Berlin полностью

When not watching the Olympic competition or touring the Wilhelmstrasse, visitors could attend dozens of cultural and social events designed to remind them that Berlin was a cosmopolitan and sophisticated metropolis. Very special guests were invited to a garden party at Göring’s palatial residence, which, as Ambassador Dodd could not help noticing, was “far larger and more elaborately fitted out than the White House in Washington.” Göring’s nocturnal party was lit by spotlights stationed on neighboring roofs and by hundreds of lights suspended from trees. “There was hardly anything that modern inventors could have added,” commented Dodd. Göring’s rival Goebbels, however, threw an even more lavish party on the beautiful Phaueninsel west of the city. Guests reached the island via a newly constructed pontoon bridge and then passed through an “aisle of honor” formed by young female dancers holding torches. The whole place was done up like a movie set and stocked with starlets from UFA, one of whom, the bountiful Lida Baarova, was Goebbels’s latest mistress. Although Ambassador Dodd, again dutifully in attendance, was unsettled by fireworks explosions “of a kind that suggested war,” he was impressed by the gaudy magnificence of Goebbels’s bash, which he guessed “must have cost 40,000 marks of government money.” Throughout the games Berlin’s museums mounted special exhibitions and its musical ensembles performed gala concerts. For the opening ceremony Richard Strauss directed an all-star orchestra and chorus in renditions of the German anthem, the Horst Wessel Lied, and a new “Olympic Hymn” he had written for the occasion.

Some foreign reporters remained skeptical about the show of civility they witnessed during the games. When a group of drunken Brownshirts, forgetting their instructions regarding open displays of anti-Semitism, roamed the streets bawling “Wenn die Olympiade sind vorbei / Schlagen wir die Juden zu brei (When the Olympics are over, we’ll beat the Jews to a pulp),” these journalists were not surprised. William Shirer, who reported for CBS News, understood that the Nazis had “put up a very good front for the general visitors.” Most of the foreign press, however, was taken in by the friendly atmosphere and organizational virtuosity displayed during the games. Commenting on the American team’s reception in Berlin, both the New York Times and the New York Herald Tribune spoke of a warm welcome surpassing anything the Americans had ever experienced at an Olympic venue. Frederic T. Birchall of the Times praised the Olympic stadium as a structure “built for the ages, revealing the far-sighted vision” of its creators. The British Daily Mail declared that no festival could be more splendid than the one taking place in Berlin, and gushed that visitors would find the city “magical.” The World of Sports, also British, proposed that if visitors could forget their “prejudices” and the “rumors” they had heard about Nazi Germany, they would take away an experience of “lasting good” based on “the friendship of the sporting youth of the world.” Even journalists from France, which had recently been shocked by Germany’s remilitarization of the Rhineland, expressed respect for the cordiality of the German hosts, noting with particular gratitude that Berliners had shouted “Viva la France!” when the French team arrived.

Like the foreign journalists, most foreign visitors to the Berlin games seem to have gotten the impression that the regime had meant them to—namely, that Nazi Berlin was orderly and not nearly so repressive as many critics claimed. Among the prominent American guests, Charles Lindbergh showed himself a Berlin-booster as he toured local airplane factories and sprinted around a practice track at the Olympic Village. The writer Thomas Wolfe fell in love with the city during his Olympic visit, especially since some of the locals mistook him for a competitor. At one point, thoroughly drunk, he staggered down a street hugging the trees and proclaiming his admiration for everything German. He told a reporter for the Berliner Tageblatt that if “there were no Germany, it would be necessary to invent one.” He pronounced the Olympic stadium to be “the most beautiful and most perfect in its design that had ever been built.” As a patriotic American, however, Wolfe rooted for the American team, including its sensational Negro sprinter and jumper, Jesse Owens. “Owens was black as tar,” said the Southern writer later, “but what the hell, it was our team and I thought he was wonderful. I was proud of him, so I yelled.”