Free Berlin Games by Guy Walters Page B

also fenced against them. In competition after competition she beat countless fencers of the opposite sex. At one event, an observer noted: ‘Any mental hazard the men may have felt at lunging towards a woman soon disappeared when they met her skillful foil.’
    The spectre of the forthcoming Games still taunted her, however. Would she be allowed to compete? Or would she indeed want to? In an interview with a Mills College magazine in May 1935, she admitted that it would be an ‘honour’ if Germany invited her to participate. As a former Olympic champion, she should not have regarded it as an ‘honour’–it was merely her due. It soon became clear that her loyalty to her sport and her personal ambition were greater than her loyalty to her Jewish ancestry. In August, the American Hebrew asked her a series of questions: ‘Did you receive and accept reported invitations to participate in the Olympics for Germany? Do you think in light of continued discrimination, America and other countries should withdraw? Do you regard yourself as a refugee from Germany? Did you know Nazi papers repeatedly and tendentiously reported your suicide?’ Mayer told the paper that she had not received an invitation from Germany. She then said that she was ‘unable to answer your second question’ and that she did not consider herself a refugee. She added that she was ‘amused’ by the suicide rumours.
    Mayer’s unwillingness to comment directly on the boycott movement may well have been because her family still lived in Germany, and could be punished if she made anti-Nazi remarks from the safety of California. Like Bergmann, she seemingly had little room to manoeuvre, although so far she had yet to be coerced back to Germany. There were those who maintained, however, that Mayer had been invited back to Germany, and that she was secretly stalling in order to try to improve conditions for her family. In September, Gustavus Kirby wrote to Avery Brundage, stating that he had heard that Mayer ‘has been not only invited but urged to return to Germany but that she has refused or is reticent to do so by reason of the fact that herbrother, who is a physician, has been treated so badly by the Hitler government that he is now reduced to cleaning out hallways in an apartment house’. If Mayer was stalling in order to help her family, then she was playing a dangerous game. The Nazis were not just another male fencer who thought he could make easy work of this ‘blonde girl’.
    Someone who certainly thought he could get the better of the Nazis was General Charles Sherrill of the IOC. In the late summer of 1935, he visited Germany, where he met Hitler himself in Munich at midday on 24 August. Although Sherrill was visiting the Chancellor to talk about the issue of Jewish participation, it is evident from the letter he wrote to Franklin Roosevelt some two weeks later that he was both charmed and bamboozled by Hitler. Sherrill recalled the meeting in oozing detail, his description as breathy as that of an enraptured teenager:
    This German’s face and figure showed he is in perfect health–good color, but not too much, well-built, but not too heavily, good height, but not really tall.
    His eye is clear, his glance is frank, his replies prompt, but limited. About what he said and how he said it, there was no July 4th nonsense (as we call it at home)–no speechifying, such as politicians are prone to use even with an audience of one.
    Especially did I notice the clarity and neatness of his German–if all Germans spoke so, we poor foreigners would better understand them! His precision of phrase reveals the practised orator. He evidently knows exactly what he wants to say. No great political leader in any country had ever had his text-book so widely read as has been Hitler’s ‘Mein Kampf.’ But very few foreigners notice the accent he therein casts upon two things–the