August 3, 1936: Berlin, Germany:
It had been unreal... or maybe surreal was a better term, Rollie Barrell thought as he, his wife, Claudia and James, and Rufus and Alice made their way into the gigantic Olympic Stadium in Berlin.
Though Rufus and Alice had arrived 10 full days after the others, joining them in Hamburg on the 26th of July, they had been together for nearly a week, the last five days of that in Berlin itself. None of them had ever seen anything like it. And that included Claudia, who had been born and raised in Germany under the Kaiserreich. This new "Third Reich" of Hitler and the Nazis was something for which none of them could have been prepared.
Though there had been plenty of talk over the past months about the possibility of the Americans boycotting the Berlin Games due to the Nazis mistreatment of Jews, that had not come to pass. And, surprisingly (or not if you were blessed with a healthy dose of skepticism as Rollie was), there was absolutely no sign of anti-Semitism to be found anywhere in the various cities they had visited on their circuitous route to the German capital.
Their trip had begun in Frankfurt, which happened to be the location where Claudia had served as a nurse in a hospital for prisoners-of-war... and where she had met Jimmy Barrell. The building was still in use as a hospital. Claudia had cried as they stood outside looking at the brick building where she had spent the most difficult two years of her life. James had given her a hug, his own emotions a confusing stew as he saw the place where his father had been taken after being shot down and seriously injured back in 1918.
From there, Rollie had offered to visit Bad Hersfeld, where Claudia had been born and raised. But her entire family was dead, her father and brother killed in the war, her mother an indirect casualty as well, who probably died from a broken heart; all of them gone before the madness ended in November 1918. Instead the group went first to Coblenz, then Cologne, Dusseldorf and Dortmund before finally going to Hamburg to meet Rufus and Alice. In several places, Claudia had been asked, in a vexed tone why her blond-haired, blue-eyed son wasn't wearing the brown uniform of the Hitler Youth. "Because's he's American, not German!" she had invariably shot back.
Of those brown-shirted youths (and their adult counterparts) there was no shortage in any of the cities they visited. The swastika was prominently displayed everywhere. In general the people they met, when they realized that the group was American were overbearingly nice (which didn't always happen right away since at first blush Claudia both looked and spoke like a German - for obvious reasons - and James did as well). Claudia eventually figured out that the government had put out a nationwide demand that until the Olympics ended the German people were to be unfailingly kind and friendly to all visitors. Rollie, for his part, admired the slickness of the propaganda machine, while at the same time despising the regime that had conceived it and which it was promoting.
Eventually, they reached Berlin, where the propaganda machine was in full voice. Every street was lined with swastika flags, with an occasional Olympic flag thrown in for good measure. They were in the stadium on August 1st for the "opening ceremony" of the Games, one of several innovations the Nazis had added to the program. The ceremony included having all the teams march into the stadium in a "parade of nations" and also included the culmination of a Nazi innovation called the "torch relay" - a torch manufactured of Krupp steel, lit in Olympia, Greece and hand-carried by a series of runners through several nations, with the last runner entering the stadium along a route lined hundreds deep by Hitler Youth to finally light a cauldron at one end of the massive Olympic Stadium, filled with 105,000 spectators, the vast majority of whom spent the bulk of the ceremony on their feet with their right arms extended in what had been known in previous Olympic games as the "Roman salute" but had since been co-opted first by Mussolini in Italy and then the Nazis in Germany as a fascist salute.
On the night of the first of August, they'd met up with Betsy, whose experience mirrored their own. Being less suspicious than Rollie, Betsy found the Germans charming and the pomp and pageantry of the opening ceremony thrilling... right up to the moment when 20,000 pigeons were released into the air, and cannons boomed. The noise frightened the birds, who proceeded to drop a mess of guano, most of which landed on and around the American team. Betsy herself avoided being splattered, but Annette was not so lucky. Now Betsy - and Annette - were simply looking forward to competing. Her only comment aside from chiding Rollie for his smirking about the pigeons, was on the prevalence of Nazi symbology everywhere they looked - this even included signs with the Olympic rings grasped in the talons of a Nazi eagle. "And there are so many people in uniforms," she noted.
By the third, it fell to all the Barrells that it was well past time for the simple pleasure or rooting for a family member in an athletic event: the running of the women's 100 meters. There were to be six heats, with Betsy running in the first heat. Everyone was standing for the event, one thing that had become evident was that the majority of the time, the majority of the stadium would be on their feet. Rufus and Alice, both now in their late fifties, found this somewhat exhausting, but soldiered on.
"The one thing I can't get over is just the scale," Rollie said to his father. "I mean, this stadium is enormous for one thing, but the Nazis don't do anything by half-measures, do they?"
"No, they sure don't," Rufus replied.
Francie placed a hand on Rollie's arm and said, "You know I wanted to bring the girls with us," she paused and Rollie nodded, "But looking at this," she waved a hand around the stadium, "I think leaving them with Dick was the right call." Marty Barrell, 13 and Allie, 6, were staying with Francie's brother Dick York and his family in Detroit. Rollie sighed and nodded in agreement.
"I wish our seats were better. My eyes aren't what they used to be," Alice groused. And it was true, they were really far from the track. Rufus thought he recognized one of the specks warming up near the track as his daughter, but he couldn't be sure. Many of the teams were wearing white uniforms.
"You did bring your binoculars, didn't you?" Rollie asked his father.
Rufus' expression was so surprised it was nearly comical. "Why, yes! I did!" he exclaimed and reached under his seat. "I'd forgotten," he said, red-faced.
Alice shook her head, but privately wondered if Rufus was beginning to go senile. He'd always had a mind like a steel trap when it came to baseball... and it seemed to her he still did, but he had also always been somewhat absentminded about everything else too.
Rufus handed the binoculars to his wife, who peered down and verified that Betsy was there. "And there is that Annette O'Boyle," she said, the disapproval in her voice evident. Betsy had relayed Annette's promise to treat Tommy with more respect, but neither Rufus nor Alice had heard from Tom before leaving for Berlin, and didn't know if anything had changed on that front.
"From the way Tommy's been pitching, I don't think his infatuation with her is having much impact," Rufus told his wife. She sniffed in derision but didn't say anything further. And it was true - Tom was having arguably his best season ever. On the day they'd left for the Olympics, Tom was 15-5 with a 3.44 ERA and was leading the CA in strikeouts as well. He wasn't alone in starring for the Kings either, Harry was hitting .375, With Powell Slocum taking over as manager Danny was back at first base (with Frank Vance moving back to third) and was hitting .380 and Fred was at .319 - the Kings themselves were 55-29 and in first place.
Rufus let Alice keep the binoculars for the race. Betsy was in prime form; she ran an 11.4 to easily win her heat and advance. In heat four, Annette ran a 12.8 and also moved on to the semifinals. Also advancing was a Polish runner named Stefania Szymanska, who had been the cause of some controversy just prior to the games: there was a nasty rumor going around that she was, in fact, male. In the wake of the accusation, a Polish newspaper had suggested that Betsy herself might be a male too. Nothing came of it, and it didn't matter: Betsy had run against "Steff" in the U.S. several times, and always won. Aside from a briefly considered "examination" by German doctors prior to the race, which came to nothing, the whole thing had been a tempest in a teapot.
In the first of two semifinals, Betsy would be racing against two of three Germans to have advanced out of the heats, while in the second, Annette would be facing both Szymanska and the other German. With Alice yelling herself hoarse, in the course of just over 11 seconds, Betsy won her heat with a time of 11.5; the Germans finished 11.9 and 12.2 for second and third, to be the first three runners to make the final. In the second semifinal, Annette finished third, barely beating a British runner to take the last spot in the final with a time of 12.1, behind the German competitor and Szymanska who finished in a dead heat just ahead of her with identical 12.0 times, though the photo finish gave the edge to the German.
That set up a Final in which the field was comprised of two Americans, three Germans and a lone Pole. With Alice again cheering so loudly that some of the Germans around her began staring, Betsy led wire-to-wire and won with an 11.5 mark, two-tenths ahead of Szymanska with the fastest of the German trio, Elizabeta Warner, taking bronze at 11.9. Annette O'Boyle finished fifth with a time of 12.2.
Rufus stood, hand over heart and tears in his eyes, during the medal ceremony as his daughter received her gold medal. Rollie, standing beside his father, also hand over heart, couldn't help but notice the thousands of spectators who had their right arms straight out, even with an American standing atop the medal stand. Rollie could see Hitler's box across the way and his impression was that the German dictator had the entire country firmly in his hands. Surreal... and more than a little frightening.
Alice, complaining of a headache, rose to leave after the women's 100, with Rufus accompanying her. They would return the next day when Betsy would compete in the discus. Rollie, Francie, Claudia and James stayed to watch the men run. Rufus wanted to stay as well because one of the American runners was the older brother of a baseball prospect named Roosevelt Brewer about whom the OSA had issued a glowing report after the youngster's outstanding 1936 season as a high school junior. The elder Brewer, Marcus, was an electrifying runner and expected to challenge for at least a silver in the 200 meters. The favorite was his fellow American, Jack Powell who was generally considered the best athlete in the world and likely to put a finger in the eye of Hitler's "Aryan supremacy" schtick.
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Author's note: This post had a lot of exposition instead of my usual preference for dialogue-drive story. That was largely because of the size and scope of the topic (this post could have been much longer had I included everything I thought about including). The 1936 Olympics were in many ways both a gigantic propaganda exercise by Nazi Germany and also the first truly modern games in that the spectacle put on by Hitler's minions in the last Olympics before World War II became something of a blueprint for the postwar Games, and these elements persist to today. If you want more background on the Berlin Games, I heartily recommend this video on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d9whmFSYXps
For those who don't watch the video, a lot of the things mentioned in this post actually happened in Germany, including the incident with the pigeons and the artillery fire at the close of the opening ceremony.
And if you're wondering, 'Jack Powell' is indeed based on Jesse Owens, just as FABL's 'Roosevelt Brewer' is based (albeit much more loosely) on Jackie Robinson and Rosie's brother Marcus is based on Jackie's older brother Mack Robinson who won silver behind Owens in Berlin. In keeping with the fictional nature of Figment itself, I changed the names, but the heroic and historic accomplishments of Owens & Robinson at "Hitler's Olympics" represent something larger than sport.
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