Hitler’s Olympics were more than just games

More Than Just Games:  Canada and the 1936 Olympics By Richard Menkis and Harold Troper.  University of Toronto Press

I boycotted the 2014 Sochi Olympic games, none too effectively, from my Montreal vantage point, refusing to view them on television or read about them in the press, even ignoring my understandably enthusiastic kids when they followed the progress of Canadian ski jumpers or speed skaters.  The idea of a Russian Olympics under Vladimir Putin struck me as grotesque.

One related video I did watch was the horse-whipping by latter-day Cossacks of the activist punk band Pussy Riot.  This took place on the outskirts of the Olympic grounds, with few spectators, but in the era of viral video it made its way to lone boycotters like me halfway around the world.

Richard Menkis and Harold Troper present a related scenario with verve and careful research, associated with Canada’s role in the lead-up to and the competitions of the 1936 Berlin Summer Olympics. Based upon their popular museum exhibit, which was mounted during the 2010 Vancouver Winter Games, More Than Just Games: Canada and the 1936 Olympics depicts the failure of boycott efforts following the rise of the Nazi Party in Germany.  

The Olympics of 1936 resulted in an international propaganda coup for the Nazi Reich, just as the regime was expanding its concentration camp system as well as its use of extra-legal terror to attack perceived enemies.

Among its many revelations, More Than Just Games conveys how seat-of-the-pants Canada’s Olympic efforts were at the time. The federal Liberal government contributed the grand sum of $10,000 – in two instalments – to organizing committees’ budgets.  Many athletes paid their own way or raised funds independently in order to cover the cost of travel. 

 Although Canada chose not to send contributions to a number of cultural side-events organized by the Germans, we did send a group of dancers under the tutelage of Toronto-based choreographer Boris Volkoff.  With the mistaken impression that they were to participate in an “amateur dance competition,” Volkoff’s youthful troupe discovered upon arrival in Berlin “that the dance event was neither amateur nor competitive. . . .  the Canadians were the only amateur troupe among the 14 national dance groups.”

Though Menkis and Troper are game when aspects of their tale turn farcical, the bulk of what they have to tell calls for a tone of studied amazement.  They make it readily clear how well-reported were the Nazi attacks on Jews, Gypsies, social democrats and Catholics. The newspapers of record that deserve honourable mention for such work include the Toronto Daily Star and the Calgary Daily Herald. Headlines abounded, describing the “social death” of German Jews during the lead-up to and proclamation of  the Nuremberg Laws in September, 1935.

A moving presence in the historical narrative is Matthew Halton, a young reporter for the Toronto Daily Star, who wrote early about parades of German children shouting “The Jews must be destroyed.”  He warned of Hitler’s desire for a “disastrous foreign war” and he criticized the notion that the German Olympic organization could be seen as independent of Nazi moves to co-ordinate “all aspects of society.”

An early effort of Halton’s was an interview with Toronto Reform Rabbi Maurice Eisendrath, who visited Germany in the ’30s.  A major player in efforts to mount a Canadian boycott of both Winter and Summer Olympics, Rabbi Eisendrath told Halton that in Germany Jews were “rapidly being reduced to the condition of ‘pariah dogs,’ and how he saw teachers separating Jewish children from their classmates.”

Eisendrath was seemingly a lone figure among Jewish community and political leaders willing to work with players on all fronts in an effort to convince the Canadian Olympic Committee to boycott the German games.  When this failed he worked with the Canadian Jewish Congress as well as with labour groups to convince the federal government to cease funding Olympic plans.

None of these efforts succeeded.  In July of 1936 “approximately 120 athletes, coaches, judges, Olympic officials, and their luggage boarded Canadian Pacific’s Duchess of Bedford” ocean liner for Europe.  

The Canadian medal showing was poor, with highlights including a gold in canoeing, a newly established Olympic sport.  A silver was won in hurdles, as well as a silver for the Windsor-based V-8s basketball team (for those driving a vehicle with a Windsor-built V-8 under the hood, this lends new meaning to the next tune-up).

Troubling stories haunt these outcomes, though the explanation for certain darker turns are lost in the mists of time.  At the last moment two Jewish-American relay runners were benched without explanation. The Canadian hockey team, which had won every gold medal since the inception of the modern Olympics, was bested by Great Britain in a set of circumstances too complicated to detail here. In a bleakly absurd footnote to this outcome, Hitler’s Air Force commander and early architect of concentration camps, Hermann Goering, found his way to the Canadian dressing room to “profess his belief that the Canadians were the ‘real world champions.’”

This sort of juxtaposition – the mundane alongside the horrible – lurks throughout More Than Just Games.  Its authors convey the dark heart of their story – the full social catastrophe meeting central European Jews, while the pageantry and organizational skill applied by the Germans to the Olympics won over popular opinion.

Without scolding or high-handed moralizing, Menkis and Troper tell the story of figures like Eisendrath and Halton who recognized the bleak picture; at the same time, the majority of Canadian athletic, political and journalistic players focused on the success of the German spectacle.  This failure of judgment influenced Canadian political and trade policy after the Olympics were over.  In 1937 prime minister Mackenzie King spent time with Hitler at the Hindenburg Palace. In his diary the prime minister wrote, “My sizing up of the man as I sat and talked with him was that he is really one who truly loves his fellow-men, and his country, and would make a sacrifice for their good.”

 

Norman Ravvin is a writer and teacher in Montreal.