Free Hitler's Olympics by Christopher Hilton Page A

Francisco and asked him to negotiate a compromise, assuring him she felt in no way Jewish. 21 He recommended she be granted citizenship despite the grandparents factor.
    Maybe pressure of unpleasant consequences was brought to bear on the family. Her mother cabled her saying her brothers were considered German citizens and so she was, too. One report suggested she had been obliged to disassociate herself from her Jewish father and say she was the product of her Aryan mother and an illicit affair with an Aryan father. Another report hinted that some test had been carried out and she had only 25 per cent Jewish blood. 22
    She would go to Berlin.
    Fritz Wandt was eleven and his family were farmers at Dyrotz, a tiny place within walking distance of where the Olympic Village would be. They’d moved about a bit but his father considered Dyrotz ‘as his elixir of life’ and they came back in 1935. He leased land and literally made hay. At the military camp nearby ‘there were a lot of horses and they needed hay and so we took ours and sold it to them. The Olympic Village was already under construction. We could see it when we came past it with our loads of hay. As early as this time, it was possible for all the nations that were going to take part in the three-day event to have their horses there and exercise on the military training area – very similar to the Olympic course. As a little boy you could get into the stables and watch the horses. I remember that the Swedish team – I think it was, or it may have been the Swiss – had their horses. That was the beginning of it for me, the beginning of my Olympic enthusiasm.’ 23
    In September, a German football team called Ratibor played a Polish team in Upper Silesia – part of Germany, of course – in front of 50,000 people. After the game a member of that crowd, a Polish Jew called Edmund Baumgartner, was reportedly beaten to death by some Nazis. The facts remain disputed because other sources suggest Baumgartner played and when his team took the lead the crowd invaded the pitch, and he was beaten to death on it. Whatever the truth, newspapers spread the story far and wide, and the stark brutality of it seemed to encapsulate the Nazis. That it happened at a sporting event provoked its own kind of disquiet, heightened because the German team was due to play England on 4 December at White Hart Lane, London – the home of the Tottenham Hotspur team, which had wide Jewish support. The ominous mood heightened further with the announcement that the Germans would be bringing 10,000 of their own supporters.
    Hitler intended to use the behaviour of the 10,000 as living proof that the Nazi regime was humane, normal and sporting. This might help to head off any boycotts of the Olympics, as would the presence in London at the time of the match of von Tschammer und Osten, Lewald and Diem. They would be lobbying hard.
    On 5 November, three months to the day before the Winter Games opened, Baillet-Latour visited Hitler and had a long conversation with him. Judging the nuances of it, recapturing the hard and soft moments, is very difficult. Baillet-Latour pointed out that Munich newspapers worked under censorship and carried stories about signs at the Garmisch recreation hall saying ‘Jews Are Forbidden to Enter’, words that violated the spirit which the Germans had assured the world they would respect. Hitler promised the signs would come down there, in Berlin and from centres of foreign tourists, but gave no promise about the special glass cases on the streets which displayed the rabidly anti-Semitic Der Stürmer magazine for people to read.
    The German newspapers did not carry any of this and the Propaganda Ministry refused to issue a statement. The news emerged when Baillet-Latour met foreign correspondents and answered their questions. He was asked about a reported official German news service announcement that ‘in future the winners of athletics contests in the Third Reich may