughter on British soil.
In a saner world, the World Cup would never have been given to Russia. When the decision was made in 2010, the world knew about Putin’s authoritarian corruption.
By contrast, the Olympic authorities actually had some excuse with regard to Berlin in the Thirties. They had given the Games to Berlin five years earlier, when Germany was still a democracy and the Nazis were still on the lunatic fringe.
What followed, however, was one of the greatest obscenities in sporting history, as Hitler’s cronies turned a celebration of international brotherhood into a stage-managed advert for his blood-soaked regime.
HITLER and his propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, were well aware that sport, like politics, is all about spectacle. Indeed, it was under Goebbels’ aegis that the organisers devised the first Olympic torch relay, bringing it from Greece to Berlin.
Today, we think of the torch relay as a noble tradition going back to the titan Prometheus who stole the power of fire from Zeus. Yet at the time, it was irresistibly reminiscent of the torch- lit paramilitary parades that characterised the Nazis’ election campaigns during Hitler’s rise to power.
What was more, in a strikingly sinister irony, the countries through which the torch travelled — Greece, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Hungary, Austria and Czechoslovakia — were those the Germans brutalised and enslaved a few years later.
So much, then, for the Olympic ideal! The Games opened in Berlin’s Olympic Stadium on August 1. The crowd cheered when the airship Hindenburg appeared overhead and roared themselves hoarse when the torch entered the stadium through lines of uniformed Hitler Youth.
But the real star of the show was Hitler himself. Many of the athletes performed Nazi salutes as they passed the Führer. All except the Americans lowered their flags in homage.
To the crowds, Hitler seemed more than a politician: he was a hero, a saviour, even a god. It was, wrote the watching U.S. novelist Thomas Wolfe, an ‘almost religious event, the crowd screaming, swaying in unison and begging for Hitler.
‘ There was something scary about it; his cult of personality.’
In public, the Nazis were on their best behaviour, as the Russians probably will be later this month. The games, said Goebbels, would be a ‘festival of joy and peace’ — which is exactly the kind of thing Putin’s propagandists say today about the World Cup.
As historian Oliver Hilmes records in his new book, Berlin 1936, adverts for anti-Semitic newspaper Die Stürmer were taken down, while the German team even included a Jewish athlete, the fencer Helene Mayer, in order to defuse talk of a U.S. boycott.
As is well known, Hitler was horrified by the success of the pioneering black American athlete Jesse Owens, whose gold medals in the 100m, 200m, relay and long jump offended the Nazis’ obsession with Aryan racial superiority.
Yet with an eye firmly on foreign opinion, the Nazi Press office took care not to appear excessively nationalistic. ‘As welcome as German victories are,’ read one message to the newspapers, ‘it is not appropriate only to mention excellent German performances in the headlines. Foreign triumphs should not be downplayed.’
To the casual observer, then, Berlin could easily seem a capital like any other. As visitors relaxed on the café terraces in the sunshine, writes Hilmes, they watched the world go by, ‘the young and the old, women with prams, businessmen hurrying to appointments, Hitler Youths, flâneurs and countless tourists from every country under the sun’.
And there is no doubt that many visitors were taken in, as they probably will be in Moscow over the coming weeks.
On August 15, 1936, 18,000 people were watching the swimming when it was announced that the Führer was about to enter the arena.
At that, one American tourist, Carla de Vries of Norwalk, California, rushed over to the VIP seats, where, hopping from foot to foot with excitement, she managed to get Hitler’s autograph. Then, before his SS guards could react, she leaned over the barrier, pulled the dictator’s face towards her, and gave him a kiss.
Hitler laughed. So did most of the world’s Press. When she returned home, a newspaper asked why she had done it. ‘ Why,’ she said happily, ‘I simply embraced him because he appeared so friendly and gracious.’ Not even the most experienced critics of the Nazi regime were immune from the heady atmosphere.
The British diplomat Sir Robert Vansittart was taken in by Goebbels himself, recording that he ‘liked him and his wife at once’. Their credulity is extraordinary. After all, even at the time, the violence and persecution of the Nazi regime were well known.
Only the previous September, the Nuremberg Laws had stripped Germany’s Jews of their basic rights — a crucial step towards the horror of the Holocaust.
It was just a few hours’ drive from the Olympic Stadium to the concentration camps people whispered about in cafes. Just 22 miles from Berlin, the Nazis were even then building the massive Sachsenhausen camp, where up to 35,000 people were killed.
YET the world chose to turn a blind eye. People who should have known better preferred to think the Nazis would improve with time, and argued that the success of the Olympics proved Germany was on the right track.
But for those with eyes to see and ears to hear, there were all too many hints of the truth.
Doubters and dissidents sometimes muttered about friends who had disappeared. People seemed nervous and jumpy. As the games wore on, Thomas Wolfe wrote: ‘ Something happened. It didn’t happen suddenly. It just happened as a cloud gathers, as fog settles, as rain begins to fall.’
Even Wolfe, who loved German culture, could smell the ‘poisonous emanations of
suppression, persecution and fear …tainting, sickening and blighting the lives of everyone’. We all know what came next.
Before the year was out, Hitler had intervened in earnest in the Spanish Civil War. Then he took Austria, the Sudetenland, then the rest of Czechoslovakia. In September 1939, he invaded Poland.
So, barely three years after the games, the world had learned a terrible lesson. Today, the Berlin Olympics are often described as a ghastly one-off, a terrible aberration from the sporting ideal. Yet the truth is very different.
They were not an aberration. After Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson likened Russia’s hosting of the World Cup to Hitler’s 1936 Olympics, he was taunted by his Moscow counterpart.
Johnson had said Putin would ‘glory’ in holding the World Cup after the attempt to kill Sergei Skripal and his daughter in Wiltshire. ‘I think the comparison with 1936 is certainly right,’ he said. ‘It is an emetic prospect of Putin glorying in this sporting event.’
In an intemperate reaction, Russia’s foreign minister Sergey Lavrov sent Johnson a copy of the infamous photo of England’s football team doing Nazi salutes in 1938 in front of a crowd of 105,000 before a friendly match in Berlin against Germany. Shamefully, they had been ordered to do so by the Foreign Office in a gesture of appeasement to show that Germany, which two months earlier had annexed Austria, was not a pariah state.
The game helped clear the way for Neville Chamberlain’s ‘Peace in our Time’ deal with Hitler, which, in turn, led to Germany’s invasion of Czechoslovakia.
Lavrov was accused of deliberately trying to provoke the UK government by suggesting it was complicit in fascism, while distracting attention from Moscow’s role in the Skripal poisonings.
The spectacle of the World Cup in Russia will surely see more such cynical propaganda. But then football’s governing body, FIFA, has never let moral considerations get in the way of making money.
Why else was the 1978 World Cup held in Argentina, a country ruled by a brutal military junta which was in the process of ‘disappearing’ 30,000 of its own people?
As for Russia, Putin has a notorious track record for using sporting events as a propaganda showcase. The 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi turned into a gigantic ego-trip for the Russian leader. Apart from systematic, state- sponsored Russian drug- doping, the event was dogged with controversy about Putin’s abysmal human rights record, his regime’s horrendous mistreatment of gays and lesbians, and his meddling abroad. Little has changed since then.
Inevitably, Putin’s advocates –— not least the ‘useful idiots’ of the British Left — claimed that these were dreadful smears against a much-maligned man doing his best to modernise his country.
At least Russia’s bellicose leader was polite enough to wait until the games were over — four days, to be precise — before his thugs seized the Crimean peninsula from Ukraine. A few weeks later, his troops poured into Ukraine itself.
So much, again, for the Olympic Games as a force for world peace.
All this leaves one key question. If we can’t trust the sporting authorities to stay out of the gutter — and if Putin is determined to turn the World Cup into a colossal propaganda stunt — should England have boycotted the tournament, as many have argued?
ALAS,
I think a boycott would, at this stage, be ineffective. The U. S. boycott of the Moscow Olympics in 1980, for example, achieved precisely nothing.
The only people who would have been disappointed if the England squad had stayed away would have been our own fans — as well as our young sportsmen themselves.
The fact is the damage was done in 2010, when FIFA awarded the 2018 World Cup to Russia and the 2022 tournament, crazily and equally unforgivably, to the tiny oil-rich emirate Qatar.
In the long run, it is surely the Government’s job, with our Western allies, to make it morally and politically impossible for sporting authorities to make such greedy and unprincipled decisions.
In the short term, though, there will be no avoiding what seems certain to be a tremendous coup for Mr Putin. And it is all too easy to imagine the scene.
In the host cities of Moscow, St Petersburg, Volgograd and Kazan, as in Berlin in 1936, the newly-cleaned streets will gleam in the summer sunshine. The spectacle will be magnificent, the volunteers friendly, the mood buoyant.
And although there is bound to be much talk of Russia’s notorious hooligans, my guess is that Putin will ensure his countrymen are on their very best behaviour.
More than three billion people across the world will watch on TV as the goals flow. At the end, a smiling Vladimir Putin will hand the World Cup to a triumphant Spaniard, Brazilian, German or Argentine captain.
The crowd will roar; fireworks will decorate the sky. Everybody will go home happy. ‘ Oh, Putin’s not so bad!’ people will say. ‘What was all the fuss about?’
They said something similar in 1936. How blind, how foolish, how naïve we are, that we so doggedly refuse to learn from history.