Destined to Witness Page 16
“What in the world do you think you are doing?” a man’s voice demanded to know. Herr Dutke, one of my least favorite teachers, had entered the classroom without anyone noticing him.
“He said Joe Louis lost the fight because he’s a Negro and a coward,” I said, trying to justify my attack.
“That’s no reason to hit somebody,” Herr Dutke shouted at me. “You can’t go around hitting people just because they don’t agree with you that Hottentotten make the best boxers. Max Schmeling has demonstrated in the most convincing way that a Negro’s brute strength is no match for an Aryan boxer with superior intelligence. His victory was a great victory not only for Germany but for Aryan people throughout the world.
“Now apologize to your comrade for hitting him,” Dutke ordered. I was determined to do no such thing, no matter what the consequences.
“Did you hear me? I told you to apologize!” Herr Dutke screamed.
I just glared at him defiantly without saying a word. But before Dutke had a chance to deal with my intransigence, Herr Schürmann, our homeroom teacher, entered. Eagerly, Dutke briefed him on what allegedly had transpired. According to Dutke’s version, I had gone berserk and beaten a boy because he had insisted that Schmeling was a better fighter than Joe Louis.
I was taken aback by Dutke’s dishonesty, but remained silent. Before making his exit, Dutke recommended stiff punishment for “diesen wilden Kerl (this wild rascal),” meaning me, and Schürmann promised to take “appropriate action.”
As soon as Herr Dutke had left, Schürmann listened to my version of the altercation, which my classmates corroborated. Herr Schürmann gave me a stern warning to keep my temper in check but suspended punishment. At the same time he issued an equally stern warning to my opponent, who had several facial cuts and bruises to show for our encounter, to refrain from making disparaging racial remarks aimed directly or indirectly at me. Then, Herr Schürmann told the class that he, too, had been listening to the fight, and that although Louis lost, he lost with honor by staying on his feet at least five rounds longer than anyone thought possible in view of the brutal punishment he absorbed.
I felt vindicated in the eyes of my classmates, and although I still had to listen occasionally to how a brilliant Max Schmeling beat a dimwitted Joe Louis, I heard just as many comments in praise of the American and his superhuman effort to remain on his feet. I never felt that in losing the fight, Joe Louis had let me down, but his defeat at the hands of Schmeling had nevertheless been a bitter disappointment to me. Now it felt good to know that many people still respected Joe Louis as the toughest fighter who ever stepped into a ring. Henceforth, when anyone called me Joe Louis, which happened quite frequently, I stuck out my chest and felt like a champ.
Shortly after the memorable fight in Yankee Stadium, a full-length documentary film, entitled Max Schmelings Sieg—Ein Deutscher Sieg (Max Schmeling’s Victory—A German Victory) ran in all of Hamburg’s movie theaters. Everybody in the neighborhood rushed to see this Goebbels-inspired propaganda film—everybody, that is, but me. I simply couldn’t bring myself to relive my agony by watching my hero get beaten. Not until two years later did I overcome my aversion and watch the film, but only because by that time, Joe Louis had evened the score with a spectacular knockout of Schmeling in the first round.
While German sports fans were still debating the pros and cons of the first Louis-Schmeling fight, the approach of another sports spectacular, the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin, was making headline news. Weeks before the opening of the games, the press reported that the U.S. Olympic team would include an appreciable number of black athletes. To avoid offending any of the fifty-one visitor nations, especially those that were fielding black and other non-Aryan athletes, the Goebbels-controlled press had refrained from the usual racist innuendoes and treated the news involving black athletes with uncharacteristic objectivity. Even the signs proclaiming JUDEN UNERWUNSCHT (Jews Not Wanted) that had proliferated throughout Hamburg in restaurants and other establishments of public accommodation disappeared for the duration of the festival to avoid stepping on sensitive foreign toes. The rather transparent idea behind this new modification of established racist practices was obviously to compound Hitler’s coup of bringing the Olympics to Germany by casting the dictator in the image of a gracious and benign international host.
This temporarily revised national policy did not, however, prevent my neighborhood from receiving the news of blacks coming to Berlin with a great deal of condescension and ridicule that exposed the average German’s abysmal ignorance of the United States. Many were amused by the idea that “a bunch of Kanibalen” were about to take on Germany’s vaunted Olympic track team. The father of one of my classmates, a barber, told us in all seriousness that the blacks who were on their way to Berlin had been captured in the “American jungles” where, he explained, they used to roam free before being pressed against their will into Olympic servitude. He further had it on good authority that only those blacks who had been observed running the swiftest and jumping the highest in their pursuit of wildlife were captured and forced to train for the Olympics in order to hone their already formidable physical skills.
This man-in-the-street type of “knowledge” was not too far out of line from that of better-educated Germans. Herr Dutke preempted any possibility of a black Olympic triumph by telling us that blacks weren’t athletes “in the true sense of the word” since they were “born runners and jumpers—like horses and other animals.”
“For a German runner to lose to one of these half-civilized people from America,” Herr Dutke assured the class, “is no more a disgrace than losing to a horse. Everybody knows that a horse is physically superior but mentally inferior to a man. The same is true for the Hottentotten from America.”
Most of the derisive talk about inferior Hottentotten, Kanibalen, and Buschneger, which kept me in a continuous state of impotent rage, came to a sudden halt following the arrival of the American track-and-field team at the Olympic Village in Berlin. Even the most ignorant and prejudiced among my neighbors were quick to realize that the clean-cut young black men in the smart white uniforms who were smiling at us from the newspapers, magazines, and newsreels were anything but the primitive savages they had expected. Learning that the black athletes were college students made a deep impression on my education-worshipping countrymen, but what really made believers out of them was the blacks’ gentlemanly and sportsmanlike comportment on and off the track.
A few days before the opening of the games, Karl Morell startled me with sensational news. His father was taking him, his older brother, Hans, and several neighborhood boys on a one-week trip to Berlin, and if my mother would give her permission—and come up with the train fare and a few extra marks spending money—I was welcome to come along. At first, my mother was dead set against letting me go. But when I convinced her by way of a two-hour hunger strike that my life might as well be over if I couldn’t go to Berlin, she agreed to have a chat with Herr and Frau Morell to learn more about the trip. After a lengthy discussion with the Morells, during which they assured her that I would be in good hands and that there was no better way for a boy to spend part of the school summer holidays than to see the nation’s capital and the Olympic Games, my mother relented.
On the morning of our departure, our group of about ten boys from the neighborhood, some in Hitler Youth uniforms, each loaded down with heavy backpacks and canteens, journeyed by Hochbahn to Hamburg’s Central Station. Before boarding a D-Zug (express train) for Berlin, Herr Morell had us fall in and stand at attention like an SS honor guard for a snappy military briefing on what to do and what not to do on the trip. For the occasion, he, too, carried a backpack, but although he did not wear his Amtswalter uniform, his polished brown riding boots and britches left no doubt about his Nazi Party membership.
The train was packed, mostly with schoolchildren who, like us, were venting their excitement by filling the air with deafening chatter and the occasional strains of a
marching song. Listening to the cacophony and watching the landscape go by, I still found it difficult to believe that in a few hours I would be walking around our Reichshauptstadt (capital) Berlin, the city we kids had been taught to regard as the center of the universe.
When we arrived late at night at Berlin’s famous Anhalter Bahnhof, we were hoarse from singing and dead tired. By the time we reached our youth hostel on the outskirts of the city, after a brief bus ride through Berlin’s bustling night traffic and a quick look at the famous Brandenburg Gate and the Funkturm, Berlin’s answer to Paris’s Eiffel Tower, we were ready to hit the sack. But before we were allowed to go to sleep on the inviting mattresses that lined the walls of an attic dormitory, Herr Morell reminded us that we were breathing the same Berlin air as our beloved Führer, and made us render the Nazi salute. The very idea of the Führer’s proximity gave me goose pimples that didn’t go away until I was soundly asleep.
Unlike my original feelings toward Joe Louis and Max Schmeling, I never was torn by conflicting loyalties between the black Olympic athletes and the athletes of my motherland. From the very beginning of the games it was clear to me that the black athletes’ victories were my victories, that their defeats were my defeats. I immediately felt a surge of pride over the very special kinship that linked me with these men from America, and before long, the names of Harrison Dillard, Dave Albritton, Archie Williams, John Woodruff, Cornelius Johnson, and Ralph Metcalf were as familiar to me as those of Germany’s top Olympic entrants, like track ace Lutz Long. While all were accorded bona fide star treatment, none of the accolades showered on the black Americans compared with the ones the German fans reserved for their newly discovered Olympic darling—and my newest hero—Jesse Owens. Alabama-born, like Joe Louis, Owens was widely touted as the United States’ leading prospect for track-and-field Olympic gold. But his actual performance surpassed even the most optimistic expectations of his newly won German fans. After an exhausting four days during which he made fourteen consecutive appearances, running four heats each in the 100 and 200 meters and jumping six times, Owens raced to victory in the 100-and 200-meter sprints in 10.3 and 20.7 seconds, respectively, led off the winning 400-meter relay, and set an Olympic broad jump record of 26 feet, 5 5/16 inches. The fact that Herr Morell was able to get us admitted to only a fraction of the events and that from our seats way up in the packed stadium’s bleachers we could barely see the action on the field did nothing to dampen our enthusiasm for the games.
An alleged snub of the black quadruple gold-medal winner by Hitler, which was widely reported at the time in the United States, was predictably overlooked by the Nazi-controlled German press. Whether the dictator deviated from his earlier practice of congratulating the winners personally in order to avoid shaking hands with a Neger is largely a matter of conjecture, since no gold-medal winner after Owens was “honored” in this way. It is a fact, however, that the dictator left the Olympic Stadium before Cornelius Johnson, the black high-jump gold-medal winner, had a chance to ascend the victor’s stand, and that he discontinued greeting winners from then on. When I asked him years later what he thought of the infamous “snub,” Jesse Owens told me that he was not sure that Hitler meant to snub him or the other black athletes by not receiving them in his private box. “He was obviously a very, very busy man who had better things to do with his time than shake hands with jocks” was the way Jesse dismissed the non-incident. “But even if he meant to snub us,” Jesse added, “I couldn’t have cared less.”
It wasn’t until several weeks after our small group’s return to Hamburg that I could let a day go by without my recapitulating the feats of the Olympic heroes and the fact that I had been there. With all the publicity showered on Jesse Owens, some of my playmates could not resist calling me Jesse, the way a short while earlier they had called me Joe. Again I took it for the compliment it was intended to be. There was no doubt that as Jesse’s star had ascended in Berlin, so had mine among my peers.
As in the case of the Schmeling victory, the Nazis did not let the opportunity go by to give the widest possible publicity to another major sports coup (Germany had won the lion’s share of gold medals) and prepared a full-length documentary propaganda film of the Olympic Games, Olympia. Divided in two parts entitled Fest der Völker (Festival of the People) and Fest der Schönheit (Festival of Beauty), the film was directed by Germany’s cinematographic genius (and rumored Hitler mistress) Leni Riefenstahl, who produced a masterpiece that still draws raves from movie buffs.
This time, I eagerly went to see the film. Only too aware of the prevailing racist attitudes, I had resigned myself to seeing Jesse relegated to a few cameo appearances, but was pleasantly surprised to find that the film focused more on Jesse than on any other Olympic star. I didn’t believe my eyes when time and again the Riefenstahl cameras zeroed in on Jesse with close-up after close-up that left little doubt about the director’s profound preoccupation with her subject. There were numerous shots taken from various angles of Jesse’s well-muscled, ebony-hued body, glistening with perspiration, each capturing the grace and power of his movements. At other times, the cameras focused on his expressive face as he concentrated in preparation for action, and on his guileless, open smile following each victory. There also was plenty of footage that recorded the outbreak of pandemonium as the Berlin stadium erupted with deafening chants of “Jesse! Jesse! Jesse!” aimed at spurring the black American to victory. The film, obviously intended to bolster the Nazi concept of Aryan supremacy, ironically turned out to be a monument to the superiority of one non-Aryan superstar.
When at the end of the film the lights went on in the movie theater, people who spotted me were looking at me not with the usual ill-disguised expressions of ridicule, condescension, or contempt, but with obvious admiration and approval. “There’s Jesse’s little brother,” I heard one man point me out to his children. I felt a surge of pride that I found extremely difficult to conceal. That feeling of pride recurred whenever someone mentioned the names Jesse Owens or Joe Louis and sustained me throughout my childhood years.
Many years later, when, in the course of my work as Ebony managing editor, I met my two heroes in person—Joe Louis in Las Vegas, where he was a greeter at Caesars Palace, and Jesse Owens in Chicago, where he ran his own PR firm—I had the chance to personally thank them for what they had done for me. Looking puzzled at first, both accepted my gratitude with characteristic modesty when I told them that as a ten-year-old black kid in Nazi Germany, I was able to walk a bit taller because of them.
THE HINDENBURG
Many of the Nazis’ high-priority projects were designed to impress upon the German people and the rest of the world that Germany was flourishing and on the road to becoming a respected world power again. Foremost among them was the construction and operation of the largest airship ever built, the monstrous dirigible LZ-129 Hindenburg, which dwarfed its behemoth sister ship, the Graf Zeppelin.
For months before the Hindenburg inaugurated the first regular transatlantic dirigible passenger service, Dr. Goebbels’s press had ballyhooed “this great technological marvel of National Socialism” and hailed it as living proof of Germany’s world leadership in “the most important technology of the twentieth century.” Having seen the Hindenburg in numerous newsreels and in the newspapers, we kids were easily impressed with Germany’s “bold leap into the future” via this lighter-than-air marvel and never got tired of discussing its daunting capabilities. But although I had become quite familiar with the LZ-129’s awesome dimensions, nothing had prepared me for my first and only encounter with this monster of the skies.
The day the Hindenburg was scheduled to visit Hamburg in a low overflight turned out to be a beautiful sunny day. About an hour before the event, the denizens of Stückenstrasse No. 3, minus Tante Möller, who said she was too old and too scared to participate, climbed a small ladder through a narrow hatch onto the roof of our three-story building. With eager anticipation I searched the sky for a sign of
the familiar cigar-shaped colossus, my sense of excitement heightened by the rooftop perspective, since my mother had never before allowed me to go up there. All the roofs around us were packed with people who had come to witness the historic event. Among them I recognized some of my playmates and soon we were killing time by waving and shouting back and forth.
Finally, somebody pointed southward and hollered, “There it is!” Looking up, I saw the airship at a considerable distance, heading directly toward us. At first, I was disappointed, since it didn’t seem nearly as large as I had imagined. But slowly and surely, the Hindenburg grew bigger and bigger and the droning of its engines became louder and louder until it loomed menacingly directly before us. For a moment I found its gargantuan size so oppressive that I had difficulty breathing. I was convinced that if the monster came any closer, it would crush me and everyone else on the roof. Before I knew it, the monster was directly above us, casting its vast shadow over our street. I could clearly make out the word Hindenburg on its hull and, extending from its aluminum underbelly, its passenger gondola and its four external diesel-powered turbines that were filling the air with a window-rattling drone. Within seconds, as quickly as it had come, the Hindenburg had passed over us. Rapidly, it shrank until the black, white, and red swastika emblem on each of its four gigantic tailfins disappeared from view.
For days after the Hindenburg’s Hamburg visit, we kids talked about nothing else. We felt as if that unique experience had forged a special link between us and the giant airship and eagerly followed its triumphant Atlantic crossings in the news. Yet, less than a year later, on May 7, 1937 (May 6, U.S. time), our hopes and dreams for our technological marvel were shattered with the news that the Hindenburg had exploded shortly after its arrival at Lakehurst, New Jersey, and that thirty-six persons had lost their lives.