Exhibit offers glimpse of the Nazi Olympics

By ROGER H. AYLWORTH - Staff Writer

German martial music mingles with the Star Spangled Banner. Nazi symbols are juxtaposed with the athletic exploits of Black Americans, and the ever-echoing question, "How could it happen?" come together in an exhibit opening next week at Chico State University.

The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum's "Nazi Olympics: Berlin 1936" uses words, pictures, music, and video to walk the visitor through the games.

The traveling exhibit officially opens Tuesday in the west half of Colusa Hall on the Chico State campus, and is free to the public.

Lauren Kaminsky, director of traveling exhibits for the Washington D.C.-based Holocaust Museum, said the exhibit - which cost more than $1 million to create and is transported in three 48-foot tractor-trailer rigs - tries to explore the dynamics of the Olympics in the context of Nazi propaganda and American racial politics of the time.

From the day Berlin was chosen as the site for the 1936 summer games it was a focus of debate.

The exhibit gives a thumbnail sketch of the rise of Nazism, and with it the growth of state-sponsored anti-Semitism.

There was a move at one point for the United States to simply boycott the games.

When the decision was made for the United States to participate, there was pressure for American Jewish athletes to refuse to take part.

The exhibit is a mixture of decidedly human stories.

Eleven years before his brother, Jackie Robinson, would break the color barrier in major league baseball, Mac Robinson won a silver medal for the United States in the 200-meter race in Berlin.

Kaminsky said most Americans remember the Berlin games for the stinging setback to Nazi views of racial superiority delivered by Jesse Owens, but she said, "The interesting thing is the Germans cheered for Jesse Owens every time he ran."

There is also the story of Gretel Bergman.

At the time of the '36 games Bergman held the woman's high jump record in Germany, having cleared 5-foot-3, but since she was Jewish the German Olympic Committee denied her a place on the team.

A July 16, 1936, letter from the committee to Bergman offered her "standing-room" tickets if she wanted to attend the games.

Kaminsky said Bergman eventually moved to the United States, and in a effort to divorce herself from all things German, she changed her name to Margaret Lambert.

Chico State professor Carol Edelman, who with her professor husband Sam Edelman was instrumental in arranging the exhibit's visit to campus, said Lambert will come to the university to speak in late March.

On the American side, sprinters Marty Glickman and Sam Stoller, who were both Jews, were pulled from the 4x100 relay team the day before the race, and replaced by Owens and fellow black sprinter Ralph Metcalfe.

At the time there were allegations the two Jewish runners were pulled to placate Hitler, but, according to Kaminsky, the coaches always maintained they were merely putting the squad's two fastest runners in the race.

Samuel Balter was a member of the gold-medal winning U.S. basketball team, but as an American Jew he was criticized by some in the Jewish press for even taking part in the games.

While the Germans may have lost the games in terms of medal count, the 1936 Olympics was a major win for the Nazis.

Kaminsky said the Germans hid the most blatant signs of oppression of the Jews from the eyes of the world press, and created an image of a well-ordered and progressive nation.

"The Olympics was a major propaganda machine and the Nazi regime used it wonderfully," she said.

Carol Edelman and Kaminsky said the exhibit is designed to leave visitors with a range of messages.

Kaminsky said the goal is to get people to remember events of the past and educate them that these events not continue to repeat themselves.

Edelman said she hopes viewers will take as part of the message the necessity to challenge things and ideas that we recognize as wrong and to "complain early before it gets worse."

She also said she hopes people will recognize that "the individual can make a difference."

Kaminsky said the exhibit obviously leads people to ask, how could an advanced, educated society like Germany do what it ultimately did? But it can't answer that question.

Why and how may well be questions that can never be adequately explained, but both Edelman and Kaminsky said one of the messages of the exhibit has to be never again.