Hitler’s Olympics, Part 1: The Blue-Eyed Tornado

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Pushkin.

I think that Hitler is appreciably nearer shooting us, and therefore I think we're appreciably

nearer replying.

It's the beginning of the Second World War, just before the United States joins the fight.

A journalist named Dorothy Thompson is speaking to a British television crew.

She's standing behind a dark wood table, wearing a nipped-way suit and blouse, one

hand perched in her pocket.

Perfect posture.

Shoulder-length hair with a strand of premature white.

You can see her thinking while she's talking.

We're very much interested in the Far East.

We're interested in the Pacific and we're interested in the Atlantic.

Thompson was a foreign correspondent in the 1920s.

Vienna, Berlin, Dublin, Paris.

This is the heyday of newspapers.

Every paper of consequence across the Western world had someone in Europe.

And they all knew each other.

Drank together.

Descended on war zones together.

And Dorothy Thompson was the star.

And as this war becomes more and more, becomes more and more clear that this war is going

to be a world war, we come nearer to being actively involved.

Because these were different times, there was always discussion of Thompson's physical

beauty, the flawless skin, her radiance.

One of her nicknames was the Blue-Eyed Tornado.

She was brilliant, indefatigable, unshakably self-assured.

And that voice.

But after all, the ideological basis of this war was very well set by Mr. Neville Chamberlain

at the very beginning of it, when he said, if I remember correctly, if I should think

that one man and one nation should wish to dominate the world, I should think he ought

to be stopped.

That's the way America feels about it, too.

Remember that voice.

Over the course of the next eight episodes, you're going to hear the voices of a lot of

people from that same era, the long years before the Second World War, some more powerful

than Dorothy Thompson, more self-important, more strident, but none who saw the world

so clearly.

Dorothy Thompson is our North Star.

One of my strongest childhood memories was the 1976 Olympics in Montreal, my homeland's

first Olympic Games.

I was a kid.

My family didn't have a television, but we rented one just for the occasion.

Two rabbit ears on top of a grainy black-and-white set.

We put the TV in the fireplace, because there was no other place for it.

And I watched everything.

The Romanian Nadia Comaneci bewitching the world in gymnastics.

My running hero John Walker powering away around the final curve to win the men's 1500

meters.

I still get nervous thinking about that race.

Lassi Verin's improbable double in the 5000 meters and the 10,000 meters.

Alberto Wanterina, Cornelia Ender, Don Quarry, and the women's 4x100 freestyle relay.

Maybe the greatest swimming race ever.

I was a little kid and I fell in love with the Olympics.

And I've been in love ever since.

This summer in Paris, I will be glued to my television again.

And this thing that I love, and that so many millions of people around the world love,

would not exist if the Olympics had not been held in 1936 in Adolf Hitler's Germany.

The modern Olympics started in 1896.

And if you'd gone to any of those early games, you'd think you were at some kind of sideshow.

They never really took off.

46 countries showed up for the 1928 games.

37 showed up for the next games.

Only one country applied to host the 1932 games.

No one else wanted it.

The Olympic dream was fading.

But then came Berlin.

It was the Nazis who gave us the Olympics we have today.

They were really, really good at putting on a big show.

Berlin was the first Olympics to be televised.

The first to have a torch relay at the opening ceremony.

The first to create a genuine international star, Jesse Owens.

The first to understand that the games were a spectacle.

At first, Hitler himself was opposed to the Olympics.

It didn't interest him, it was an international event, people from all over.

But Joseph Goebbels said, no, we can use this.

This will be good propaganda for us.

And so they began promoting the Olympics.

Hitler used the games to demonstrate his theories of Aryan supremacy.

To rally the German people.

To give legitimacy to the band of thugs he had gathered about him.

To make the case that Germany was a true world power.

And the United States went along with all of it.

Why? That's the story of Hitler's Olympics.

I'm Malcolm Gladwell. You're listening to Revisionist History.

My podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood.

Welcome to Hitler's Olympics.

The story of how we ended up with the Nazi Olympics.

Over the next eight weeks, my colleague Ben-Nadav Haffrey and I

will tell the story of the games behind the greatest of all Olympic games.

Not who won what.

Not what stirring come-from-behind burst of effort led to an improbable victory.

Instead, I want to talk about the furious machinations leading up to the Olympics.

And the genuinely difficult moral questions that surrounded the Berlin Games.

Questions that I think we're still trying to make sense of.

And along the way, we're going to introduce you to an odd cast of characters.

People who tried and largely failed to resolve those questions.

Heroes and villains.

The clear-eyed and the deluded.

The forgotten and the misunderstood.

But we have to begin with the person who may have seen the problem of 1936 more clearly than anyone else.

Dorothy Thompson.

Thompson was born in western New York in 1893, just outside of Buffalo.

Her mother died when she was seven.

Her father was a Methodist minister, but a bad one, who drifted from church to church.

Her childhood was hand-to-mouth.

She hated her stepmother.

Somehow, she ended up at Syracuse University at a time when not a lot of women were going to college.

After graduation, she threw herself into the women's suffrage movement,

the great social cause of progressives of that generation.

She was a committed, passionate advocate of women getting the vote.

And when they got the vote in 1920, soon afterwards, she wanted to pursue a career as a journalist.

The historian Sarah Churchwell.

She sailed for Europe, didn't have anything lined up in advance.

She just packed up her bags one day and left.

Suddenly, here she is, exposed to this whole host of international and global projects and initiatives.

She makes her mark right away, goes to Ireland,

tracks down a leader of the Irish independence movement,

and gets the last interview with him before he dies of a hunger strike.

Next, she goes to Vienna, where she convinces the Philadelphia public ledger to hire her as a correspondent.

Dorothy learns German, gets promoted to Berlin bureau chief.

Then comes another step, and another step.

And by the end of the 1930s, Thompson's column was read by 8 to 10 million people a day,

at a time when the population of the United States was 130 million.

She was a fixture on the radio too, toured the country the way rock bands do today.

During one week in 1937, she turned down 700 speaking requests. 700!

She was so famous that Katharine Hepburn played her effectively

in the first movie that Hepburn made with Spencer Tracy called Woman of the Year.

It's basically the story of a Hollywood version of Dorothy Thompson.

Dorothy Thompson became such a public figure that quips about her were part of the culture.

She snips her nails with indignation.

She has discovered the secret of perpetual emotion.

And, most famously, this from Alice Roosevelt Longworth,

Teddy Roosevelt's daughter, who said that Thompson is, quote,

the only woman in history who has had her menopause in public and made it pay.

A line, incidentally, that Dorothy Thompson found hilarious.

This is my favorite Dorothy Thompson story.

One night in 1926, she's coming back from the opera in Vienna

when she hears there's been a coup in Poland.

There's a night train to Warsaw,

and the whole foreign correspondent crew is racing to get on it.

Dorothy doesn't have time to get back to her apartment,

so she has her secretary fetch her typewriter and a traveling bag.

The bigger problem is, she doesn't have any money for the journey,

and the banks are closed.

So who does she call?

Remember, it's Vienna in 1926.

Sigmund Freud, of course.

He's a good friend.

And, by the way, everyone who was anyone was friends with Dorothy Thompson.

So Freud pulls a stack of cash out of his safe

and sends his driver to the train station.

Dorothy jumps on the train.

Big relief. She's made it.

But no, they cross the border into Poland,

and the train tracks are blown up.

Dorothy jumps out, hails a big Daimler.

The driver demands a king's ransom,

so Dorothy jumps in a Ford.

The second driver refuses to enter Warsaw

when he hears the gunfire.

Meanwhile, the driver of the first car, the Daimler,

runs into heavy gunfire.

His car is riddled with bullets.

The other correspondents witness the attack,

and they're inconsolable.

Dorothy's dead.

They wire her obituary back to Vienna.

But Dorothy is not dead.

She's left the Ford behind

and is walking the final few miles into Warsaw,

still in her ball gown and slippers.

And, legend has it, swearing like a sailor.

Dorothy had everyone's attention.

And what was she talking and writing about

over and over again in the 1930s?

Adolf Hitler.

Long before the world became obsessed with Hitler,

Dorothy Thompson was obsessed with Hitler.

So, yeah, she always saw that Hitler was a thing.

And that he was the one to watch.

And that you needed to understand where that was going.

She read a lot of history.

She read a lot of politics.

She interviewed everybody to try to get a sense

of what it was that was going on.

And so she got to the heart of it

in a way that few, if any, of her contemporaries did.

A journalist once calculated

that by the spring of 1940,

she had written a total of 238,000 words

for her column in the Herald Tribune.

And 147,000 of those were about Hitler.

If I ever divorce Dorothy, her husband once said,

I'll name Adolf Hitler as co-respondent.

Hitler. Hitler. Hitler.

She had to meet the man.

Coming up, the first of what will be

many meetings with Hitler over the course of this series.

Before we go any further,

I want to present an idea that will be useful

over the next nine episodes.

It's one of the most famous psychological theories

of the 20th century.

Leon Festinger's Cognitive Dissonance.

We've talked about it before in the show.

It's a psychological state of discomfort

that occurs when a person holds

two or more conflicting thoughts

about the same thing.

Beliefs or behaviors.

Chocolate cake is bad for me.

I desperately want a piece of chocolate cake.

That's cognitive dissonance.

It's a contradiction between what I believe

and how I behave.

And Festinger believed that cognitive dissonance

makes us so uncomfortable

that we are compelled to resolve it.

So, you change your behavior

to align with your belief.

You say, I'm just not going to eat the cake.

Or, I'm going to take just one bite.

Or, I'm going to go to the gym afterwards.

Or, you change your beliefs

to align with your behavior.

You tell yourself, I read somewhere

that chocolate cake, in fact, isn't that fattening.

Or, maybe you try and make the world

change its mind so they can't judge you.

You stand up and say, this looks like cake,

but it's not actually cake.

It's cocoa powder and sweetener

and whipped low-calorie cream cheese.

If you go online, you can find a ton

of old black-and-white videos

of psychologists working through the implications

of Festinger's idea.

Psychological story of decision-making

doesn't end, however,

when a decision has been made.

That's Philip Zimbardo,

one of the many psychologists

inspired by Festinger's work.

The act of making a decision

can trigger a flood of other processes.

According to psychologist Leon Festinger,

whenever we choose to do something

that conflicts with our prior beliefs,

feelings, or values,

a state of cognitive dissonance

is created in us,

a tension between what we think

and what we do.

The Berlin Olympics created

cognitive dissonance on a grand

geopolitical scale.

The Olympics were an ideal,

pure competition, unencumbered by politics,

high-minded, an event created

for cross-cultural understanding,

young men and women in perfect

physical condition, coming together

from around the world.

The founder of the modern Olympic movement

was Pierre de Coubertin,

who would always say,

the important thing in life is not the triumph

but the struggle.

The essential thing is not to have conquered

but to have fought well.

That was the belief.

But in 1936, what was the action?

To participate in the Berlin Games

meant going to Germany,

competing in a stadium built

by Nazi architects,

being fodder for Hitler's propaganda chief

Joseph Goebbels,

and helping to legitimize a regime

that had already started on the long

anti-Semitic path that would end

in the Holocaust.

The Berlin Olympics were brutally

dissonant, and in each of these

episodes, Ben and I will follow

how a different person resolved

the contradiction, starting with

someone who pretty much said,

if there's a problem with the cake,

then don't eat the cake,

Dorothy Thompson.

As early as 1923,

Dorothy Thompson

had her sights set on an interview

with Hitler.

This was a decade before he'd come to power,

early days in Munich,

after the so-called Beer Hall Putsch,

when the young Hitler tried to launch

a coup against the German government.

When that failed, he escaped to a hideaway

in the Bavarian Alps.

Thompson followed him there,

arriving only two hours after Hitler did,

but he'd already moved on.

For the next seven years,

she pursued him, to no avail.

But then, Hitler's party

started gaining traction.

His movement grew.

He set up office in the Kaiserhof Hotel in Berlin,

right across the street from the Reich Chancellery,

the seat of power in Germany.

All the top Nazis hung out at the Kaiserhof,

with its grand awning,

wrought iron balconies.

They ate in the three-story dining room

under its great glass ceiling.

It was luxurious.

It felt like power.

Hitler could look out his window

at the Reich Chancellery and dream.

Hitler had a press officer

named Ernst Homstengel.

Everyone called him Putsi,

which meant little fellow,

though it translates literally as cute.

Putsi was half German,

half American.

His mother was a Sedgwick,

one of the grand old New England families.

He grew up in Germany, but went to Harvard,

where he was classmates with T.S. Eliot

and with Theodore Roosevelt's son.

One day, Putsi ran into Hitler

in a bar in Munich, holding the crowd spellbound,

and he fell in love.

Putsi was a great musician,

but whenever Hitler got a little lonesome,

he would have Putsi bang out

some Wagner on the piano,

or some other little ditty that he'd written.

Many years after the war,

Putsi wrote his memoirs,

which I would wholeheartedly recommend,

in large part because of passages

like this,

about the time he and Adolf were over

at a friend's house.

They're so good that we had to reenact them.

I started playing some of the football

marches I had picked up at Harvard.

I explained to Hitler

all the business about the cheerleaders

and college songs, and the deliberate

whipping up of hysterical

enthusiasms.

Sound familiar?

I told him about the thousands of spectators

being made to roar,

Harvard! Harvard! Harvard!

Rah! Rah! Rah!

in unison, and the hypnotic

effect of this sort of thing.

I played him some of the Sousa marches,

and my own Falera,

to show how it could be done by adapting

German tunes. Gave them all

that buoyant beat so characteristic

of American brass band music.

I had Hitler

fairly shouting with enthusiasm,

That's it, Hanfstengel!

That is what we need for the movement!

And he pranced up and down the room

like a drum majorette.

After that, he had the

S.A. band practicing the same thing.

Rah! Rah! Rah!

Became Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil!

That is the origin

of it, and I suppose

I must take my share of the blame.

Puzzi ends the war as an advisor

to Franklin Roosevelt,

making him the only person to serve the leadership

of both sides of the Second World War.

But I digress.

So, Puzzi convinces Hitler

that he needs to have more of an international

profile, so he starts inviting people

to come and meet Herr Hitler

at the Kaiserhof, the New York Times,

an Italian journalist, a Japanese

journalist, a legendary foreign

correspondent with the memorable name

Hubert Renfro

Knickerbocker, and

finally, Dorothy Thompson.

Is she prepared

for the interview? Of course.

She's Dorothy Thompson.

When he was in prison in 1924,

years before the Kaiserhof,

Hitler had written his manifesto,

Mein Kampf. It was a bestseller

in Germany, and trust me,

Dorothy Thompson had read Mein Kampf

in the German, all 700

nutty pages of it,

including passages like

With satanic joy in his face,

the black-haired Jewish youth

lurks in wait for the unsuspecting girl

whom he defiles with his blood,

thus stealing her from

her people. There's a lot

of stuff like this in Mein Kampf.

It was and it is Jews

who bring the Negroes

into the Rhineland, always with the same

secret thought and clear aim

of ruining the hated white race

by the necessarily resulting

bastardization, throwing it

down from its cultural and political

height, and himself rising

to be its master.

Dorothy Thompson knows

just who she's going to meet when she

walks into the Kaiserhof.

She walks through the marble lobby, waits

in Puzzi's office. She would

say later that there was a lot of fussiness

over the final preparations for the interview.

She was limited to three

questions, which she had to submit

24 hours in advance.

Hitler did not like thinking

on his feet. Before the interview,

she spots Hitler going to his rooms,

accompanied by someone who she says

looks like Al Capone.

She waits for an hour.

Finally, she's ushered in.

She would say later,

I was a little nervous. I considered

taking smelling salts.

Understand, that's a joke.

Dorothy Thompson

wasn't afraid of anyone. This was

the woman who marched into Warsaw

wearing her ballroom slippers.

We don't have a recording of the interview,

but I want you to imagine it. Her voice,

her presence, those piercing

blue eyes. Hitler's never

met her before. And Hitler,

to put it nicely, did not

exactly have relationships of any real

meaning with women, unless

you count photo opportunities

with little German girls.

So maybe he's the nervous one,

because he just starts babbling.

Thompson would later

write up the interview in an essay called

I Saw Hitler.

He is formless,

almost faceless,

a man whose countenance is a caricature,

a man whose framework seems

cartilaginous,

without bones.

He is inconsequent and voluble,

ill-poised, insecure.

He is the very prototype

of the little man.

Ouch!

A lock of lank hair falls over

an insignificant and slightly

retreating forehead.

The back head is shallow.

The face is broad in the cheekbones.

The nose is large, but badly shaped

and without character.