Free Berlin Games by Guy Walters Page A

phoniness of the training. When the correspondent asked what opportunities Jews who lived far from Ettlingen had of training there, Tschammer und Osten replied, ‘They can become members of athletic clubs that have not excluded non-Aryans.’ The correspondent responded by asking how such clubs could exist in Germany. Tschammer und Osten initially refused to answer, but the correspondent pressed him. Eventually, the flummoxed Nazi spectacularly passed the buck: ‘If you do not believe me you can ask Count Baillet-Latour […] who will tell you that everything is all right with the Olympiad and that the Germans are fulfilling all their promises that were made concerning facilities for Jewish athletes.’
    Bergmann considered herself warily fortunate to be able to train at what was an idyllic island, with its views across the Rhine to Vogesen. ‘We felt that we had suddenly been lifted from our everyday spheres of life and carried to a sportsman’s paradise,’ gushed one anonymous attendee in a propaganda article about the camp. Bergmann recognised that the Jews’ attendance was simply a gesture, but the athletes tried tohave as good a time as possible. The same anonymous writer tells of how, in the evening after a hard day’s training, ‘songs were sung accompanied by stamping, some of them drawn out and others short and lively; the tones of an accordion were heard, and below in the Rhine valley the first lights appeared’. The writer describes how, on another evening, during a pause between the songs, the athletes gazed out across the twilit hilltops, a view that caused one of them to remark, ‘And they say we are not at home here.’ Apparently, ‘no one answered either affirmatively or negatively, since there was nothing to deny and affirmation was not necessary’. Germany was indeed their home, just as much their home as that of those who were persecuting them.
    Bergmann found herself at Ettlingen again in the autumn, but on this occasion she was the only Jew. Her room-mate was a seventeen-year-old high jumper called Dora, who Bergmann found a little strange. Dora never joined the other girls in the shower, instead always shutting herself into a room with a bath. Bergmann wondered about Dora’s modesty, but she kept her musings to herself, because ‘a Jewish girl could not afford to say anything derogatory about an Aryan’. Bergmann was right not to ask too many questions about Dora, as she had been secretly appointed by the Nazis to rival her. That was not Dora’s only secret, however. There was something else about her that Bergmann would not discover for another thirty years.
    In California, Helene Mayer also found herself wrestling with the Nazi regime. After learning of her expulsion from the Offenbach Fencing Club in April 1933, and the cessation of her government sponsorship in June, Helene did her best to continue her studies blithely. She graduated from Scripps in May 1934, knowing that her dream of joining the German Foreign Office would remain just that. Fortunately, she was offered a teaching post at the exclusive all-female Mills College in the foothills of Oakland on the eastern shore of San Francisco Bay. When she arrived in the autumn, Mayer made an immediate impact. Her fencing skills impressed everybody, and her tall, chic presence around the campus was hard to miss. One of her friends remembered Mayer being ‘more fun than a barrel of monkeys’, a young woman who loved to go to parties and to dance with men–so long as the men were taller than she. In the spring of the following year, Mayer appears to have had a week-long affair with a German naval officer serving on thelight cruiser Karlsruhe III , which was docked in San Francisco. The officer would have been taking a terrible risk consorting with a Jew, but no doubt the distance from home made him jettison caution. Mayer not only danced and slept with men, but she