Latest / Revisionist History / Hitler’s Olympics, Part 8: “Vater, It is to be Fayetteville”

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Hitler’s Olympics, Part 8: “Vater, It is to be Fayetteville” · Revisionist History

0:06
Speaker 1: Bushkin. Yeah. Yeah, now's about you're the best thing to
0:17
Speaker 1: think about the guy Krieger who goes from Germany to Arkansas. Yes,
0:24
Speaker 1: he does, to Fayetteville. Yes, I'm talking to a professor
0:28
Speaker 1: at Yale Law School, James Q. Whitman, about an all
0:32
Speaker 1: but forgotten figure named Heinrich Krieger. In the early nineteen thirties.
0:37
Speaker 1: Krieger was a student in Dusseldorf, an intellectual who set
0:41
Speaker 1: out for a semester abroad. We have no pictures of him,
0:45
Speaker 1: so we'll have to use our imaginations. A proper upper
0:49
Speaker 1: class European waistcoat, little round glasses, bouler hat in his
0:54
Speaker 1: briefcase about her copy of NIETZSCHEZ Beyond Good and Evil.
0:58
Speaker 1: I'm guessing he's never been to America before. He takes
1:01
Speaker 1: a steamship from Hamburg to New Orleans the SS Westmoreland,
1:05
Speaker 1: his heart beating furiously with a mixture of apprehension and excitement,
1:11
Speaker 1: he disembarks, takes a train north and west, and arrives
1:15
Speaker 1: in Fayetteville, Arkansas. Rents a room in the house of
1:18
Speaker 1: a German professor named of Gustav on Maple Street, right
1:22
Speaker 1: by the University of Arkansas. The School of Law. The
1:26
Speaker 1: law school was only ten years old. Classes were held
1:29
Speaker 1: in the old chemistry building on campus. Today, Fayetteville has
1:32
Speaker 1: one hundred thousand people. Back then it's just over seven thousand.
1:36
Speaker 1: A dusty little place, a whole world away from dusudarf.
1:42
Speaker 1: Did the University of Arkansas Law School get a lot
1:44
Speaker 1: of overseas students in the nineteen thirties, I don't think so.
1:49
Speaker 1: This is this is almost a comic notion that someone's
1:53
Speaker 1: coming from this, from the cradle of European civilization to
1:56
Speaker 1: Faytteville in the early nineteen thirties. I mean, it's like
1:59
Speaker 1: the culture shock that poor man.
2:01
Speaker 2: I don't know how he ended up there, I truly don't.
2:04
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, and he goes there. How much time is
2:06
Speaker 1: he spend in just a year?
2:07
Speaker 3: A year?
2:08
Speaker 2: He was an exchange student for a year, and.
2:09
Speaker 1: He ends up writing. And you've read this book, he writes, Oh.
2:13
Speaker 2: Yes, yeah, and it's quite a good book if you
2:15
Speaker 2: accept this basic starting premise, that's well done, you know.
2:18
Speaker 1: So describe to us what he produces in his time
2:21
Speaker 1: in favor. But he produced a book called Race Law
2:23
Speaker 1: in America. Oh, I really forgot to mention Herr Krieger
2:28
Speaker 1: is a Nazi, a serious one. My name is Malcolm Gladwell.
2:37
Speaker 1: You're listening to Hitler's Olympics are a series of the
2:40
Speaker 1: nineteen thirty six Berlin Games. Dorothy Thompson, Charles Cheryl, Avery Brandage,
2:46
Speaker 1: Jesse Owens the main subjects of our series so far.
2:50
Speaker 1: We're all Americans trying to make sense of what was
2:53
Speaker 1: happening in Germany in the early days of the Nazi regime.
2:57
Speaker 1: The Olympics forced us to look at them, but the
3:01
Speaker 1: Germans were looking at us too. The bronze medalist in
3:09
Speaker 1: the men's foundred meters in Berlin was an American named
3:12
Speaker 1: Jimmy Luvall. He went on to become a chemist at
3:15
Speaker 1: Stanford University. I happened to be somewhat obsessed with Jimmy
3:18
Speaker 1: LaVall for a whole series of reasons that have nothing
3:21
Speaker 1: to do with his running career, but that's for another time.
3:24
Speaker 1: In nineteen eighty eight, LaVall sits for a long interview
3:27
Speaker 1: about his experiences at the Olympics, and at one point
3:30
Speaker 1: he describes what happened when the team first got to Germany.
3:34
Speaker 3: We arrived eventually in the Hamburg disembarked. They took us
3:39
Speaker 3: up to the Roth house and served us so each
3:44
Speaker 3: of us had a small glass of twenty five year
3:47
Speaker 3: old port. Well up to that time, I'd never realized
3:50
Speaker 3: how delightful a good wine could taste. This was excellent wine.
3:56
Speaker 1: The Germans saw all these Americans coming from across the
3:59
Speaker 1: ocean and welcomed them with open arms.
4:02
Speaker 3: I mean, you heard all this regular all about Hitler,
4:04
Speaker 3: But certainly the German people or as nice as they
4:07
Speaker 3: could be. I had a Jena and colonel invite me
4:12
Speaker 3: out to his home for dinner one night, and dinner
4:17
Speaker 3: with he and his children, his two daughters, and his wife,
4:21
Speaker 3: very pleasant. Two or three of us went along. We
4:24
Speaker 3: saw no sign of any intolerance of any.
4:26
Speaker 1: Type, no sign of any intolerance. Jimmy Navau was black.
4:33
Speaker 1: He was from Los Angeles, which in the nineteen thirties
4:36
Speaker 1: was functionally as segregated as Birmingham. In Los Angeles, white
4:40
Speaker 1: people did not invite him to their houses for dinner
4:43
Speaker 1: or give him a glass of twenty five year old port.
4:47
Speaker 1: The runner who took gold in the fornded meters Archie Williams,
4:50
Speaker 1: was also African American, also from California.
4:54
Speaker 4: He took us outter this beautiful looked like a country
4:57
Speaker 4: club where the Olympic village where they had was landscape
5:01
Speaker 4: with beauty and all the buildings were brand new. In fact,
5:04
Speaker 4: uh it later be was to become what a monitor
5:09
Speaker 4: or military academy, and it was set up with the
5:12
Speaker 4: cottage type barracks and they had uh all every country
5:16
Speaker 4: had its own dining hall. And since we had one
5:20
Speaker 4: of the largest teams and we had all the goodies,
5:23
Speaker 4: all the foreign athletes wanted to be our friends immediately.
5:27
Speaker 4: And in addition to that, we had some kind of
5:28
Speaker 4: a car which allowed us to ride any transportation anywhere
5:33
Speaker 4: in in Berlin free of charge. All you had to
5:36
Speaker 4: do was just show it to the conductor and sit out,
5:38
Speaker 4: and you could go wherever you wanted to.
5:40
Speaker 1: Sit down and go anywhere you wanted to. If you
5:43
Speaker 1: were black in Los Angeles in the nineteen thirties, you
5:45
Speaker 1: couldn't even go to the beach.
5:47
Speaker 3: We got on the train to go to Berlin. We
5:49
Speaker 3: arrived in Berlin and there was this mob of uh
5:52
Speaker 3: young people with a lot of girls. Bois Jesse, Bois Jesse,
5:56
Speaker 3: Bois Jesse. Oh yeah, uh remember that Jesse had scept
6:00
Speaker 3: four world records here in the United States that year,
6:02
Speaker 3: so they wanted to see him. Well, Jesse got off
6:04
Speaker 3: the train and these little girls had scissors and I
6:06
Speaker 3: started slipping off his clothes. I'm not kidding. It was wonderful.
6:12
Speaker 1: How did Jesse respond able?
6:14
Speaker 3: Jesse got back on the train as fast as he cut.
6:19
Speaker 1: The Germans were fascinated with the black athletes. The Nazis
6:23
Speaker 1: were probably as obsessed with the way white Americans treated
6:26
Speaker 1: black people as Americans were with the way Nazis treated
6:30
Speaker 1: the Jews, because America had mastered a problem that the
6:33
Speaker 1: Nazis were desperately trying to solve for themselves. Remember Putsy
6:40
Speaker 1: Hitler's Harvard educated piano playing pr guy. He set up
6:43
Speaker 1: Dorothy Thompson's nineteen thirty one interview with Hitler, where she
6:47
Speaker 1: concludes that Hitler's eyes have the peculiar shine which often
6:51
Speaker 1: distinguishes geniuses, alcoholics, and hysterics. After Thompson's article, Hitler refused
6:59
Speaker 1: all all interviews with foreign journalists for about a year,
7:03
Speaker 1: but finally Putsy convinced Hitler to sit down with Putsy's
7:06
Speaker 1: best friend from Harvard, a radio commentator from Wisconsin named H. V. Caltenborn.
7:14
Speaker 1: Putsy and Kaltenborn did theater together in college. Putsy has
7:18
Speaker 1: his friend come to Hitler's chalet in the Bavarian Alps.
7:21
Speaker 1: It's August. The views are gorgeous. Hitler's laundry is flapping
7:25
Speaker 1: on the clothesline in the backyard. Putsy takes a picture
7:28
Speaker 1: of Hitler and his Harvard body standing next to each
7:31
Speaker 1: other on the porch. Hitler's all in black, looking very stern.
7:35
Speaker 1: Kaltenborne will later write he dislikes talking to strangers. Instead
7:40
Speaker 1: of answering an interviewer's questions, he makes excited speeches, thus
7:45
Speaker 1: seeking to create for himself the atmosphere of the public
7:48
Speaker 1: meeting in which he is at home. Kaltenborn asks Hitler
7:53
Speaker 1: about the Jews. For a moment, he bored into me
7:57
Speaker 1: with his clear blue eyes, which are his most attractive feature.
8:01
Speaker 1: People were always fixated on Hitler's eyes. You have a
8:04
Speaker 1: Monroe doctrine for America, he wrote at me. We believe
8:08
Speaker 1: in a Monroe doctrine for Germany. You exclude and he
8:11
Speaker 1: would be immigrants you do not care to admit. You
8:14
Speaker 1: regulate their number, You demand that they come up to
8:16
Speaker 1: a certain physical standard, you insist that they bring in
8:19
Speaker 1: a certain amount of money, You examine them as to
8:22
Speaker 1: their political opinions. We demand the same right. We are
8:27
Speaker 1: concerned about any anti German elements in our own country,
8:32
Speaker 1: and we demand the right to deal with them as
8:34
Speaker 1: we see fit. Hitler has never visited America. He doesn't
8:41
Speaker 1: even speak English, but here he is holding forth on
8:44
Speaker 1: the fine points of US immigration law and foreign policy.
8:48
Speaker 1: As first articulated by James Monroe in his seventh Annual
8:52
Speaker 1: Message to Congress in December eighteen twenty three, there's a
8:56
Speaker 1: project going on within Germany in the thirties to kind
9:02
Speaker 1: of find a legal basis for what they want to
9:05
Speaker 1: do with the Jews. Right, an incredibly naive question would
9:10
Speaker 1: be why would they bother to find legal basis.
9:13
Speaker 2: It's not a naive question, it's a crucial Well, it
9:15
Speaker 2: may be naive, but it's a question crucial for understanding
9:17
Speaker 2: what went on.
9:18
Speaker 1: Our Yale law professor James Q. Whitman. Again, part of.
9:22
Speaker 2: The answer has to do with German culture. Much more broadly,
9:26
Speaker 2: Germans do tend to insist that things be properly legally codified,
9:33
Speaker 2: and that was even true of the Nazis.
9:36
Speaker 1: In nineteen thirty two when Caltenborn and Hitler meat. The
9:39
Speaker 1: Nazis aren't yet at the stage where they've settled on
9:42
Speaker 1: mass murderer as a solution to their Jewish problem. That's
9:45
Speaker 1: years away. They're still trying to figure out how to
9:48
Speaker 1: marginalize the Jews in a way that seems acceptable.
9:52
Speaker 2: The Nazis, it is important to remember, especially in the
9:54
Speaker 2: early years, had to run a state which was not
9:57
Speaker 2: entirely managed Nazis. They had to have the German bureaucracy
10:03
Speaker 2: on their side. They had to do things that would
10:06
Speaker 2: appeal to.
10:09
Speaker 1: People.
10:09
Speaker 2: Most of them were trained in law and would expect
10:12
Speaker 2: law to be to govern.
10:14
Speaker 1: What was done by through the Nazi program. So they
10:18
Speaker 1: looked to the US, where the Constitution promised its citizens
10:22
Speaker 1: equal protection under the laws, but with the laws made
10:24
Speaker 1: black people second class citizens. The US systematically oppressed a
10:29
Speaker 1: racial class, but the country was still respected around the world.
10:34
Speaker 1: So how exactly was the US doing it? If you
10:39
Speaker 1: were a Nazi in Germany, this seemed like a really
10:42
Speaker 1: important question. It's like if you were a kid doing
10:45
Speaker 1: card tricks in your bedroom and your parents take you
10:47
Speaker 1: to a full on magic show in Las Vegas, and
10:50
Speaker 1: you watch the lady get cut in half, and you
10:52
Speaker 1: turn to your dad and you say, wait what, Which
10:58
Speaker 1: brings us back to hairc Our eager law student from Dusseldorf,
11:03
Speaker 1: with his waistcoat and his little round glasses put yourself
11:07
Speaker 1: for a moment in his elegant hand made brogues. You're
11:10
Speaker 1: young and idealistic. You are really interested in helping out
11:13
Speaker 1: this grand national project to do the Jewish thing right?
11:17
Speaker 1: So where do you go for inspiration? Well, you don't
11:21
Speaker 1: spend a year at Harvard Law School. The Germans knew
11:23
Speaker 1: all about Harvard. Putsey went to Harvard. What could you
11:26
Speaker 1: learn from the brightest legal minds of Massachusetts? Not so much.
11:31
Speaker 1: You need to go somewhere where Americans had spent years
11:34
Speaker 1: working through the nitty gritty of how to get away
11:36
Speaker 1: with marginalizing people. You need to go to the American South.
11:41
Speaker 1: Did Herkrieger consider the University of Alabama Law School, possibly
11:46
Speaker 1: a logical choice given his agenda, or maybe all miss
11:50
Speaker 1: in Oxford, Mississippi. They knew a thing or two, definitely
11:53
Speaker 1: on the short list. He must have spent many long
11:56
Speaker 1: hours going over the pros and cons of each possible
11:59
Speaker 1: destination until one day, over schnapps in the Krieger family's
12:03
Speaker 1: elegant townhouse on Radhas for strassa right on the Rhine Promenade.
12:07
Speaker 1: Young Kreeger turns to Papa Krieger and says, vatter it
12:13
Speaker 1: is to be Fairdville, Arkansas, and so it was in Fatdeville.
12:20
Speaker 1: He learns from local politicians. He has long conversations with
12:24
Speaker 1: his law professors. After a year, he says, here is
12:27
Speaker 1: too much to master. I must stay longer. In the
12:30
Speaker 1: United States of America. He moves to d C so
12:33
Speaker 1: he can do more research. At the Library of Congress,
12:36
Speaker 1: Krieger writes up everything he's learned just in time.
12:40
Speaker 2: He came back to Germany, and it seems that the
12:44
Speaker 2: Justice ministry in Berlin was looking for somebody who knew
12:46
Speaker 2: about American law, and somebody said, gee, I know this
12:48
Speaker 2: kid Kreeger.
12:50
Speaker 1: And he was enlisted. Yeah. But what they couldn't figure
12:54
Speaker 1: out is so the German legal establishment, as it sort
12:58
Speaker 1: of searches for waste to think about their their version
13:04
Speaker 1: of a race problem. They must be kind of they
13:08
Speaker 1: are generally aware of what's going on, obviously and going
13:10
Speaker 1: on in the United States. But what Kreeger is doing
13:12
Speaker 1: is he is giving them what he's giving He's giving
13:17
Speaker 1: them a concrete picture of the range and diversity of
13:20
Speaker 1: strategies and legal strategies that Americans use.
13:22
Speaker 2: Absolutely and done in a very sensitive way, concrete and
13:26
Speaker 2: extensive picture of what's going on. I mean, I say, so,
13:29
Speaker 2: you're perfectly right. There have been plenty of interests in
13:31
Speaker 2: American race law before that, but the knowledge was kind
13:33
Speaker 2: of scattershot. This was a much much more systematic treatment.
13:38
Speaker 2: I mean, I hate to say it's not a fine book,
13:40
Speaker 2: but it's quite a well known book.
13:42
Speaker 1: And what is Kreeger's conclusion? There is much much more
13:46
Speaker 1: to American race law than anyone back home in Dusseldorff
13:50
Speaker 1: has realized. So imagine that there is this guy from
14:02
Speaker 1: Germany who comes over and what itever it is thirty
14:04
Speaker 1: three or thirty four. What is that man learning about South?
14:11
Speaker 5: I think if he went to small towns and small communities,
14:16
Speaker 5: what he would find would be very, very complex, unexpected
14:22
Speaker 5: relationships that crossed racial lines, also cross gender lines.
14:27
Speaker 1: Lisa Lindquist Dor is a historian at the University of
14:30
Speaker 1: Alabama and an expert on Jim Crow. I called Dor
14:34
Speaker 1: because of a fascinating bit of research she did a
14:36
Speaker 1: couple of years ago. She collected every example she could
14:40
Speaker 1: find of accusations of black on white rape in the
14:43
Speaker 1: state of Virginia between nineteen hundred and nineteen sixty. She
14:48
Speaker 1: was interested in what happened to a black man during
14:51
Speaker 1: the high water years of segregation if he was alleged
14:54
Speaker 1: to have sexually assaulted a white woman. Now, if you
14:59
Speaker 1: remember to kill a mockingbird, you'd assume that any black
15:02
Speaker 1: man accused of raping a white woman in the South
15:05
Speaker 1: ended up dead. But that's not what Lisa Linquistor finds.
15:10
Speaker 1: She looks at two hundred and eighty eight cases. Seventeen
15:13
Speaker 1: of the accused are killed through extra legal violence. They're lynched,
15:18
Speaker 1: fifty are executed by the state. Forty eight people get
15:22
Speaker 1: sentence of the maximum prison sentence, fifty two get five
15:26
Speaker 1: years or less. But one hundred and twenty one forty
15:30
Speaker 1: two percent, the largest of all categories, are either acquitted, pardoned,
15:36
Speaker 1: or paroled. Take for example, a nineteen thirty one case
15:40
Speaker 1: involving a black man in Norfolk, Virginia named William Harper.
15:44
Speaker 5: A woman named Dorothy Skaggs, who is married to a
15:47
Speaker 5: sailor left her home to go to a guitar lesson,
15:51
Speaker 5: and she later testified in court that while walking along
15:53
Speaker 5: the street, who was struck on the head dragged into
15:56
Speaker 5: an allien rigged by a black man. William Harper was arrested,
15:59
Speaker 5: he was identi. His trial was very predictable, and he
16:02
Speaker 5: was sentenced to death, and then the defense revealed new
16:05
Speaker 5: evidence and he was given a new trial. And at
16:09
Speaker 5: the second trial, Harper produced six white witnesses who testified
16:13
Speaker 5: that on the night in question, Dorothy Skaggs was not
16:15
Speaker 5: on her way to a guitar lesson, but was at
16:18
Speaker 5: a roadhouse across state lines in North Carolina, drinking and
16:21
Speaker 5: dancing with a man who was not her husband. Harper
16:24
Speaker 5: was quickly acquitted, but the case was not over. Dorothy
16:27
Speaker 5: Skaggs and a white woman who corroborated her story of
16:30
Speaker 5: rape were brought to trial on charges of perjury. Both
16:33
Speaker 5: were initially convicted and sentenced to five years in prison,
16:36
Speaker 5: but both eventually were granted new tiles and subsequently acquitted.
16:39
Speaker 1: So you almost met it's like a mess. It is
16:43
Speaker 1: right for the white men of Virginia. Clearly, there are
16:48
Speaker 1: three separate considerations here. First, there's a black man who
16:52
Speaker 1: might have raped one of our own. That makes us
16:55
Speaker 1: really unhappy. Well, wait, she also cheated on her husband.
17:00
Speaker 1: That also makes us unhappy. And then hold on, should
17:03
Speaker 1: we really make a practice of just out and now
17:05
Speaker 1: believing a woman who says she's been raped, Because once
17:09
Speaker 1: you start going down that road, I mean, god knows
17:11
Speaker 1: where that ends. If segregation was, if the foundation of
17:16
Speaker 1: it was simply white supremacy, it gives white men one
17:21
Speaker 1: card to play. But what you're describing is they have
17:25
Speaker 1: two cards they can play, and they can choose when
17:27
Speaker 1: they play them, and if it suits their interests, they
17:30
Speaker 1: can either use the male card or the white card.
17:33
Speaker 5: Right right, And not only that, they always have the
17:37
Speaker 5: two cards. Then, even women who they claim an assault
17:42
Speaker 5: and they're believed in court and the guy goes to
17:44
Speaker 5: prison if they do anything, even subsequently, men can continue
17:48
Speaker 5: to play that men card and say, now we don't
17:52
Speaker 5: believe her anymore. Look what she has done. She has
17:55
Speaker 5: behaved poorly.
17:57
Speaker 1: The point is that Jim Crow isn't really systematic, not
18:00
Speaker 1: in Virginia or Arkansas or anywhere else. It's not some
18:03
Speaker 1: rigid set of rules. It's a Jerry built contraption with
18:07
Speaker 1: a million different exceptions and contradictions, which allows you to
18:11
Speaker 1: lynch the black guy when you want, or go to
18:13
Speaker 1: the formal legal route and have him executed, or if
18:16
Speaker 1: the whole thing feels a little too complicated, just blame
18:20
Speaker 1: your accuser.
18:21
Speaker 5: It is not so rigid and brutal that every instance
18:30
Speaker 5: of misbehavior causes a crackdown.
18:33
Speaker 1: And that's in your mind. That's why it survives as
18:36
Speaker 1: long as it does right.
18:38
Speaker 5: It's flexible, and it can incorporate all kinds of relationships
18:42
Speaker 5: across racial, gender class lines that might otherwise seem to
18:46
Speaker 5: violate the rules.
18:47
Speaker 1: What is it that allows the South to construct this
18:54
Speaker 1: kind of flexible, resilient I mean, you know, I'm thinking
19:00
Speaker 1: back to our German who comes over to the South.
19:03
Speaker 1: When our German goes home, much of what he reports
19:07
Speaker 1: the Nazis find shocking. And the thing they find shocking
19:10
Speaker 1: is the very thing you're describing. That They think what
19:13
Speaker 1: they need to have is a very clear, consistent rule
19:17
Speaker 1: which they follow to the letter. And what they can't
19:20
Speaker 1: get over is this idea that it's just kind of discretionary.
19:25
Speaker 1: It appalls their legal minds.
19:27
Speaker 6: Oh sure, So I'm just curious why how did they
19:31
Speaker 6: get there? Is it because their world was so messy
19:35
Speaker 6: that they had to accommodate that messiness.
19:38
Speaker 5: I suspect so because whites don't want to lose all
19:42
Speaker 5: the benefits they get from African Americans, whether it's buying
19:46
Speaker 5: their stuff or having them work in their houses or
19:48
Speaker 5: on their farms. White Southerners very much want to be
19:52
Speaker 5: able to benefit from and profit from a system based
19:57
Speaker 5: on white supremacy, and yet to do that, it's going
19:59
Speaker 5: to corporate all sorts of interactions all the time in
20:03
Speaker 5: their daily lives that are often incidental, very difficult to police.
20:10
Speaker 1: This is what Heinrich Krieger reads about in the law
20:13
Speaker 1: library at the University of Arkansas and then later at
20:16
Speaker 1: the Library of Congress. He reads court cases, state constitutions,
20:20
Speaker 1: and criminal codes. He may well have read about that
20:23
Speaker 1: William Harper case. It was all over the newspapers. What's
20:26
Speaker 1: the right word to describe the way he makes sense
20:29
Speaker 1: of what he finds in that year in Fayetteville. Is
20:33
Speaker 1: it surprise? Is it shock?
20:37
Speaker 7: Yeah, that's a great question. It's very hard to read
20:40
Speaker 7: him because, on the one hand, he shows a certain
20:42
Speaker 7: level of admiration and support for what he sees in
20:45
Speaker 7: the United States, that is to say, a racial awareness
20:48
Speaker 7: that he did texts in the South, like, you know,
20:50
Speaker 7: people know, we know we are white, we know that
20:53
Speaker 7: there are racial others. We have to deal with it.
20:56
Speaker 7: But he's also strangely disgusted with the way the United
21:01
Speaker 7: States handles it.
21:02
Speaker 1: I'm talking to the historian Jonathan Wisen, another of the
21:05
Speaker 1: scholars fascinated by Heinrich Grieger's time in the South.
21:08
Speaker 7: On the one hand, he's approving and on the other hand,
21:11
Speaker 7: he's surprised by the violence.
21:14
Speaker 1: Kreeger is appalled by lynch bobs, but he's a Nazi.
21:18
Speaker 1: It's not the racial violence that bothers him. The thing
21:20
Speaker 1: about lynching that he can't take is it is so
21:23
Speaker 1: messy and disorganized. What are the rules.
21:26
Speaker 7: It's hard to pin him down because he has a
21:29
Speaker 7: whole range of emotions that I think capture the general
21:32
Speaker 7: German view. You know, the Americans are so violent, how
21:35
Speaker 7: could they be doing this? So he's really intrigued by
21:38
Speaker 7: this disconnect between how close Americans are to kind of
21:45
Speaker 7: acting on their racial impulses, but how badly they are
21:48
Speaker 7: doing it. And so it's a strange mixture of discussed surpride,
21:53
Speaker 7: support dismissal. It's a fascinating and puzzling read in that regard.
21:57
Speaker 1: Yeah, he agrees with America in theory, but disagrees in practice.
22:03
Speaker 8: Absolutely.
22:04
Speaker 1: Kreeger actually writes an article on that for the George
22:07
Speaker 1: Washington University Law Review about the way the US handles
22:10
Speaker 1: Native Americans. And if you ask Krieger to sum up
22:13
Speaker 1: what he concluded in that article, he would have said,
22:17
Speaker 1: lost money, ENFUNO. Don't get me started.
22:24
Speaker 8: The Olympics are this chance, like this moment where the
22:27
Speaker 8: whole world is put into dialogue in some way with
22:29
Speaker 8: Nazi Germany before it's just painfully obvious what they're going
22:33
Speaker 8: to be.
22:33
Speaker 1: I'm talking to Ben A. Daph Haffrey, my partner in
22:36
Speaker 1: this series on Hitler's Olympics. Midway through Ben and I
22:40
Speaker 1: realized that we weren't all that interested in what happened
22:43
Speaker 1: at the Olympic Games, who won, what, and all that
22:46
Speaker 1: we were interested in what was going on around the
22:49
Speaker 1: Olympic Games, the contortions the Americans had to go through
22:53
Speaker 1: to justify going to Berlin at all. And Krieger's time
22:57
Speaker 1: in Arkansas is just a flip side of what we
23:00
Speaker 1: exploring all along, every almost every episode we have is
23:03
Speaker 1: about an encounter between a German and an American and
23:10
Speaker 1: the and the kind of complicated, tangled ways in which
23:13
Speaker 1: each party strives to make sense of what happened or
23:16
Speaker 1: makes sense of the other. And it's a it's a
23:20
Speaker 1: kind of it's a hugely important moment for the US
23:23
Speaker 1: in Germany, because the US is the ascended power in
23:26
Speaker 1: the world, and Germany is at a moment in its
23:29
Speaker 1: history when it desperately wants to be the other, right,
23:32
Speaker 1: the other great superpower. And I think that's what we're
23:35
Speaker 1: describing here.
23:37
Speaker 8: Yeah, I think that's true. And I also and I
23:39
Speaker 8: think that the the broader significance of that, to me
23:43
Speaker 8: is the sort of implication of the Dorothy Thompson who
23:46
Speaker 8: goes Nazi question, which is that the wrong understanding and
23:51
Speaker 8: the popular understanding of World War two is that the
23:56
Speaker 8: Nazis kind of am out of nowhere and are the
23:59
Speaker 8: singular evil who then must be defeated and then good
24:03
Speaker 8: triumphs and that's that, And of course it's not the case.
24:07
Speaker 8: I mean, they are profoundly evil, but they're not actually
24:11
Speaker 8: that singular, and neither is the passist impulse.
24:15
Speaker 1: Los minidan fanga, don't get me started. The meeting is
24:30
Speaker 1: where in Berlin. It's in Berlin, in Putstam. Actually James Whitman,
24:35
Speaker 1: in the course of his research he uncovered a transcript
24:38
Speaker 1: of a crucial conference held just outside Berlin in June
24:41
Speaker 1: of nineteen thirty four. By that point, the Nazis have
24:45
Speaker 1: seized power and put out a big proposal, the Prussian Memorandum.
24:50
Speaker 1: It's all about how they want to handle the Jewish question,
24:53
Speaker 1: and all the country's biggest legal experts are gathering in
24:56
Speaker 1: Postam to try and figure out if and how they
25:00
Speaker 1: can translate those ideas into law.
25:03
Speaker 2: So the radicals were demanding bans on sexual relations between
25:07
Speaker 2: Jews and Arians.
25:09
Speaker 1: It's one thing to say that, though, but how do
25:11
Speaker 1: you make that work in practice? Well, it was a
25:14
Speaker 1: tough question, you know what. It remains a tough question. Now.
25:19
Speaker 2: The Nazis were having understandably a great deal of difficulty
25:23
Speaker 2: determining who would count biologically as a Jew. It's worth
25:27
Speaker 2: emphasizing that they didn't know anything about genetics, right. There
25:32
Speaker 2: was a lot of concern that if there was racial
25:33
Speaker 2: mixing between Jews and Arians, eventually the awful Jewish blood
25:39
Speaker 2: would come to the surface. You know, there were others
25:44
Speaker 2: who thought that whatever the Jewish blood was, it would
25:46
Speaker 2: be swamped in any case if there wasn't very much
25:48
Speaker 2: of the mixing. But nobody really knew. The scientists who
25:55
Speaker 2: were involved complained that there's absolutely no physiology logical way of.
26:00
Speaker 1: Determining who's a Jew. Yeah, so how do I The
26:03
Speaker 1: fuhnomental problem here is how do I erect a legal
26:05
Speaker 1: system which seeks to, in some you know, create a
26:09
Speaker 1: second class status for Jews when I don't know what
26:12
Speaker 1: a Jew is? So who's thought about this issue? Well,
26:17
Speaker 1: of course the Americans had, and Heinrich Krieger had just
26:20
Speaker 1: written it up in his recent book Race Law in
26:23
Speaker 1: the United States. It would become Krieger's great contribution to
26:27
Speaker 1: Nazi ideology. He gave them a concrete understanding of the
26:31
Speaker 1: American way of prejudice, a legal understanding, something he could
26:36
Speaker 1: start from if you're interested in building a whole new
26:39
Speaker 1: system of racism from scratch.
26:46
Speaker 2: The difficulty that the Nazis, the main difficulty that the
26:48
Speaker 2: Nazis faced and trying to create a new race law
26:52
Speaker 2: was that all of the traditions of European criminal law.
26:56
Speaker 2: Jurisprudence insisted that you had to abide by a normal
27:00
Speaker 2: of what we call formal equality, that you just speak
27:02
Speaker 2: of the defendant and the state party the first part
27:06
Speaker 2: party the second part. But there's no room from their
27:08
Speaker 2: point of view in specifying characteristics of the individuals, including
27:13
Speaker 2: specifying their membership in a particular race. And that was
27:16
Speaker 2: the rule all through the world, but Americans didn't care.
27:21
Speaker 1: Then the Nazis had to make sense of all the
27:24
Speaker 1: ways Americans banned into racial marriage and sex.
27:27
Speaker 2: So there were many many anti missiggenation statutes, and the
27:30
Speaker 2: miss the anti misceggonation statutes took a huge variety of
27:34
Speaker 2: views on who counted as a member of whatever race.
27:37
Speaker 2: The most extreme view, of course, was the notorious one
27:39
Speaker 2: drop rule.
27:42
Speaker 1: Among those states that used the one drop standard, meaning
27:45
Speaker 1: even a single black ancestor made you count as black,
27:49
Speaker 1: was Arkansas. Maybe that's why Heinrich Krieger ended up in Fayetteville.
27:54
Speaker 1: You can Betty had many late night conversations about it
27:57
Speaker 1: in some Fayetteville dive bar. In states where there was
28:01
Speaker 1: no one drop rule, well, there was just a very
28:04
Speaker 1: unteutonic patchwork of laws.
28:08
Speaker 2: But the others just came up with a huge variety
28:10
Speaker 2: of as the as the Nazis said, politically determined judgments
28:14
Speaker 2: about who was going to count. What's more, and very interestingly,
28:18
Speaker 2: to the radical Nazis, the question was effectively left to
28:22
Speaker 2: a kind of judicial discretion. Somebody appears in court in
28:27
Speaker 2: the questions does everybody regard this person as.
28:31
Speaker 1: Black?
28:32
Speaker 2: Or or does this person kind of look that way
28:35
Speaker 2: to me? And that seemed extremely appealing to the radical Nazis,
28:40
Speaker 2: just just cut the whole knot by making a political
28:43
Speaker 2: decision on the spot.
28:44
Speaker 1: Or yeah, yeah, so they're they're kind of liberated by
28:49
Speaker 1: the by by American indifference to legal formalities on this questions.
28:55
Speaker 2: As many Europeans who come to study in this country
28:57
Speaker 2: still are.
28:58
Speaker 1: Yeah, think about all the crucial meetings that led to
29:04
Speaker 1: the American decision to send athletes to the Games. Charles
29:08
Speaker 1: Cheryl goes to Vienna and convinces the German delegation to
29:11
Speaker 1: commit in principle to including Jews on their team. Then,
29:15
Speaker 1: when it seems like the Germans might not be keeping
29:17
Speaker 1: their word, Avery Brundage goes over to visit them, and
29:21
Speaker 1: the Nazis convince him that what they're doing to Jewish
29:24
Speaker 1: athletes is no big deal. Then Cheryl goes back and
29:27
Speaker 1: see the Nazis a second time, and Broker is the
29:30
Speaker 1: grand bargain. Just put this half Jewish fencer, Helene Mayer
29:34
Speaker 1: on your Olympic team and everything will be fine. Jesse
29:38
Speaker 1: Owens decides to go to the games and gets hugged
29:40
Speaker 1: on the field by his German competitor, loots long and
29:44
Speaker 1: builds a myth out of it. We understand what is
29:48
Speaker 1: motivating all of them. Brundage wants a seat on the
29:51
Speaker 1: International Olympic Committee. Cheryl is surfing the endless waves of
29:55
Speaker 1: his own ego. Jesse Owens is trying to justify his
29:58
Speaker 1: decision to go to the game. But what are the
30:01
Speaker 1: Nazis on the other side of the table. The easiest
30:05
Speaker 1: answer is that they're con men. They played the Americans
30:08
Speaker 1: first song. They meet Cheryl and Brundage and say to themselves,
30:12
Speaker 1: oh my god, these guys are children puppets. But I
30:16
Speaker 1: don't think that's right. The Nazis aren't rolling their eyes
30:19
Speaker 1: at the Americans, They're learning from them. The Germans look
30:24
Speaker 1: at Jesse Owens and Jimmy Laval and Archie Williams and
30:27
Speaker 1: all the other black athletes, and they say they came
30:31
Speaker 1: after all you put them through. You get to bask
30:34
Speaker 1: in the glory of their success without having to treat
30:36
Speaker 1: them like human beings. So this whole audacious project we're
30:40
Speaker 1: launching where we want to take a portion of our
30:42
Speaker 1: population and treat them like second class citizens and still
30:46
Speaker 1: also win the respect of the world, be crowned as superpower.
30:50
Speaker 1: Maybe it's possible. Maybe we don't even need some kind
30:54
Speaker 1: of principal justification, some set of reasoned out laws. Maybe
30:58
Speaker 1: we can just make it up as we go along.
31:01
Speaker 1: The modern Olympics were created to bring cultures together to
31:05
Speaker 1: promote international understanding, and Berlin maybe the potonic ideal of that,
31:09
Speaker 1: because it's where the Germans learned to think like Americans.
31:15
Speaker 1: Although there were some limits, These Germans, even quite serious Nazis,
31:21
Speaker 1: were were quite alarmed to learn about the one drop rule.
31:25
Speaker 2: They were indeed, as they described it as inhumane. How
31:30
Speaker 2: can you possibly visit all this discrimination on someone who
31:34
Speaker 2: just somewhere way back in the ancestry, I had some
31:39
Speaker 2: you know, a little bit of a drop of George blood.
31:41
Speaker 1: I mean, this is like this one of those insane
31:44
Speaker 1: moments where I'm just curious when you how did you
31:47
Speaker 1: when you were reading this and you come across those
31:49
Speaker 1: moments where even the Nazis are you know, are taken
31:55
Speaker 1: aback by what's going on? What's your reaction? My reaction was, well,
32:04
Speaker 1: good lord, I mean, who would have imagined that there
32:10
Speaker 1: was American racism that went too far for Nazis? And
32:15
Speaker 1: where do you suppose Heinrich Kriger goes after he's done
32:18
Speaker 1: with his mission to the American South South Africa to
32:22
Speaker 1: study apartheid. Heinrich Krieger reminds us that you can't tell
32:27
Speaker 1: the story of the nineteen thirty six Olympics by focusing
32:30
Speaker 1: just on the nineteen thirty six Olympics. That's what Ben
32:34
Speaker 1: and I started to understand. You have to broaden the lens.
32:38
Speaker 1: And in our next episode, we turned the clock back
32:41
Speaker 1: to nineteen thirty two and ask the same questions we've
32:45
Speaker 1: been asking of Berlin about the games that came before Berlin.
32:49
Speaker 1: A little thought experiment that will take us to Los
32:52
Speaker 1: Angeles for a drive down Olympic Boulevard. Revisionist History is
33:09
Speaker 1: produced by Benda daf Haffrey, Tally Emlin and Nina Bird Lawrence.
33:13
Speaker 1: Our editor is Sarah Nix. Fact Checking by Arthur Gomperts
33:18
Speaker 1: and Jail Goldfind Original scoring by Luis Kara, mastering by
33:22
Speaker 1: Sarah Bruger and Jake Korski. Engineering by Nina Bird Lawrence.
33:26
Speaker 1: Our executive producer is Jacob Smith. Special thanks to Karen Chakerji,
33:31
Speaker 1: Laura Walker, and Zabina Schmidt. I'm Malcolm Gladwell.