Games at Garmisch

(See front cover and pictures, pp. 38 & 39)

Sixty miles southwest of Munich, on the fringe of the Bavarian Alps, lie the twin villages of Garmisch-Partenkirchen. The houses have brightly painted walls. The inns have tiled stoves in the dining rooms. Woodcutters in green felt hats, puffing pipes that reach down to their waists, use oxcarts to haul pine logs down the snowy mountain roads. Last week the wintry quiet of Garmisch-Partenkirchen was pleasantly shattered by an event which mystified the woodcutters as much as it delighted the innkeepers by accounting for the presence in the town of some 50,000 visitors, including Realmleader Hitler himself. The event was the opening of the Fourth Olympic Winter Games.

As scene of the games which were held at Chamonix in 1924, at St. Moritz in 1928 and Lake Placid in 1932, Garmisch-Partenkirchen was selected two years ago because it was supposed to be the finest winter sports resort in Germany. Since then, Germany's Olympic Committee has spent 3,000,000 marks ($1,200,000) building headquarters for officials, a mile bobsled run, an artificial ice rink, a huge ski stadium, a ski jump so tall it makes the town's old one look like a mink-slide. All these preparations were keyed to the widespread German belief that the 11th Olympiad, which reaches its climax next summer in Berlin, was to be a rare chance to win back some of the international goodwill lost during three years of Naziism. The whole country had been carefully primed to play the perfect host to the visiting athletes from 28 nations, who, Germans fondly hoped, would afterward scatter to the world as friendly missionaries for the Third Reich.

First event on the program was the parade of the contestants and the ceremony of the Olympic Oath. A crowd of 50,000 gathered in the stadium below the ski jump to watch Herr Hitler, who has never sat on a bob-sled and cannot stand on skis, review the parade.

While four German regimental bands tootled merrily in a snowstorm, the march began. First of the 1,600 athletes to appear through the stadium gates were the Greek skiers. Next came the Australians: two officials and a lone speed skater. First misunderstanding of the Olympic Winter Games promptly followed. To avoid confusion in such matters, Olympic authorities long ago devised a special salute to be used on gala occasions: raising the right arm straight into the air. This salute when made quickly closely resembles the Nazi salute. To most spectators, the, acknowledgment which the athletes gave as they passed Herr Hitler, standing on the balcony of the club house, doubtless appeared to be a return of his own Nazi hand-wag. To avoid giving this impression, the 115 U. S. athletes, next to last in the alphabetically arranged procession, failed to salute at all, merely turned eyes right. When they were cheered less loudly than the rest, U.'S. correspondents cabled that the U. S. team had been "snubbed."

On the reviewing stand President Karl Ritter von Halt of the German Organizing Committee announced Realmleader Hitler, who had arrived by train from Munich an hour before. Into the profound snowy silence the voice of Der Fuehrer came out of six loudspeakers: "I hereby declare these Fourth Olympic Winter Games of the year 1936, held in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, open." In a steel bowl high up above the stadium on one side of the ski-jump, a pale spout of flame from the

Olympic torch popped up. On the other side of the run, the Olympic flag, which consists of a white background decorated with five interlocking circles to represent the Continents, floated into the air. The Olympic bell rang. All the church bells of Garmisch tinkled in response. A cannon, lugged into the arena by oxen, boomed. The bands played the Olympic hymn. The crowd cheered, clapped, yelped "Heils" that echoed down from the mountains. When the uproar began to die down, German Skier Willi Bogner scrambled up the steps of a rostrum decked with fir boughs, raised his right arm in Olympic salute, touched the flag of the German delegation with his left hand and recited the Olympic oath: "We swear that we will take part in the Olympic Games in loyal competition, respecting the regulations which govern them and desirous of participating in them in the true spirit of sportsmanship for the honor of our country and for the glory of sport."

As the athletes paraded out of the arena, observers thought they saw Herr Hitler, whose tiny mustache was by this time white with snow flakes, smile with special gratification at the particularly loud cheers given the Austrian delegation, look yearningly at the mountain tops, a few miles beyond which lies the Austrian border. Half an hour later the last of the athletes had filed out of the skistadium and the Olympic Games were under way.

Adolf Hitler was by no means the only bigwig in Garmisch-Partenkirchen last week. His entourage included Air Minister Goering, Minister of Propaganda Goebbels, War Minister von Blomberg, Julius Streicher, Interior Minister Frick, Storm Troop Leader Lutze and almost every other important Nazi in Germany. Nonetheless, Correspondent Frederick T. Birchall of the New York Times, which last autumn gave the loudest bursts of publicity to Jeremiah T. Mahoney's efforts to have the U. S. withdraw from the 1936 Olympic Games (TIME, Nov. 4), felt justified in writing: ". . . Not the slightest evidence of religious, political or racial prejudice is outwardly visible here. Anti-Jewish signs have been removed from villages. The Stuermer, anti-Semitic newspaper, is being kept out of sight. A Jewish hockey player has even been drafted for the German team. In short, politics is being kept out of a sphere in which it has no place. . . . Only sports count and nobody thinks of anything else. ..."

These superficially contradictory circumstances last week were important because they revealed the peculiar way in which sport in general is defined by Nazi minds. Sport in Germany is by no means a mere diversion from more serious affairs. It fits into the Nazi creed of Strength through Joy. The religious intensity with which up-to-date Nazis have accepted this nebulous idea can be perceived in the enthusiasm with which groups of healthy young Germans roll down practice slopes in the effort to learn how to ski, in the amazingly extensive methods by which Germany's Olympic Committee, functioning under Sports Leader Hans von Tschammer und Osten, has prepared for the 1936 Olympic Games, and in the extraordinary career of one of Germany's most celebrated cinemactresses. If President Hoover had made Jean Harlow a major functionary in the Olympic Games of 1932, it would have been explicable only as a tribute to the superhuman shrewdness of that young woman's press-agents. Herr Hitler last year awarded to an actress of comparable popularity exclusive permission to make cinema recordings of the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin next summer as part of a propaganda epic which will be shown later to German cinemaddicts throughout the Fatherland. Except to those who are Cinemactress Leni Riefenstahl's rivals in the cinema industry, this seemed to Nazis an entirely appropriate gesture.

Leni Riefenstahl is the 28-year-old daughter of a Berlin plumber who, like Adolf Hitler, went on to better times. She began her career as a ballet dancer in Munich in 1923. By 1930, she was one of her country's leading cinema stars, noted for her daring in playing dangerous sequences without a double, her fondness for being photographed in mountainous scenery, her nickname of "Oelige Ziege" (Oily Goat), impolitely coined by a German cinema critic. In 1933, U. S. audiences were able to see Fraulein Riefenstahl in an epic called S. O. S. Iceberg, during the filming of which she lived in a Greenland tent for four months (TIME, Oct. 2, 1933). The same year, she wrote, directed and acted in The Blue Light, in which magnificent photography of the Dolomites as background for a fairy tale corroborated Leni Riefenstahl's thesis that sex appeal is unnecessary in the cinema.

In the course of these activities, Cinemactress Riefenstahl delighted Berlin gossips by spending six unchaperoned weeks in a Mont Blanc cabin with eight male members of her cast whom she astonished by her skill with skis. In 1934 she met Adolf Hitler, who had long admired her work on the screen. He perceived in her a personification of those qualities of health, energy, ambition, good-looks, youth and love of sport which are the German equivalent of female glamour, promptly amazed the German cinema industry by commissioning her to make the official film of last summer's Nurnberg Party Congress in which she directed 800,000 men. When Herr Hitler's crony, Air Minister Goering, married Cinemactress Riefenstahl's crony, Actress Emmy Sonnemann, last year, Hitler was best man. That Realmleader Hitler, a confirmed celibate, has any such intentions concerning Cinemactress Leni Riefenstahl no one suspects for a moment, but that he holds her in high esteem, entertains romantic admiration for her achievements and her character as a prime example of German womanhood, is apparent to everyone. Functioning as an inspiration both to Herr Hitler and her female contemporaries is a job which, for Cinemactress Riefenstahl, is never done. At Garmisch-Partenkirchen last week, much too occupied to engage in her customary practice of skiing up & down hill in a bathing suit to acquire a tan, she was even busier than usual, keeping an expert Nazi eye on winter sports for Fuehrer Hitler and giving visitors to Germany a startling picture of what he thinks German girls should be.

The Olympic Winter Games last eleven days, include hockey, bob-sled racing, speed and figure skating, four kinds of skiing. It is a truism that the Olympics, instituted to promulgate international goodwill, usually promulgate nothing of the sort. Last week, long before any significant results had been recorded, a series of major and minor brawls in sad contrast to the gay opening ceremonies made it clear that, in competitive ill-will, as well as in size, beauty of scene and dignity, the Winter Olympics of 1936 would outclass all their predecessors.

Bob Sledding. Before the Games started, major bob-sled controversies concerned: 1) the poor condition of the run, which U. S. Driver Hubert Stevens described as "unsound" and 2) the bad effect on it of U. S. runners, which are sharper than those of European bobsleds. Most romantic casualty of the week was Donna Fox, a Bronx undertaker who, after sustaining a bruised ear when his sled tipped over on a curve, ungraciously blamed the accident on the poor construction of the run. Fastest practice runs of the week were made by Hubert Stevens, who won the two-man event at Lake Placid in 1932, and Reto Capadrutt of Switzerland, both of whom averaged 60 m. p. h.

Hockey. Canada's officials protested two members of England's hockey team on the ground that they were really

Canadians. England threatened to withdraw. Hero of Germany's team was Jewish Rudi Ball who, recalled from self-exile just before the Games, skated so much faster and handled his stick so much better than his "Aryan" teammates that in the opening game of the week, Germany lost to the U. S. by only one point.

After the game, Germany's hockey leader said it was a pity the game had an "irregular ending." Because of snow which frequently interrupted play, the referee suggested a postponement when the U. S. was a goal ahead. After Germany's hockeyists had agreed, the U. S. team, presumably on the ground that the snow gave them an advantage in defending a lead, refused.

When Italy played the U. S., Italian substitutes loudly booed pugnacious U. S. Forward Gordon Smith. Smith accused an Italian of knocking his glasses off, complained to the referee. Italy won, 2-to-1. When the second round of the tournament started, Canada was still overwhelming favorite to win the title.

Figure Skating, Refused admittance to practice on Riesser Lake because it was being used for hockey, British, Canadian and U. S. figure skaters threatened to withdraw. They failed to make good their threat. After the first day's competition in school figures (see p. 39) by men skaters, observers thought Robin Lee of the U. S. seemed a little stage-shy, looked for close competition between Canada's Montgomery Wilson and Austria's Karl Schafer.

Skiing. Of the 1,000 best skiers of the world, at least 950 are Scandinavians. For Norwegians, Finns and Swedes, international competition in the Olympic games is much less exacting than the tournaments which they have to win at home in order to get places on the teams.

Ski-jumping champion at the 1932 Olympics was Birger Ruud. baby-faced Norwegian, whose 5-ft. 5-in. body is muscled like that of a Japanese vaudeville tumbler. In the downhill race, an event never before scheduled in the Winter Olympics and scorned by most Scandinavians who consider downhill racing an effete novelty in the sport they have practiced for centuries, he zoomed down the flank of Mt. Kreuzeck, over the course that drops 3,000 feet in two miles, in 4 min., 47 4/10 sec. It was four seconds better than the next man, Germany's Franz Pfnuer. In the slalom race (see p. 38), Birger Ruud foolishly fell down. Pfnuer made two trips down the course without mishap. His combined score for the downhill & slalom was 99.25. gave him an Olympic gold medal. Another German placed second, Birger Ruud was fourth and Dartmouth's Dick Durrance, who comes from Tarpon Springs. Fla. and is the ablest skier on the U. S. team, got a ( creditable tenth. German satisfaction at this turn of events was increased by the fact that the women's downhill & slalom title, first event of the Games to be decided, went to spry little Christl Cranz of Freiburg.

On skis, as elsewhere, Finns like marathons. As usual, in the four-man relay race, 40 kilometres up hill as well as down at Garmisch last week, the Finnish team finished first.

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