How Hitler Hijacked World Sport by Christopher Hilton

Author:Christopher Hilton [Hilton, Christopher]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: The History Press
Published: 2011-11-30T05:00:00+00:00

anti-Semitism was the basic reason I believe that Sam and I didn’t get to run in the Olympic Games. Here were the great black athletes who couldn’t be kept off the winning podium – they were marvellous – but here were two rather obscure Jewish American athletes who could be kept from the winning podium so as not to further embarrass Adolf Hitler.24

If Glickman was right, Hitler had hijacked the United States relay team in the sense that he was picking half of it.

Gretel Bergmann, at home, understandably showed no interest in the Games or in how the jumper substituted for her fared. Dora Ratjen seems, according to the latest research, to have been born with uncertain genitalia but concealed this at the Olympic training camp by never showering with the other girls. He was ordered to room with Bergmann because she was Jewish and as a result under the strict Nazi laws he would not dare to let his hormones (if he had them) lead him to lay a hand upon her. She never saw him change out of his clothes either.25

The Nazi thinking must have been that if they entered him for the women’s high jump he would have to win and bring even more glory to the Reich. Nor necessarily did Ratjen find himself in a position where he could refuse. As a member of the Hitler Youth he had do what he was told or else. In the women’s high jump he finished fourth.

Helene Mayer won silver in the fencing and at the medal ceremony gave the stiff arm salute.

The man who built and organised the Olympic Village, Captain Wolfgang Fürstner, was a regular soldier and heavily involved in the German army’s fitness programme. The Olympic Village proved an outstanding success but, some weeks before the Games began, Fürstner – a Mischling – was replaced by Lieutenant Colonel Werner von und zu Gilsa. Fürstner loyally made no complaints (in public, anyway; nobody knows what he might have said in private) and served under Gilsa.

Shortly after the Games, a banquet honoured Gilsa’s contribution to making the Games a success. This, it seems, was too much for Fürstner who returned to his barracks and shot himself. Goebbels ordered the German press to report this as a car crash and the truth only emerged when foreign journalists heard about it and investigated.

William Shirer, broadcaster and journalist, gave a beautifully balanced summary:

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