Robert Faurisson Jewish Myths about the Berlin Olympic Games (1936

Sunday, September 17, 2000 Jewish Myths about the Berlin Olympic Games (1936) Le Monde, journal oblique (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, at Berlin, the Aryan ‘Lutz’ befriends Jesse, the mulatto”), 17-18 September 2000, p. VI). The journalist is forced to acknowledge that the story of chancellor Hitler refusing to shake Jesse Owens’ 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”, 3 December 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, 4 April 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 reserved for him in Germany. In 1984, four years after J. Owens’ 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, Paris, Christian Bourgois, 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, Paris, Seuil, 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 authorities of the 3rd Reich with the aim of breaking or getting round 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 on the part of 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 very year, Germany hosted about forty Zionist training centres (Umschulungslagern) for the instruction of young Jews in farming or other skills that they would need to use later on in Palestine. The Jewish press in Germany at that 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: amongst 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 the 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 (Austin, University of Texas Press, 1985), or Otto Dov Kulka’s noteworthy study “The reactions of German Jewry to the National-Socialist Regime” on pages 367-379 of the work by Jehuda Reinharz, Living with Antisemitism (Hanover, New Hampshire, University Press of New England, 1987), or the book by the French author Emmanuel Ratier, Les Guerriers d’Israël (Paris, Facta, 1995). One may also consult either 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 to take advantage of it so as to find fault, wail, and make new demands, S. Cypel is not afraid of 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 one of 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 radio commentator for the New York “Giants” football club, stated that he had an “enthusiastic” remembrance of those games (G. Frey ed., Vorsicht Fälschung !, Munich, FZ-Verlag, 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 in 23 February 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 the second German 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 both to 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, which has great need of money and fears the wrath of the Jews, steadily tries to make atonement for its cardinal sin: did it not proceed, in its issues of 29 December 1978 and 16 January 1979, to print my iconoclastic observations on the physical and chemical impossibilities of the Nazi gas chambers? That act is what 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, 30 August 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 which is among the most horrid that 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. I shall, upon its release, give an account both of this book as such and of its review by Le Monde. NB: In its issue of 29 September, Le Monde was to publish, 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, of the 1936 Olympics, what has been retained is “the fury of Hitler refusing to shake the hand of Jesse Owens”. Nothing in the piece indicates that this is the stuff of myth. September 17, 2000 (revised October 24) Posted by N