Pushkin.
My name is Margaret Lambert. I was born a name that I hate, Gretel it's too Teutonic. I hate that name and Gretel Bergmann. And I was born i Bohn twelfth, nineteen fourteen in a very small town in the south of Germany. And it was a great life.
In nineteen ninety six, Margaret Lambert sat down for an interview with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. She was eighty two years old. She looked at least fifteen years younger. Being an Olympic level athlete will do that to you. She started out talking about her childhood in a little German town called Laupim.
That was this club in that town. You just went there. I could go there and unescorted because it was close to my house. And I'm as happy as a lark. What did you like about sports? I just loved it, and you were good at it, and that was good at it. There was nothing different at that stage about being a Jewish athlete, none whatsoever.
By the nineteen thirties, Lambert's sport of choice was the high jump, one of the more graceful Olympic sports. You've probably seen it. It's the one where the jumper runs up to an impossibly high bar and then rises effortlessly above it.
Great success in it thanks to my long legs and my big feet, I suppose.
In nineteen thirty three, the year Hitler came to power, she jumped a little higher than one and a half meters that's like four feet and nine inches. It was one of the highest jumps in the country. She would be a shoe in for the German Olympic team.
Except once Hitler became chancellor. You started to worry a little bit, you know, But everybody thought this is going to blow over. He's not going to last.
But it soon became very clear that this was not going to blow over. Four days after becoming chancellor, Hitler was already censoring the press. Things developed quickly from there, and then later that year Lambert got a letter from her sports club.
You are no longer welcome here because you're Jewish, hil Hitler, and that was the end of that. So they just threw me out of the club and everybody commiserated, you know, what are we going to do? What's going to happen here? And it was a horrible life.
But there was still one way that Margaret Lambert might have a chance to compete at the nineteen thirty six Olympic Games. The chance that had a lot to do with one man, Avery.
Welcome to Revisionist History, my show about things overlooked and misunderstood. I'm Malcolm Gladwell. Today on the show, Ben the daf Haffrey and I are back with Avery Brundage, the apostle of Olympia, the kingpin of cognitive dissonance, the man who made the modern Olympic Games happen. Brundage believed above all in the values of the Olympic religion, amateurism, total equality
of opportunity, the only true meritocracy. Brundage wanted to become an Olympic official, and by nineteen thirty four he had almost done it. He was up for a seat on the International Olympic Committee, something he must have wanted more than anything else. And then Adolf Hitler got in the way. So Avery Brundage had to make a choice to resolve the dissonance of whether his pure games could be held in an impure place. Today in the show Avery Brundage's very consequential.
Resolution, things started changing for Margaret Lambert and the rest of Germany's Jewish population. As soon as Hitler came to.
Power, you were banned for more public places. No theaters, no restaurants, no swimming pools. You couldn't go any place, and you could not associate with non Jewish people.
Fitness was really important to the Nazi project, so important that eventually, in the elite Adolf Hitler schools, students would spend about as much and sometimes even more time playing sports than they did on academics. Sports had a military function. If Germany wanted to go to war again, a strong,
healthy population was going to be really important. Strength also matters if you're trying to prove you're the master race, so just emphasizing the weakness of outsiders you could make week in part by denying them access to the same training the arians had.
But sports, for me, of course, was the thing I wanted the most. Next to the Jewish school there was a yard, and we tried to straighten that out, but we had to fight the teacher's chickens, and they used that same place for their activities and it was not very appetizing, so we gave up on that pretty fast.
While Margaret Lambert was chasing chickens around a bumpy field. The Nazis were realizing just how badly they wanted the Olympics for money and propaganda power are sure, but also I think for a much stranger reason they worshiped the ancient Greeks. When Gebels Hitler's fame Nazi minister of Propaganda, goes to Sparta in the nineteen thirties, he says that to him, it was just as if he were in a German city. It's why leading brand and of German
sunscreen was called Sparta Crown. As the scholar Helen Rosch writes, Nazi fascism was seeking the rebirth of a past so mythic and so ancient that it predates the nation entirely. So what better way to prove your connection to that mythic in ancient past than to host the Olympic Games.
Adolf Hitler tried to use these Olympics as his propaganda vehicle to show the world how powerful he was, to show the world how unified a Germany was, And I think he tried to scare the world into not standing up against him somehow. And he wanted, of course, the United States and all the big nations to be there.
So the crucial question for our purposes is, well, Hindsight's twenty twenty, how much of all this could Avery Brandage in the IOC have really known in nineteen thirty three. The answer is not everything, but enough.
The news parade goes forward.
I mean, this is a national radio broadcast in the US from March nineteen thirty three. That's just two months after Hitler became Chancellor.
At prosodies not being enacted daily in Germany by the Nazis. Domed troops of Hitler, numerous Jewish citizens have been brutally taut us. Horrified citizens in America look on in astonishment as ruthless adult Hitler continues a savage campaign of anti submitting brutality.
That summer, a New York Times journalist read a report on Germany put out by the American Jewish Committee and wrote, it is impossible to read it without carrying away the conviction that the Nazi leaders are guilty of something more
than employing violence and terror. Meanwhile, the Consul General for the United States in Berlin was writing back home to the State Department about how Germans were pushing an anti Jewish sport agenda, how Berlin wasn't safe, and how even if the Nazis had told Charles Cheryl they'd give the Jews equal opportunity, they really weren't doing that. A movement for the US to boycott the thirty six Olympics began to gather momentum. Other countries were thinking about boycotting too.
But by then Avery Brandage was the president of the US Olympic Committee, and he'd grown fond of saying things like this.
All the participants are equal before the starter's pistol, and there are no social distinctions or family distinctions.
That same year, he wrote to a colleague that the very foundation of the modern Olympic revival will be undermined if individual countries are allowed to restrict participation by reason of class, creed, or race. The very foundation. So by this logic, Mark A. Lambert that German Jewish high jumper should have been Avery Brandage's ideal athlete, right, unpaid, highly skilled,
and obsessed with sport. If someone like her wasn't going to get a fair shot at the Nazi Olympics, then surely Avery Brundage would have to try and stop the Nazi Olympics. But first he had to figure out if the rumors about Germany were true. We'll be right back.
I always start all my speeches with the statement that the Olympic moment today is the most important social force in the world. The word Olympic is the magic word.
The year after Hitler came to power, Avery Brandage had almost made it to the International Olympic Committee, his ticket back to the most rarefied part of Olympia where he could rub shoulders with all the princes and aristocrats in that particular gentleman's club. And this is something I think Avery Brandage really wanted.
Why does he want to hang out with these kind of Pots's.
Malcolm and I once again psychoanalyzing Avery Brandage talking about a letter he wrote to the IOC. There's one moment that's quite telling in one of these when he's writing to Edstrom, one of the members of the IOC, and you see his typewritten note, anything may happen in these perilous days, and then he crosses out perilous and he handwrites in parlous, And there's a kind of like for Avery.
Brundage is not saying the word parless like he's second guessing his own vocabulary to fit in with these guys.
Yeah, and that is the world of the IOC, right. The IOC is a fundamently nineteenth century institution. It's just one count and baron after another kind of living out the glory days of there. And then Brundage comes along and he is an entirely different animal.
He's like, yes, I may have done all these things that you guys can never even dream of. I built these buildings, I made my own fortune. I trained in a ditch until I was good enough to compete in the Olympics. But I still think Princess rock and I'll go on the record as saying as much.
And what kind of a world is this when it's come to the point where being a prince is a handicapped I ask.
You, it's very gruteal MUCKs. I don't want to belong to a club that would happen.
But like he knows that the only way he's going to get in that club is if he, as the president of the American Olympic Committee, brings the Americans to the Games.
So why is that so?
He he is at that point the most powerful man in amateur sport in America, so he really like he holds the cards, and the United States is both the most significant participant in the Olympics. They're going to bring a huge team. There's going to be a medals race between them and the Germans that will be extremely dramatic and make for really good viewing. But also they have a lot of moral authority, and if the United States substains from the Olympics, it majorly undermines the Olympic project.
Has it been made explicit to Brundage that his future in the IOC is contingent on him bringing Americans to Berlin.
I haven't seen anything that states it explicitly, but I think it is very clear that the members of the IOC want the Olympics to happen. They want them to happen in Germany. But as Americans learn more about what the Nazis were up to, as the last traces of Weimar Democracy vanished, the pressure in the US to boycott the Games got really intense, and avery Rundage was right in the middle of it. Publicly, he was pro going to the Games, but he expressed at least some concern
about what was happening in Germany. And yet in his archives, I've found private letters to the IOC from as early as nineteen thirty three, and in them he frames the boycott campaign as a Jewish plot to sabotage the Olympics, and from the beginning he knew what crowd he was playing to the President of the International Committee, count Enri de bayer LeTour wrote to Avery Brundage saying they should work together hand in hand while we are handling this
difficult question. I am not personally fond of Jews and of the Jewish influence, but I will not have them molested. So that's a clue. But then there's also the matter of Brandage's lengthy correspondence with Siegfried Edstrom. Edstrom was sort of like the Swedish Avery Brundage, an engineer who'd made good. He was a member of the IOC. The two were friends.
He's the one who wrote the letter we talked about in the last episode, suggesting that he nominate Brundage for a seat on the IOC, and Brundage of course responded enthusiastically. But how did he begin that letter accepting this most precious of all prizes. He didn't lead with his enthusiasm. Instead, he started by complaining about the boycotts. Undoubtedly, the International Olympic Committee will be swamped with protests from Jews and
Jewish organizations from many different countries. I assume that the IOC will take the same stand as the American Olympic Committee will, to it that it is concerned with athletic affairs only and that it will not be drawn into political, religious, sociological or racial controversies of any kind. Then he said how much he'd like to be on the IOC.
Inside, deep inside that kind of engineer, self made man's brain is this romantic streak. I want to be part of this grand you know, sporting amateur enterprise. And it's beautiful and it speaks to me, and it's you know, it's this pure thing in an impure world. I really do think that what how happens to him in nineteen twelve at the Olympics, that failure remains with him for the rest of his days. It's the thing that drives him to save in his own mind, save the Olympics.
That is, he had failed once to live up to the Olympic spirit, and he's not going to fail again.
But the concerns weren't going away. Hitler had already made himself a dictator, Germany was re arming, and war was once again on the horizon in Europe. So the American Olympic Committee decided they needed to send someone to Berlin to figure out for themselves what was going on. They chose, of course, Avery Brandage. On September twelfth, nineteen thirty four, two days after the Nuremberg rally that year, Avery Brandage
arrived in eastern Germany. His plan was to meet with Jewish sports officials to suss out just how bad things had actually gotten. There was, however, one problem. He didn't speak German, so he did this whole trip with Nazi interpreters, including the head of all Nazi sports, the Reichschportfior, Hans von Schamer and Austin von Schamer. And In Austin was a rather severe looking Nazi official, a small man with thinning,
slit hair and a paralyzed right hand. He was meant to assure every Brandage that the Nazis weren't discriminating against Jewish athletes, which maybe would have been easier had all the sports clubs in Nazi Germany not recently received a copy of a book called the Spirit of Sport in the National Socialist Ideology, which included passages like this, there is no room in our German land for Jewish sports leaders and their friends infested with the Talmud, for pacifists,
political Catholics, pan Europeans and the rest. They are worse than cholera and syphilis, much worse than famine, drought and poison gas. Do we want them in the Olympic Games in Germany? Yes, we must have them. We think they are important for international reasons. There could not be better propaganda for Germany. What does it mean? It means they would pretend that Jews could be allowed at the Games in hopes that it would help the Nazis hoodwink the
world about how they were actually treating the Jews. You'd think that Avery Brandage, champion of Olympic ideals like no politics in sport, would hate to see the Olympics used that way. Instead. Here's our second warning sign about this trip. Brundage quickly saw von Schamer and Austin as a friend. He spent six days exploring Germany with his various Nazi counterparts. I have to imagine that he also visited the Reichs Sportsfeld, the site of the giant new stadium being built for
the Games. Brundage new construction, after all, it was his business in This stadium would be epic, big enough to fit more than one hundred thousand people.
This is what I can't get over. Every one of the characters we've met so far have a meeting with the Nazis. It's like Dorothy Thompson goes, you know, Charles Cheryl has this big meeting with Hitler. Each makes this pilgrimage to the Promised Land.
Right.
We don't know in thirty four exactly what Brundage is thinking. He's playing his cards pretty close to his chest.
Yeah, we actually not a lot is known about these meetings, but we did find an archival account from a dentist and Jewish sport official who is president at one of these meetings at the hotel Kaiserhoff in nineteen thirty four. We had it translated.
Kaiserhoff. I would point out the same hotel where Dorothy Thompson interviewed Adolf Hitler. Oh Man, I missed that this is where it's all happening in Berlin. This is where you when you have to do your Nazi meet and greets, you go to the kaiser Off.
The point is this was not friendly territory for the Jewish sports officials. The Hotel kaiser Off was a grand luxury hotel on Wilhelm Plotz, directly opposite the Chancellor's office. Remember Hitler once had an office there. There were marble floors, a dining room in a three story glass roofed atrium. Brundage is in the lap of luxury at the seat of Nazi power. Sigfried Edge from Brundage's IOC friend is
there with them. They were joined by a Nazi German Organizing Committee member who was already a friend of Brundage's from the nineteen twelve Olympics. The Deputy reichs sportsfure was also there, dressed in full SS black boots and all.
So what do we know about what happens at the meeting?
So he begins to ask them a series of questions about Jewish participation in sport. So he asks, are Jewish boys allowed to play sport in large numbers? And the right sport funer says yeah, absolutely, and the Jewish leaders have to sit there and nod but then they say they make a caveat. They're like, well, you know, maybe they can play in large numbers, but there's a problem. We don't actually have any municipal sports fields. And Brandage immediately dismisses this and says, well, in the US, we
don't have municipal sports fields either. We just have our own fields for each each athletic association. If you imagine this from the perspective of the Jewish sports leaders, it's a high wire act. Here sitting before them is Brandage the man best position to put pressure on the Nazis who are also seated at the table. But the Jewish sports leaders have no sense really a Brandage's position on all this. How could they?
So?
What do they do? They have to try and read between the lines of every question he's asking. Then he asks can Jews join the associations? They say yes, but only if they're Jewish associations, and he's like, well, in my club back in Chicago, we don't allow Jews either. Next question, they say like, oh, well, you know, we have our own sports fields, but they keep getting closed down because the Nazi party is shutting down our sports fields.
They're breaking into our games. They're beating people up, and Brandage, according to this account of the meeting, which I have to believe is reliable, just seems kind of bored by this and doesn't ask follow up questions about this this report. But this dentist rites of Brandage is that it was clear that Brundage wanted to save the Olympics in Berlin.
And there's one sort of glimmer of hope towards the end where Brandage asks if a Jewish athlete runs one hundred meters in ten point three seconds, would he then be able to participate in the Olympics? And the Jewish sport leaders reply, how is he supposed to do that without having had the opportunity to train the rex sport? Fewer says, we'll allow him to compete. Brandage sort of times and then says, but how can he compete if he doesn't have an opportunity to train the right sport?
Fewer says, Oh, don't worry, will definitely have Jewish people on the teams, which is just kind of just like blanket assurance that everything has shown is nonsense. It's a whitewash, Yeah, it's a whitewash. And Brundage accepts this and moves on from the meeting and declares that there's no problem. Soon after that meeting, Avery Brendage heads back to the United States with his verdict all good. So the day after he gets back, the American Olympic Committee meets and votes
unanimously to go to Berlin. Brundage stuck to his guns.
Participation in these games must not be construed to be an endorsement of the policies or practices of the Nazi government. Measures have been adopted to ensure that there will be no violation of the fundamental principles of fair play and good sportsmanship, all the Olympic standards of freedom and equality to all.
Later. Margaret Lambert Hewish high jumper had this to say about Avery Brandage's trip.
He just let himself being lulled into some false security by these Nazis saying everything is fine, We're doing everything we would saying we said we would do. And he came back to the United States and said everything is fabulous over there, and we'll be going.
We'll be right back. There are two ways of understanding what Avery Brandage did in nineteen thirty four. The first in a chain of his actions that would lead irrevocably
to us participation in the Berlin Games. The most charitable interpretation is basically what Margaret Lambert, the high Jumper said, He let himself be lulled into some false security picture Brandage, the hoodwinked idealist who maybe just believed so firmly that the Olympics were a world apart from the universe of politics and money that it didn't matter if they were
held in Nazi Germany. But another way to understand what he did is to consider that his visit to Germany, and his time with the Nazis, it may all have seemed a little familiar to him. Remember Dorothy Thompson's nineteen forty one essay Who Goes Nazi? The first time we read it, we recognized Charles Cheryl as her mister B. But Avery Brundage is the perfect incarnation of Thompson's mister C, do.
You have in front of you? Her description of his kind of fascist?
Here we go. Mister C is a brilliant and a bittered intellectual. He was a poor white, trash Southern boy, or in our case, Midwestern boy, a scholarship student at two universities, where he took all the scholastic honors, but was never invited to join a fraternity. He has always moved among important people, and all always been socially on the periphery. His colleagues have admired his brains and exploited them, but they have seldom invited him or his wife to dinner.
He is a snob, loathing his own snobbery, that's brandage. He despises the men about him. He despises, for instance, mister b because he knows what he has had to achieve by relentless work. Men like Bee have won by knowing the right people. But his contempt is inextricably mingled with envy. Even more than he hates the class into which he has insecurely risen does he hate the people from whom he came. He hates his mother and his father for being his parents. He loaths everything that reminds
him of his origins and his humiliations. He is bitterly anti Semitic because the social insecurity of the Jews reminds him of his own psychological insecurity hity. He is utterly erased from his nature and enjoy He has never known. He has an ambition bitter and burning. It is to rise to such an eminence that no one can ever again humiliate him. Not to rule, but to be the secret ruler. He is courteous, the commands a distant in
cold respect, but he is a very dangerous man. Where he primitive and brutals, he would be a criminal, a murderer, but he is subtle and cruel. He would rise high in a Nazi regime. It would need men just like him, intellectual and ruthless.
That's him, that is him.
And this is the key part quote. But mister c is not a born Nazi. He is the product of a democracy hypocritically preaching social equality and practicing a carelessly brutal snobbery. Averybrndage may have thought he had found himself in Stockholm in nineteen twelve at the Olympics, but I think he really found himself in nineteen thirty four at the kaiser Off Hotel. Hundreds of thousands of people protested the decision to go to the games. Avery Brandage didn't care.
He became even more convinced that the whole boycott was just a Jewish plot to use the Olympics for their their own political purposes. He kept a file of antisemitic propaganda.
It's labeled in his archives Jewish problem. Then, really, it's not that surprising, because we know now from reading his letters that while he was questioning Jewish sports leaders in front of the Nazis at the Kaiserhoff, Averyrundage knew that he was also being assessed by Sigfried Edstrom, the IOC official sitting in the room with him, who had earlier that year sent this note to Brundage. The Nazis' opposition to the influence of Jews can only be understood if
you live over in Germany. In some of the more important traits, the Jews governed the majority and stopped all others from coming in. In the hospitals, most of the doctors were Jews, and the Jews had preference in the law courts. It was the same Many of these Jews were of Polish or Russian origin, with minds entirely different from the Western mind. An alteration of these conditions were
absolutely necessary if Germany should remain a white nation. The only objection I have is that they made the alterations so rashly and thereby caused a great deal of opposition. I am not an anti Semite myself. On the contrary, some of my best friends are Jews. But I try to look upon the question from both sides. That is why I have written this letter to you. It was
like Avery Brundage have been handed a script. A year after that trip, Brundage wrote his own letter to the president of the IOC quote, the picture of conditions in Germany obtained from reading our newspapers is entirely different from that gained by an inspection of the country. The great Jewish merchant advertisers may have something to do with this. The public mind has been poisoned against Germany, and highly organized minorities are extremely effective on questions which are decided
by popular vote. Nobody fools, Avery Brandage. Avery Brandage knew exactly what he was doing. He'd gone Nazi. Margaret Lambert, the High Jumper, had been contacted again by the Nazis a few months before Brandage's visit. According to that interview she did with the Holocaust Museum, the Nazis had begun threatening her family, trying to force her to try out for the games so they could show how open they were to having Jews on the team.
To compete in the Olympic Games is trill of a lifetime, I mean, and it doesn't happen to everybody. On the other hand, I was so afraid supposing I am allowed to compete, Supposing I win, and I was convinced that I would win a medal and possibly the gold. Supposing I do this, What do I do? I'm going to stand on that podium and say, hile Hitler like all the others, and this to do for Jewish girl would never do. I was scarce, stiff, and this was going around in my head day and night, day and night,
day and night. Well, what's going to happen? Am I going to compete? Am I not going to compete? How do I conduct myself if I do compete? I was so torn apout about it. I didn't know what to do.
The Nazis put Margaret Lambert, who was unnamed gretel Bergmann on the provisional Olympic team trying out for the Games. Vonshaimer Undastan wrote about this in a quite unconvincing letter to Charles Cheryl. You will find from this that we work entirely in the spirit of the Olympic statutes as before, Miss Bergmann is being treated like all Olympic candidates in spite of being a Jewish, in spite of being a Jewish,
pretty much covers it. The invitation was nonsense, but the IOC knew that she had poor facilities to train in I.
Still jew was not allowed to use any of this.
But you could frame it as a kind of classic Olympic story, right, like poor young Avery Brandage practicing with his own discus in an abandoned lot, and Lambert didn't even have anybody to compete against to make her sharper.
You don't have any competition. It's you have to only fight yourself.
She made the nazison to her opponent. She pushed herself to beat an idea that was so much bigger than her, and at a meat just before the games.
It worked, but it made me better because I was so full of rage. The madder I got, the better I jumped. When I was so mad that I equaled the German record. I must have cleared it by fifteen inches at the time.
She left that meet and went home, waiting to hear whether she'd made the team, and wondering what would happen if she had.
I looked for the mail every day. What's going to happen, you know? And I was really scared. An't they going to break my leg? What they gonna do to to eliminate me? But it was very simple. One day letter came and it said, in view of the fact that you have been doing very poorly lately, we did not select you for the Olympic team highlight. And that was the end of it.
To be clear, Margaret Lambert had not been doing poorly. The Nazis were just keeping her off the team. I mean, just think about how it would have looked to have a Jewish woman win gold at the Nazi Olympics.
And I sat I remember me sitting outside in the stoop and I got this letter, and I must have used every profanity I knew, and I knew a lot of them. I think that was the first time I really realized that my candidacy for as an Olympic athlete was really all a shame I was. It was just something that the Germans did to to fool the whole world.
Of course, Avery Brundage hadn't needed fooling. I do believe that he loved the idea of the Olympics. Amateurism and pure competition, using sports to prove your worth a kind of utopia, protected from the corruption of the real world. But Margaret Lambert should have been his reality check. If someone like her couldn't win in Nazi Germany, that should have made him sit up and pay attention. Instead, in that room at the kaiser Off Hotel when the worst
had come out, he just seemed bored. It's that indifference that got him his seat on the International Olympic Committee just a month before the Berlin Games. He took it from the only IOC member who'd resisted having the Games in Nazi Germany, who'd written in his last months on the IOC, if our committee permits the Games to be held in Nazi Germany, there will be nothing left to distinguish it from the Nazi ideal. He was forced to resign.
On August first, nineteen thirty six, the Olympic torch was carried by relay for the first time ever from Olympia in Greece all the way to the Reichschwartzfeld in Berlin. When it got to the stadium, Avery Brandage was in the audience. The Olympic bell inscribed with the words I call the youth of the world rang out. Meanwhile, Margaret Lambert was applying for a visa that would allow her to leave Germany. She would never again live in her
home country. Brundage had what he always wanted, a seat in the ruling class of his perfect Olympia, just in time to watch Adolf Hitler give the opening speech at the Olympic Games.
To speed it from fire, Noel tide rag.
Hit I announcing it opened.
Now that old kiddy him and I hope pad of ragged the right Arm.
Revisionist History is produced by me Bennattaphaffrey, Tolly Emlin, and Nina Bird Lawrence. Our editor is Sarah Nix. Fact checking by Arthur Gomberts and J. L. Goldfine. Original scoring by Luis Gara, Mastering by FLAONN Williams, Sarah Roguer, and Jake Gorsky. Engineering by Nina Bird Lawrence. Our executive producer is Jacob Smith. Special thanks on this episode to Karen schakerji to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum into Alexander Wells for his
translation of the Kaiserhoff meeting. I'm ben Nataphaffree
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