Free Berlin Games by Guy Walters

relations between countries or damage them.
    The idea for the letter and much of its text was not Temple’s, however, but that of Arnold Lunn, who had invented ski slalom racingin 1922 and had organised the first world championship in Combined Downhill and Slalom in 1931. His father, Sir Henry Lunn, was a Methodist reverend and the founder of Lunn’s Travel Agency, which would eventually become better known as Lunn Poly. In April, Arnold Lunn had written to Temple, telling him that he would be officiating at the Winter Olympics. ‘I feel curiously disinclined to accept hospitality at a banquet in Germany,’ he wrote, ‘so long as men are imprisoned in concentration camps merely because they refuse to render unto Caesar the things which are God’s.’ Lunn suggested that the archbishop should write to the British Olympic Association, although he stopped short of recommending a call for a boycott. ‘There is nothing that the Germans at this moment would dislike more than a protest from British athletic bodies against the treatment of Christians in Germany.’ In a later letter, Lunn told Temple that the Germans were ‘artlessly snobbish, and extremely anxious to be thought sporting’. He added, however, that it was ‘rather pathetic that none of them seem to mind being thought cruel, brutal, oppressive or unjust’.
    One BOA member who supported Temple’s letter was Harold Abrahams, the British 100 metres champion at the 1924 Paris Olympics, whose exploits were later to be depicted in the 1981 film Chariots of Fire . By now a renowned sports writer, the Jewish Abrahams presented a cogent argument in favour of writing to Hitler. After claiming that the letter might indeed cause Hitler to make some small concession, Abrahams addressed the broader, and more philosophical, point of the purpose of Olympism.
    â€¦if I rightly understand the fundamental principles which underlie our enthusiasm for international sport, it is that we have here a means of emphasising the similarities between nations, and we are, I think, shutting our eyes to reality, if we believe that the mere organisation and support of such institutions as the Olympic Games, constitutes the end of our duty in this matter. Quite legitimately the common bond of sport can be used to ameliorate international relationships, and unless all our professing that the Olympic Games are a good thing is so much eyewash, a body such as the British Olympic Association can legitimately regard it as within its provinces to point out that racial and religious prejudices such as exist in Germany to-day tends [ sic ] to undermine the good which sport hopes to achieve.
    This encapsulated precisely what the Olympic Games were meant to be for. Abrahams was shrewd enough not to remind the BOA of his own faith; its members might well have seized upon it to dismiss the affair as purely a Jewish matter. Abrahams’s argument showed that sport could indeed meddle in politics, and was in fact desirable if it could be used to promote good.
    The BOA was in no rush to reply. On 8 July, exactly eight weeks after the archbishop had written his letter, Evan Hunter informed Temple that writing to Hitler was ‘outside the province’ of the BOA. Abrahams’ words had not been heeded, further confirmation of Aberdare’s tokenism. Had he and the BOA been genuinely concerned about the plight of the Jews in Germany–and indeed the Olympic charter–then they would have backed any move that applied pressure to the Nazi regime.
    Meanwhile, Gretel Bergmann was doing her best to train under the eyes of the Nazis. Having won an Olympic trial at Ulm in June, in July 1935 she found herself back at Ettlingen training camp in the Black Forest. The camp was used for training a select group of Jews, a fact advertised by Tschammer und Osten. In August, a brief interview in the New York Times with the Reich’s sports leader captured the