Wolfe’s mention of Owens calls to mind the famous story of Hitler’s refusal to shake the athlete’s hand after his four splendid victories. The story is a myth. To avoid just such an embarrassing possibility, Hitler decided in advance not to congratulate any of the athletes publicly. (After the games, he privately honored the German victors.) Owens himself later insisted that Hitler had not been inhospitable. He claimed that he had caught the Führer’s eye once in the stadium and that Hitler had waved to him. Owens added: “I think the writers showed bad taste in criticizing the man of the hour in Germany.”
Owens’s four gold medals were not enough to give America the overall victory in the 1936 Berlin Olympics. With fifty-six medals, the United States came in a distant second to the German team, which won eighty-nine medals, thirty-three of them gold. No doubt the German organizers had taken pains to swell the number of German victories by adding new events, like women’s gymnastics and yachting, in which Germany was especially strong. Nonetheless, the host team’s victory was impressive—particularly in light of the fact that the Germans had not yet discovered blood-doping.
The Berlin Olympics was the first sporting contest to be televised, though not yet “up close and personal,” and not yet in pictures clear enough to be discernible to the tiny viewing audience. A much more celebrated and lasting document of the games was produced by Hitler’s court filmmaker, Leni Riefenstahl. As she had with Triumph of the Will, Riefenstahl received her commission to make a film about the Berlin Olympics directly from Hitler. The Reich government financed the project and provided extensive organizational support. When the games opened, Riefenstahl was ready with cameras stationed all over Berlin and the Reichs sportfeld. Again, her filming techniques were innovative. For example, for aerial shots she sent up balloons fitted with tiny cameras, much like the blimps that would later become ubiquitous at major American sporting events. To film the crew race at Grünau she employed a Luftwaffe zeppelin, but it sprang a leak and dropped into the lake. She also installed cameras in pits in the stadium (Jessie Owens narrowly escaped falling into one), had the marathoners carry cameras during training, and even put cameras on the saddles of competing equestrians. When darkness prevented good shots of the pole vault, she persuaded some of the competitors to jump again for her cameras on the following day. She also persuaded the decathlon champion, the American Glenn Morris, to repeat his 1,500-meter sprint, which she had failed to get on film. Morris was obliging because he was deeply smitten with Riefenstahl. According to her memoir, after one of his victories he accosted her in the stadium, tore off her blouse, and fondled her breasts. She was taken aback but not put off. With his muscular frame and virile good looks, Morris was her kind of man. They embarked on a steamy affair that ended only with Morris’s return to America. “Never before had I experienced such a passion,” she wrote later.
The resulting film, Olympia, is an homage to the male body in action (not surprising, given Riefenstahl’s inclinations). The work does not emphasize German victories and does not come across as particularly nationalistic. Yet it is a brilliant propaganda piece nonetheless. Nazi leaders, especially Hitler, appear in the film solely as benevolent sports lovers, cheering when the Germans win, graciously shrugging off defeats. In its technical virtuosity, Olympia is a celebration of German creativity and initiative. The German papers made much of the fact that Los Angeles, supposedly the film capital of the world, had produced no film on the 1932 Olympics. As for the city of Berlin itself, it is depicted in Olympia as a happy and harmonious place, a Volksgemeinschaft open to the world.
