Jewish myths about the Berlin Olympic Games (1936)
(with addition of July 19, 2008)
Le Monde, slanted newspaper (continued)
In today’s Le Monde Sylvain Cypel devotes an article to Jesse Owens, the American mulatto who won four gold medals at the Olympic Games in Berlin in 1936 (“1936, à Berlin, l’Aryen ‘Lutz’ devient l’ami de Jesse, le métis” [1936, in Berlin, the Aryan “Lutz” befriends Jesse, the mulatto], September 17-18, 2000, p. VI).
The journalist is forced to acknowledge that the story of chancellor Hitler refusing to shake Jesse Owens’s hand is but a legend. Still in 1991, Le Monde accredited that legend under the by-line of Claude Sarraute, who had dared to write “Hitler indeed refused to shake the hand of Jesse Owens, the black American champion at the Berlin Olympics in 1936” (“Bleu, blanc, noir”, December 3, 1991, p. 34).
The protocol had not provided for the athletes’ presentation to the chancellor and J. Owens himself afterwards denied ever having been in Hitler’s presence. What S. Cypel could have pointed out is that, having noted the defeat of Ludwig (“Lutz” or “Luz”) Long in the long jump, Hitler, on his dais above, made at first, like many other Germans, “a sign of disappointment, then applauded the black American’s performance” (J.-P. Rudin, Nice-Matin, April 4, 1980).
The same S. Cypel fails to add that the name of J. Owens was engraved four times on the tower of honour at the Olympic grounds. A photograph has immortalised the act of the German sculptor inscribing the illustrious name for the second time at the very top of the monument. Once back in the United States, the athlete was to experience anew, on public transport as elsewhere, the daily humiliations inflicted on blacks in his country, and would not fail to make a comparison with the treatment that had been accorded him in Germany. In 1984, four years after J. Owens’s death, his widow recalled that he had never made any complaints about Hitler’s Germany. How could he have done so? When he walked off the field side by side with his German friend and rival, an ovation saluted the two athletes. In the two-volume photographic album devoted to the Games, Hitler is shown six times, J. Owens seven times and the black athletes in general twelve times. The chapter covering foot racing opens with “The fastest man in the world: Jesse Owens-USA”. The opening page of the first volume bears a photograph of Adolf Hitler amidst a group of German officials, and that of volume two a portrait of Theodor Lewald, a Jew and president of the German Olympic organising committee (Olympia 1936, Die Olympischen Spiele 1936 in Berlin und Garmisch-Partenkirchen, 2 vol., 1936, 292 p.).
The Jewish athletes at the Olympics
S. Cypel writes that “the German-Jewish athletes [were] prevented from participating” in the Games. One will remind him that, as I have just mentioned, the president of the German Olympic organising committee was the German Jew Theodor Lewald, that the German Jewess Helene Mayer won the silver medal in fencing; as for the German Jew or half-Jew Rudi Ball, who at the Winter Games of 1932 had been a member of his country’s bronze medallist ice-hockey team, he again played on that team in the 1936 Games held at Garmisch-Partenkirchen. It is true that at the last moment the German star high-jumper Gretel Bergman was cut from the team but that could not be for her Jewishness, as is proved by the examples of the two other athletes. Hitler had expressly stated before the games that Jewish athletes must not be excluded from the German team (Eliahu Ben Elissar, La Diplomatie du IIIe Reich et les juifs, Christian Bourgois, Paris 1981, I, p. 164). On the subject of German-Jewish athletes’ participation in those Olympics, one noteworthy reaction was that of Victor Klemperer, cousin of the orchestral conductor Otto Klemperer. The son of a rabbi and husband of an Aryan wife, he spent the entire National-Socialist period, including the war years, in Germany and, more precisely, in Dresden which he had to leave after the terrible Allied bombings of February 1945. In his private diary, under the date of 13 August 1936, he noted:
I find the Olympic Games, which will soon be over, doubly repulsive. As an absurd over-estimation of sport; the honour of a people depends on whether one of its members jumps ten centimetres higher than the others. And besides, it’s a nigger from the United States who has jumped the highest, and the silver medal in fencing for Germany has been taken by the Jewess Helene M[a]yer (I don’t know what is more indecent, her participation as a German of the 3rd Reich or the fact that her performance should be claimed as a victory for the 3rd Reich (Journal, I, Seuil, Paris 2000, p. 286).
It must be said that V. Klemperer was fiercely anti-Zionist. For him, Zionism was “pure Nazism” and “repugnant” (ibid., p. 438).
Entente between National Socialists and Zionists
A good number of Zionist Jews held an ideology similar to that of the National Socialists. Efforts are made today to keep this point under wraps, at the risk of thwarting completely the comprehension of a whole series of historical facts among which may be cited: 1) the August 1933 Ha’avara Agreement (transfer agreement) reached between Zionists and the 3rd Reich authorities with the aim of breaking or getting around the formidable economic boycott of Germany, decreed by the other international Jewish organisations as early as March 1933; 2) the approval by a sizeable part of the Zionist camp, in 1935, of the Nuremberg Laws for the protection of German blood (these Zionists were in favour of the protection of Jewish blood and thus against mixed marriage); 3) the co-operation, all throughout the war, of the “Brown Jews” or the “International of Jewish Collaborators” with Adolf Eichmann, himself pro-Zionist and pro-Jewish, as well as with other German officials; 4) the innumerable contacts between Jewish officials and the German authorities during the whole of the war, going as far as the offer by the Lehi, alias Stern Group, of a military alliance against Great Britain (January 1941) or the meeting, in April 1945, between Heinrich Himmler and a prominent member of the World Jewish Congress, Norbert Masur. Zionists and National Socialists were also in favour of a “territorial final solution” of the Jewish question (territoriale Endlösung der Judenfrage). It goes without saying that, as in all collaborations, co-operations or co-habitations, especially in political matters, ulterior motives, manœuvres, machinations and turnabouts were not lacking.
The rise of German Zionism in 1936
In February 1936, that is, some months before the opening of the Olympic Games, the German Zionists had officially held their congress in Berlin. By that same year Germany hosted about forty Zionist training centres (Umschulungslagern) for the instruction of young Jews in farming or other skills they would need to use later on in Palestine. The Jewish press in Germany at the time experienced a prodigious expansion. There was talk of a reawakening or revival of Jewish consciousness. Assuredly the anti-Zionist Jews deplored or condemned this state of things. Many Jews, particularly those of the older generation, proudly laid claim to a certain Germanity: among them, the project held by young Jews to be a solution for the future was seen as a disaster in the making. The Germans authorised the setting up of uniformed Jewish paramilitary groups under a blue and white flag (the flag of the future state of Israel), albeit on condition that they not parade in the streets but only within their school grounds or barracks. Sometimes there were sporting events between young Zionist and young National Socialist teams. On all of these aspects one may especially read either the book by Francis Nicosia, The Third Reich and the Palestine Question (University of Texas Press, Austin 1985), or Otto Dov Kulka’s noteworthy study “The reactions of German Jewry to the National-Socialist Regime” on pages 367-379 of Jehuda Reinharz’s Living with Antisemitism (University Press of New England, Hanover [New Hampshire] 1987), or the book by the French author Emmanuel Ratier, Les Guerriers d’Israël (Facta, Paris 1995). One may also consult the Encyclopaedia Judaica or the Encyclopedia of the Holocaust; I recommend this latter book’s entry “Lohamei Herut Israel” on the subject of the proposal by the Lehi, to which Yitzak Shamir belonged, of a military alliance between Jews and Germans against Great Britain.
The case of Marty Glickman
Keen to detect the least hint of anti-Semitism and take advantage of it in order to find fault, wail and make new demands, S. Cypel does not shrink from attacking the heads of the 1936 American delegation. He states that this squad included only two Jewish athletes, Marty Glickman and Sam Stoller. At the last minute, these two relay racers were replaced by two blacks, Ralph Metcalfe and Jesse Owens. One sole explanation for Le Monde: Glickman and Stoller were dropped because they were Jews! The argument is inadmissible, since in the end the choice proved to be among the most fortunate, with the blacks taking the gold medal. In any case, if certain persons are to be believed, in the 1980s M. Glickman, then best known in America as a football radio commentator, said he had an “enthusiastic” recollection of those games (G. Frey ed., Vorsicht Fälschung!, FZ-Verlag, Munich 1994, p. 119).
The case of Horst Wessel
S. Cypel evokes “the Horst Wessel Lied, that song of the SA in honour of an anti-semitic hooligan, bellowed after the Olympic anthem”. A Jewish and Communist tradition has it that Horst Wessel met his death either in a street battle with the Communists or in a fight in public with a pimp. The truth of the matter appears to be that this pastor’s son, a militant anti-Communist active in the SA, law student and, in his free time, poet, was shot in the face by a Communist at his home and died in a Berlin hospital on February 23, 1930. In September 1929 he had published a poem to the glory of the SA and it is that poem, set to music after his death, which became Germany’s second national anthem.
Less lying propaganda?
It is somewhat difficult these days to keep pace with the daily Le Monde in its production of errors or lies relating to the 3rd Reich or the “Shoah”. I have made a duty of sending to both its managing editor, Jean-Marie Colombani, and to the authors of grossly mistaken or mendacious articles, my humble inventories, invariably set forth under the heading “Le Monde, journal oblique (suite)”. I am aware of the fact that this newspaper, in great need of money and fearing the wrath of the Jews, steadily tries to make atonement for its cardinal sin: did it not see fit, in its issues of December 29, 1978 and January 16, 1979, to print my iconoclastic observations on the physical and chemical impossibilities of the Nazi gas chambers? It is this act that remains etched in the minds of those who profess never to forget and never to forgive. So be it! But there ought to be limits to servility.
Jean-Christophe Mitterrand has seen in Le Monde the “echo chamber” of “a certain Jewish lobby” (Libération, August 30, 1999, p. 15). That lobby bursts our eardrums with its lying propaganda, as with its “Holocaust” industry’s inventions and the fabrications of its Shoah-Business. It is time that Le Monde ceased being its “echo chamber”.
For my part, I await the review that this newspaper will not fail to do of a work that is among the most horrid the holocaustic propaganda outfits have ever produced. It is the book chosen by French Education minister Jack Lang for the mandatory teaching of the “Shoah” to the children of France from the third year in secondary school. Concocted by Stéphane Bruchfeld and Paul Levine, it is to be published by Ramsay under the title: Dites-le à vos enfants (Tell it to your children).
I shall, upon its release, give an account both of this book as such and of its review by Le Monde.
September 17, 2000
NB of September 29: In its issue of today Le Monde publishes, under the by-line of Philippe-Jean Catinchi, a brief review of a book by Jean-Michel Blaizeau, Les Jeux défigurés de Berlin (The disfigured Berlin games). A passage in this account reads that what has been retained of the 1936 Olympics is “the fury of Hitler refusing to shake Jesse Owens’s hand”. Nothing in the piece indicates that this is the stuff of myth.
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Addition of July 19, 2008: Le Monde provides us with new proof of its slanted character. In today’s issue it claims to reproduce, on pages 62-63, Sylvain Cypel’s article of eight years ago (Le Monde, September 17 and 18, 2000, p. VI). But it does so obliquely. It refrains from advising the reader of three cuts – of 48, 41 and 17 lines, respectively –, then from indicating them typographically, as is customary. As for the title, it is heavily altered in both letter and spirit. In 2000 it read “1936, in Berlin, the Aryan ‘Lutz’ befriends Jesse, the mulatto”; in 2008 it becomes “The Offence to the Nazis”. Where S. Cypel honestly acknowledged that at the Berlin Olympic Games, contrary to legend, no offence was committed towards blacks by Hitler or the “Nazis”, the newspaper would now have us believe that an offence towards the “Nazi” dignitaries was bravely committed by “Lutz” (or “Luz”) Long. However, S. Cypel had expressly said the contrary, citing the following testimony: “There should be no misunderstanding. In 1936 Lutz Long was twenty-three years old. He was neither a Nazi nor anti-Nazi. He was just a German of his time, proud of what seemed to him, as to many other young people, the rebirth of Germany. In publicly embracing Jesse he meant neither to shock anyone nor to protest against anything.”
One sees from this that in 2000 it was still possible, by way of exception, to demonstrate some scruples and exercise a certain probity with regard to National Socialist Germany: at a pinch, errors too crude were still rectified. In 2008 there is no longer any question of that. The innocent reader perhaps imagines that the further away we get from the Second World War, the more the big defeated country ought to see itself treated dispassionately, with serenity. Error! Our kosher butchers and butcheresses insist that the knives must be sharpened ever more. Today in our schools, from year 4 pupils learn that the Jew embodies both Good and the innocent victim, while the National Socialist, called “Nazi”, embodies Evil and the killer. This is how the new universal religion wants it. As Alain Finkielkraut, whose words are gold, acknowledges, the Jew in France has become “the darling of History” and may also appear as “the darling of Memory”.