Initially, the United States played a prominent role in the protest movement. In November 1933 the American Amateur Athletic Union voted to boycott the German games unless Germany changed its policy vis-a-vis Jewish athletes. Avery Brundage, head of the American IOC, raised the possibility of moving the summer games to Rome or Tokyo. Fearful of losing the games, the Germans revoked their ban on Jewish participation on German teams. In June 1934 the national IOC nominated twenty-one Jewish athletes for Olympic training camps. It also invited He-lene Mayer, a half-Jewish fencer who had won a gold medal in the 1928 games, to join the German team. These concessions pacified America’s Brundage, who now became a passionate supporter of the German games, dismissing lingering opposition as “anti-Olympic” or “Communist-inspired.” General Charles Sherrill, an influential member of the American IOC, also declared himself satisfied with the German posture after Mayer had been named to the team. He did not insist that Germany add any more Jews, saying that America had no more business pressing Germany on its Jews than Germany would have in telling America how to treat its Negroes. Anyway, he added, “there was never a prominent Jewish athlete in history.”
Meanwhile, on-site plans for the summer games in Berlin were proceeding at a furious pace. The local organizers were determined to put on the most spectacular and best-run games ever. To this end, construction crews thoroughly transformed the western part of the city, putting in new streets, subways, and elevated train lines in addition to elaborate sporting facilities. The most imposing of the new buildings was the main stadium, the Reichssportfeld, the largest structure of its kind to date. The road leading to the entrance of the stadium was lined with monumental statues designed by the pro-Nazi sculptors Arno Breker and Josef Thorak. The area surrounding the stadium was as big as the entire city had been in 1680. A ten-mile route running from the Alexanderplatz to the sporting complex, embracing Unter den Linden and the Charlottenburger Chausee, was dubbed the “Via Triumphalis.” It was along this route that the Olympic Torch, designed by German chemists to burn vigorously in wind and rain, traveled its last miles from Greece to the German capital. On its final leg it was carried by a flaxen-haired Berliner named Schilgen. As he approached the stadium to light the Olympic Flame (a Hollywood touch added for the L.A. Games), SA and SS men raised their arms in the Hitler-salute.
While Nazi iconography was plainly visible around Berlin during the games, signs of the regime’s anti-Semitic policies were hardly in evidence. The yellow benches in the Tiergarten had been painted over. Notices forbidding Jewish access to public buildings had been removed.
Additional measures to impress foreign visitors with Berlin’s civility included a roundup of beggars and known con-men, as well as a prohibition on price-gouging. Buildings were scrubbed of soot, new lime trees were planted along Unter den Linden, and the Quadriga atop the Brandenburg Gate was regilded. Aware that many guests harbored hopes of finding something of the old “decadent” Berlin, the Nazi authorities reinstated some 7,000 prostitutes whom they had banned from the streets as part of their effort to “clean up” Berlin. Local women, moreover, were allowed to wear their hemlines five centimeters higher than the regime had heretofore permitted. The Nazis also reopened a number of homosexual bars, and Hein-rich Himmler instructed the Gestapo not to arrest any foreign gentlemen for transgressing Paragraph 175 of the penal code without first securing written permission from him.
The Nazi government, however, had no intention of allowing visitors to forget that Germany was under new management. In addition to plastering Berlin with swastikas, the organizers put out a guide to the city advising guests to visit the Wil-helmstrasse to see where Hitler worked. “Today,” bragged the brochure, “the Wil-helmstrasse is once again the center of a goal-oriented national government. It harbors the office of the man whom every visitor wants to see above all: Adolf Hitler!” While touting the city’s Christian churches, the Olympic guide carefully omitted any mention of its many synagogues. Jew-baiting was put under wraps during the games, but so were the Jews.
