Latest / Revisionist History / Hitler’s Olympics, Part 1: The Blue-Eyed Tornado

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

0:08
Speaker 1: Pushkin, I think that Hitler is appreciably nearer shooting us,
0:21
Speaker 1: and therefore I think we're appreciably nearer replying.
0:26
Speaker 2: It's the beginning of the Sycamore War. Just before the
0:29
Speaker 2: United States joins the fight. The journalist named Dorothy Thompson
0:34
Speaker 2: is speaking to a British television crew. She's standing behind
0:38
Speaker 2: a dark wood table, wearing a nipped way suit and blouse,
0:42
Speaker 2: one hand perched in her pocket, perfect posture, shoulder length
0:46
Speaker 2: hair with a strand of premature white. You can see
0:49
Speaker 2: her thinking while she's talking.
0:52
Speaker 1: We're very much interested in the part East, We're interested
0:54
Speaker 1: in the Pacific, and we're interested in the Atlantic.
0:58
Speaker 2: Thompson was a foreign cars despondent in the nineteen twenties Vienna, Berlin, Dublin, Paris.
1:04
Speaker 2: This is the heyday of newspapers. Every paper of consequence
1:08
Speaker 2: across the Western world had somewhere in Europe, and they
1:11
Speaker 2: all knew each other, drank together, descended on war zones together,
1:16
Speaker 2: and Dorothy Thompson was the star.
1:19
Speaker 1: And as this war becomes more and more becomes more
1:22
Speaker 1: and more clear that this war is going to be
1:24
Speaker 1: a world war, we come nearer to being actively involved.
1:29
Speaker 2: Because these were different times. There was always discussion of
1:32
Speaker 2: Thompson's physical beauty, the flawless skin, her radiance. One of
1:36
Speaker 2: her nicknames was the blue eyed Tornado. She was brilliant, indefatigable,
1:42
Speaker 2: unshakably self assured, and that voice.
1:46
Speaker 1: But after all, the ideological basis of this war was
1:49
Speaker 1: very well set by mister Nevill Chamberlain at the very
1:51
Speaker 1: beginning of it when he said, if I remember correctly,
1:54
Speaker 1: if I should think that one man and one nation
1:57
Speaker 1: should wish to dominate the world, I should think he
2:00
Speaker 1: ought to be stopped. That's the way America feels about.
2:02
Speaker 3: It, too.
2:04
Speaker 2: Remember that voice. Over the course of the next eight episodes,
2:08
Speaker 2: you're going to hear the voices of a lot of
2:10
Speaker 2: people from that same era, the long years before the
2:13
Speaker 2: Second World War, some more powerful than Dorothy Thompson, more
2:17
Speaker 2: self important, more strident, but none who saw the world
2:21
Speaker 2: so clearly. Dorothy Thompson is our north star. One of
2:30
Speaker 2: my strongest childhood memories was the nineteen seventy six Olympics
2:34
Speaker 2: in Montreal, my homeland's first Olympic Games. I was a kid.
2:39
Speaker 2: My family didn't have a television, but we rented one
2:42
Speaker 2: just for the occasion two rabbit ears on top of
2:46
Speaker 2: a grainy black and white set. We put the TV
2:48
Speaker 2: in the fireplace because there was no other place for it,
2:51
Speaker 2: and I watched everything. The Romanian Nadya Komenitch bewitching the world.
2:57
Speaker 2: In gymnastics, my running hero John Walker powering away around
3:02
Speaker 2: the final curve to win the men's fifteen hundred meters.
3:05
Speaker 2: I still get nervous thinking about that race, Lassie Van's
3:10
Speaker 2: improbable double in the five thousand meters and the ten
3:14
Speaker 2: thousand meters. Alberto want to rena Cornelia ender don Qurey
3:19
Speaker 2: on the women's forby one hundred freestyle relay, maybe the
3:23
Speaker 2: greatest swimming race ever. I was a little kid and
3:31
Speaker 2: I fell in love with the Olympics, and I've been
3:34
Speaker 2: in love ever since. This summer in Paris, I will
3:38
Speaker 2: be glued to my television again, and this thing that
3:43
Speaker 2: I love and that so many millions of people around
3:45
Speaker 2: the world love, would not exist if the Olympics had
3:49
Speaker 2: not been held in nineteen thirty six in Adolf Hitler's Germany.
3:58
Speaker 2: The modern Olympics started in eighteen ninety six, and if
4:01
Speaker 2: you've gone to any of those early games, you'd think
4:04
Speaker 2: you were at some kind of side show. They never
4:06
Speaker 2: really took off. Forty six countries showed up for the
4:09
Speaker 2: nineteen twenty eight Games, Thirty seven showed up with the
4:12
Speaker 2: next Games. Only one country applied to hosts the nineteen
4:16
Speaker 2: thirty two Games. No one else wanted it. The Olympic
4:20
Speaker 2: dream was fading, but then came Berlin. It was the
4:25
Speaker 2: Nazis who gave us the Olympics we have today. They
4:28
Speaker 2: were really really good at putting on a big show.
4:30
Speaker 2: Berlin was the first Olympics to be televised, the first
4:34
Speaker 2: to have a torch relay at the opening ceremony, the
4:37
Speaker 2: first to create a genuine international star Jesse Owens, the
4:41
Speaker 2: first to understand that the Games were a spectacle.
4:45
Speaker 4: At first, Hitler himself was opposed to the Olympics.
4:49
Speaker 2: The historian David Walachinski.
4:51
Speaker 4: It didn't interest in him. It was an international event
4:54
Speaker 4: people from all over. But Joseph Gerbels said, no, we
4:59
Speaker 4: can use this. This will be good propaganda for us,
5:04
Speaker 4: and so they began promoting the Olympics.
5:07
Speaker 2: Hitler used the Games to demonstrate his theories of Aryan supremacy,
5:11
Speaker 2: to rally the German people to give legitimacy to the
5:14
Speaker 2: band of thugs he had gathered about him to make
5:17
Speaker 2: the case that Germany was a true world power, and
5:21
Speaker 2: the United States went along with all of it. Why
5:28
Speaker 2: that's the story of Hitler's Olympics. H I'm Malcolm Gladwell.
5:35
Speaker 2: You're listening to Revisionist History, my podcast about things overlooked
5:39
Speaker 2: and misunderstood. Welcome to Hitler's Olympics, the story of how
5:44
Speaker 2: we ended up with the Nazi Olympics. Over the next
5:49
Speaker 2: eight weeks, my colleague bend At A. F. Haffrey and
5:52
Speaker 2: I will tell the story of the games behind the
5:55
Speaker 2: greatest of all Olympic Games. Not who won what, not
5:59
Speaker 2: what's stirring? Come from behind, burst of effort led to
6:01
Speaker 2: an improbable victory. Instead, I want to talk about the
6:05
Speaker 2: furious machinations leading up to the Olympics and the genuinely
6:10
Speaker 2: difficult moral questions that surrounded the Berlin Games, questions that
6:15
Speaker 2: I think we're still trying to make sense of. And
6:18
Speaker 2: along the way, we're going to introduce you to an
6:20
Speaker 2: oddcast of characters, people who tried and largely failed to
6:25
Speaker 2: resolve those questions. Heroes and villains, the clear eyed and
6:29
Speaker 2: the deluded, the forgotten, and the misunderstood. But we have
6:35
Speaker 2: to begin with the person who may have seen the
6:38
Speaker 2: problem of nineteen thirty six more clearly than anyone else.
6:43
Speaker 2: Dorothy Thompson. Thompson was born in western New York in
6:56
Speaker 2: eighteen ninety three, just outside of Buffalo. Her mother died
6:59
Speaker 2: when she was Her father was a Methodist minister, but
7:02
Speaker 2: a bad one who drifted from church to church. Her
7:05
Speaker 2: childhood was hand in mouth. She hated her stepmother. Somehow,
7:09
Speaker 2: she ended up at Syracuse University at a time when
7:12
Speaker 2: not a lot of women were going to college. After graduation,
7:15
Speaker 2: she threw herself into the women's suffrage movement, the great
7:18
Speaker 2: social cause of progressives of that generation.
7:21
Speaker 3: She was committed, passionate advocate of women getting the vote,
7:25
Speaker 3: and when they got the vote in nineteen twenty, soon
7:27
Speaker 3: afterwards she wanted to pursue a career as a journalist.
7:30
Speaker 2: The historian Sarah church Well, she sailed for Europe, didn't
7:34
Speaker 2: have anything lined up in advance. She just packed up
7:36
Speaker 2: her bags one day and left.
7:38
Speaker 3: Suddenly, here she is exposed to this whole host of
7:40
Speaker 3: international and global projects and initiatives.
7:45
Speaker 2: She makes her mark right away, goes to Ireland, tracks
7:48
Speaker 2: down a leader of the Irish independence movement and gets
7:51
Speaker 2: the last interview with him before he dies of a
7:53
Speaker 2: hunger strike. Next, she goes to Vienna, where she convinces
7:57
Speaker 2: the Philadelphia Public Ledger to highire her as a correspondent.
8:01
Speaker 2: Dorothy learns German gets promoted to Berlin bureau chief. Then
8:05
Speaker 2: comes another step, and another step, and by the end
8:08
Speaker 2: of the nineteen thirties, Thompson's column was read by eight
8:11
Speaker 2: to ten million people a day, at a time when
8:15
Speaker 2: the population of the United States was one hundred and
8:17
Speaker 2: thirty million. She was a fixture on the radio, too,
8:20
Speaker 2: toured the country the way rock bands to today. During
8:23
Speaker 2: one week in nineteen thirty seven, she turned down seven
8:27
Speaker 2: hundred speaking requests seven hundred.
8:31
Speaker 3: She was so famous that Catherine Hepburn played her in
8:35
Speaker 3: the effectively in the first movie that Hepburn made with
8:38
Speaker 3: Spencer Tracy, called Woman of the Year is basically the
8:41
Speaker 3: story of a Hollywood version of Dorothy Thompson.
8:44
Speaker 2: Dorothy Thompson became such a public figure that quips about
8:48
Speaker 2: her were part of the culture. She snips her nails
8:50
Speaker 2: with indignation. She's discovered the secret of perpetual emotion, and
8:55
Speaker 2: most famously this from Alice Roosevelt Longworth, Ted Bell's daughter,
9:00
Speaker 2: who said that Thompson is quote the only woman in
9:03
Speaker 2: history who has had her menopause in public and made
9:05
Speaker 2: it pay, a line, incidentally that Dorothy Thompson found hilarious.
9:11
Speaker 2: This is my favorite Dorothy Thompson's story. One night in
9:14
Speaker 2: nineteen twenty six, She's coming back from the opera in
9:17
Speaker 2: Vienna when she hears there's been a coup in Poland,
9:21
Speaker 2: there's a knight trained to warsaw, and the whole foreign
9:23
Speaker 2: correspondent crew is racing niked on it. Dorothy doesn't have
9:27
Speaker 2: time to get back to her apartment, so she has
9:29
Speaker 2: her secretary fetch her typewriter and a traveling bag. The
9:33
Speaker 2: bigger problem is she doesn't have any money for the
9:35
Speaker 2: journey and the banks are closed. So who does she call, Remember,
9:40
Speaker 2: it's Vienna in nineteen twenty six. Sigmund Freud. Of course,
9:45
Speaker 2: he's a good friend. And by the way, everyone who
9:48
Speaker 2: is anyone was friends with Dorothy Thompson. So Freud pulls
9:51
Speaker 2: a stack of cash out of his safe and sends
9:53
Speaker 2: his driver to the train station. Dorothy jumps on the
9:56
Speaker 2: train biqu She's made it.
10:00
Speaker 3: Oh.
10:00
Speaker 2: They crossed the border into Poland and the train tracks
10:03
Speaker 2: are blown out. Dorothy jumps out, Hell's a big damler.
10:07
Speaker 2: The driver demands a king's ransom, so Dorothy jumps in
10:10
Speaker 2: a ford. The second driver refuses to enter Warsaw when
10:13
Speaker 2: he hears the gunfire. Meanwhile, the driver of the first car,
10:17
Speaker 2: the Damler, runs into heavy gunfire. His car is riddled
10:21
Speaker 2: with bullets. The other correspondents witness the attack and they're inconsolable.
10:25
Speaker 2: Dorothy's dead. They wire her obituary back to Vienna, but
10:31
Speaker 2: Dorothy is not dead. She's left the ford behind and
10:35
Speaker 2: is walking the final few miles into Warsaw, still in
10:38
Speaker 2: her ball gown and slippers, and legend has it swearing
10:44
Speaker 2: like a sailor. Dorothy had everyone's attention. And what was
10:50
Speaker 2: she talking and riding about? Over and over again? In
10:53
Speaker 2: the nineteen thirties Adolf Hitler. Long before the world became
10:57
Speaker 2: obsessed with Hitler, Dorothy Thompson was obsessed with Hitler.
11:01
Speaker 3: So yeah, she always saw that Hitler was a thing
11:04
Speaker 3: and that he was the one to watch, and that
11:05
Speaker 3: you needed to understand where that was going is. She
11:08
Speaker 3: read a lot of history, She read a lot of politics.
11:10
Speaker 3: She interviewed everybody to try to get a sense of
11:13
Speaker 3: what it was that was going on, and so she
11:15
Speaker 3: got to the heart of it in a way that few,
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Speaker 3: if any, of her of her contemporaries did.
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Speaker 2: A journalist once calculated that by the spring of nineteen
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Speaker 2: forty she had written a total of two hundred and
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Speaker 2: thirty eight thousand words for her column in the Herald Tribune,
11:28
Speaker 2: and one hundred and forty seven thousand of those were
11:32
Speaker 2: about Hitler. If I ever divorced Dorothy, her husband, once said,
11:37
Speaker 2: I'll name Adolf Hitler as correspondent. Hitler Hitler, Hitler. She
11:44
Speaker 2: had to meet the man coming up, the first of
11:51
Speaker 2: what will be many meetings with Hitler over the course
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Speaker 2: of this series. Before we go any further, I want
12:04
Speaker 2: to present an idea that will be useful over the
12:07
Speaker 2: next nine episodes. It's one of the most famous psychological
12:10
Speaker 2: theories of the twentieth century, Leon Festinger's cognitive dissonance. We've
12:16
Speaker 2: talked about it before in the show. It's a psychological
12:19
Speaker 2: state of discomfort that occurs when a person holds two
12:23
Speaker 2: or more conflicting thoughts, beliefs, or behaviors. Chocolate cake is
12:28
Speaker 2: bad for me. I desperately want a piece of chocolate cake.
12:31
Speaker 2: That's cognitive dissonance. It's a contradiction between what I believe
12:36
Speaker 2: and how I behave infesting and believed that cognitive dissonance
12:40
Speaker 2: makes us so uncomfortable that we are compelled to resolve it.
12:44
Speaker 2: So you change your behavior to align with your belief
12:47
Speaker 2: You say, I'm just not going to eat the cake,
12:49
Speaker 2: or I'm going to take just one bite, or I'm
12:51
Speaker 2: going to go to the gym afterwards, or you change
12:54
Speaker 2: your beliefs to align with your behavior. You tell yourself
12:57
Speaker 2: I read somewhere that chocolate cake isn't that fattening. Or
13:01
Speaker 2: maybe you try and make the world change its mind
13:03
Speaker 2: so they can't judge you. You stand up and say,
13:06
Speaker 2: this looks like cake, but it's not actually cake. It's
13:09
Speaker 2: cocopatter and sweetener and whipped low calorie cream cheese. If
13:15
Speaker 2: you go online, you could find a ton of old,
13:17
Speaker 2: black and white videos of psychologists working through the implications
13:21
Speaker 2: of Festinger's idea.
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Speaker 5: Psychological story of decision making doesn't end, however, when a
13:27
Speaker 5: decision has been made.
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Speaker 2: That's Philip Simbardo, one of the many psychologists inspired by Festinger's.
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Speaker 5: Work, the act of making a decision can trigger a
13:36
Speaker 5: flood of other prophecies. According to psychologists Leon Festinger, whenever
13:41
Speaker 5: we choose to do something that conflicts with our prior beliefs, feelings,
13:45
Speaker 5: or values, a state of cognitive dissonance is created in
13:48
Speaker 5: us attention. You change what we think and what we do.
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Speaker 2: The Berlin Olympics created cognitive dissonance on a grand geopolitical scale.
14:00
Speaker 2: Were an ideal, pure competition, unencumbered by politics, high minded,
14:05
Speaker 2: an event created for cross cultural understanding, young men and
14:08
Speaker 2: women in perfect physical condition coming together from around the world.
14:13
Speaker 2: The founder of the modern Olympic movement was Pierre de Coubertin,
14:17
Speaker 2: who would always say, the important thing in life is
14:20
Speaker 2: not the triumph of the struggle. The essential thing is
14:23
Speaker 2: not to have conquered, but to have fought well. That
14:27
Speaker 2: was the belief. But in nineteen thirty six, what was
14:30
Speaker 2: the action to participate in the Berlin Games meant? Going
14:36
Speaker 2: to Germany, competing in a stadium built by Nazi architects,
14:41
Speaker 2: being fodder for Hitler's propaganda chief Joseph Goebels, and helping
14:45
Speaker 2: to legitimize a regime that had already started on the
14:49
Speaker 2: long anti Semitic path that would end in the Holocaust.
14:53
Speaker 2: The Berlin Olympics were brutally dissonant, and in each of
14:57
Speaker 2: these episodes, Ben and I will follow how a a
15:00
Speaker 2: different person resolved the contradiction, starting with someone who pretty
15:04
Speaker 2: much said, if there's a problem with the cake, then
15:07
Speaker 2: don't eat the cake. Dorothy Thompson. As early as nineteen
15:13
Speaker 2: twenty three, Dorothy Thompson had her sight set on an
15:17
Speaker 2: interview with Hitler. This was a decade before he'd come
15:20
Speaker 2: to power. Early days in Munich after the so called
15:23
Speaker 2: beerhal Putsch, when the young Hitler tried to launch a
15:26
Speaker 2: coup against the German government. When that failed, he escaped
15:30
Speaker 2: to a hideaway in the Bavarian Alps. Thompson followed him there,
15:33
Speaker 2: arriving only two hours after Hitler did, but he had
15:36
Speaker 2: already moved on. For the next seven years, she pursued
15:40
Speaker 2: him to no avail, but then Hitler's party started gaining
15:44
Speaker 2: traction his movement grew. He set up office in the
15:47
Speaker 2: Kaiserhaf Hotel in Berlin, right across the street from the
15:50
Speaker 2: Reich Chancellery. The state of power in Germany. All the
15:53
Speaker 2: top Nazis hung out at the Kaiseraff with his grand
15:56
Speaker 2: awning wrought iron balconies. They ate in the three story
16:00
Speaker 2: dining room under its great glass ceiling. It was luxurious,
16:04
Speaker 2: It felt like power. Hitler could look out his window
16:07
Speaker 2: at the Reich Chancellery and dream. Hitler had a press
16:12
Speaker 2: officer named Ernst Hampstengel. Everyone called him Putsy, which meant
16:17
Speaker 2: little fellow, though it translates literally as cute. Putsy was
16:22
Speaker 2: half German, half American. His mother was a Sedgewick, one
16:25
Speaker 2: of the grand old New England families. He grew up
16:28
Speaker 2: in Germany, but went to Harvard, where he was classmates
16:31
Speaker 2: with T. S. Eliot and with Theodore Roosevelt's son. One day,
16:34
Speaker 2: Putsy ran into Hitler in a bar in Munich, holding
16:37
Speaker 2: the crowd's spellbound, and he fell in love. Putsy was
16:41
Speaker 2: a great musician, and whenever Hitler got a little lonesome,
16:44
Speaker 2: he would have Putsy bang out some Wagner on the
16:46
Speaker 2: piano or some other little diddy that he'd written. Many
16:54
Speaker 2: years after the war, Putsy wrote his memoirs, which I
16:57
Speaker 2: would wholeheartedly recommend, in law part because of passages like this.
17:03
Speaker 2: By the time he and Adolf were over to Friend's house.
17:06
Speaker 2: They're so good that we had to reenact them.
17:09
Speaker 6: I started playing some of the football marches I had
17:12
Speaker 6: picked up at Harvard. I explained to Hitler all the
17:15
Speaker 6: business about the cheerleaders and college songs and the deliberate
17:19
Speaker 6: whipping up of hysterical.
17:21
Speaker 2: Enthusiasms sound familiar.
17:24
Speaker 6: I told him about the thousands of spectators being made
17:27
Speaker 6: to raw Harvard Harvard, Harvard rah rah rah in unison,
17:33
Speaker 6: and the hypnotic effect of this sort of thing. I
17:37
Speaker 6: played him some of the Sousa marches and my own
17:39
Speaker 6: falorah to show how it could be done by adapting
17:43
Speaker 6: German tunes, gave them all that buoyant beat so characteristic
17:47
Speaker 6: of American brass band music. I had Hitler fairly shouting
17:51
Speaker 6: with enthusiasm, that's it, Hanstenger, that is what we need
17:55
Speaker 6: for the movement, and he pranced up and down the
17:58
Speaker 6: room like a drum major. After that he had the
18:02
Speaker 6: SA band practicing the same thing. Rah rah rah became
18:07
Speaker 6: z hien z Hei. That is the origin of it.
18:11
Speaker 6: And I suppose I must take my share of the blame.
18:16
Speaker 2: Putsy ends the war as an adviser to Franklin Roosevelt,
18:20
Speaker 2: making him the only person to serve the leadership of
18:23
Speaker 2: both sides of the Second World War. But I digress
18:26
Speaker 2: so Putsy convinces Hitler that he needs to have more
18:30
Speaker 2: of an international profile, so he starts inviting people to
18:33
Speaker 2: come and meet Herr Hitler at the kaiser Hoff, the
18:36
Speaker 2: New York Times, an Italian journalist, a Japanese journalist, a
18:39
Speaker 2: legendary foreign correspondent with the memorable name Hubert Renfro Knickerbocker,
18:46
Speaker 2: and finally, Dorothy Thompson. Is she prepared for the interview?
18:52
Speaker 2: Of course, she's Dorothy Thompson. When he was in prison
18:55
Speaker 2: in nineteen twenty four, years before the kaiser Hoff, Hitler
18:59
Speaker 2: had written his men off Testo Mine Kamf. It was
19:02
Speaker 2: a best seller in Germany, and trust me, Dorothy Thompson
19:05
Speaker 2: had read Mine Kamf in the German all seven hundred
19:09
Speaker 2: nutty pages of it, including passages like with Satanic joy
19:14
Speaker 2: in his face, the black haired Jewish youth lurks in
19:17
Speaker 2: wait for the unsuspecting girl, whom he defiles with his blood,
19:21
Speaker 2: thus stealing her from her people. There's a lot of
19:24
Speaker 2: stuff like this in Mine comp it was, and it
19:28
Speaker 2: is Jews who bring the Negroes into the Rhineland, always
19:32
Speaker 2: with the same secret thought and clear aim of ruining
19:35
Speaker 2: the hated white race by the necessarily resulting bastardization, throwing
19:40
Speaker 2: it down from its cultural em political height, and himself
19:44
Speaker 2: rising to be its master. Dorothy Thompson knows just who
19:49
Speaker 2: she's going to meet when she walks into the Kaiserhof.
19:52
Speaker 2: She walks through the marble lobby, waits and puts his's office.
19:56
Speaker 2: She would say later that there was a lot of
19:58
Speaker 2: fussiness of the final preper for the interview. She was
20:01
Speaker 2: limited to three questions, which she had to submit twenty
20:05
Speaker 2: four hours in advance. Hitler did not like thinking on
20:08
Speaker 2: his feet. Before the interview, she spots Hitler going to
20:12
Speaker 2: his rooms, accompanied by someone who she says, looks like
20:15
Speaker 2: al Capone. She waits for an hour. Finally she's ushered in.
20:21
Speaker 2: She would say later, I was a little nervous. I
20:24
Speaker 2: considered taking smelling salts. Understand that's a joke. Dorothy Thompson
20:31
Speaker 2: wasn't afraid of anyone. This was the woman who marched
20:33
Speaker 2: into Warsaw wearing her ball room slippers. We don't have
20:37
Speaker 2: a recording of the interview, but I want you to
20:39
Speaker 2: imagine it. Her voice, her presence, those piercing blue eyes,
20:44
Speaker 2: Hitler's never met her before. And Hitler, to put it nicely,
20:48
Speaker 2: did not exactly have relationships of any real meaning with women,
20:52
Speaker 2: unless you count photo opportunities with little German girls. So
20:57
Speaker 2: maybe he's the nervous one because he just starts babbling.
21:04
Speaker 2: Thompson would later write up the interview in an essay
21:06
Speaker 2: called I Saw Hitler. He is formless, almost faceless, a
21:13
Speaker 2: man whose countenance is a caricature, a man whose framework
21:16
Speaker 2: seems cartilaginous without bones. He is inconsequent and voluble, ill poised, insecure.
21:24
Speaker 2: He is the very prototype of the little man ouch.
21:30
Speaker 2: A lock of lank hair falls over an insignificant and
21:33
Speaker 2: slightly retreating forehead. The backhead is shallow, the face is
21:37
Speaker 2: broad in the cheekbones. The nose is large, but badly
21:40
Speaker 2: shaped and without character. His movements are awkward, almost undignified,
21:45
Speaker 2: and most unmartial. There is in his face no trace
21:49
Speaker 2: of any inner conflict or self discipline. I mean, how good,
21:55
Speaker 2: how true, how vicious is this? And then she backhands him,
22:00
Speaker 2: And yet he is not without a certain charm, but
22:04
Speaker 2: it is the soft, almost feminine charm of the Austrian.
22:08
Speaker 2: The eyes alone are notable, dark gray and hyperthyroid. They
22:12
Speaker 2: have the peculiar shine which often distinguishes geniuses, alcoholics, and hysterics.
22:23
Speaker 2: When Hitler becomes Chancellor of Germany a year later, one
22:26
Speaker 2: of the first things he does is kick Dorothy Thompson
22:28
Speaker 2: out of the country because he's been humiliated by a woman.
22:33
Speaker 2: I think the thing that really sticks in his craw
22:35
Speaker 2: is the line that follows that little bit about geniuses,
22:38
Speaker 2: alcoholics and hysterics. There is something irritatingly refined about him.
22:46
Speaker 2: I bet he crooks his little finger when he drinks
22:49
Speaker 2: a cup of tea. Is adolf with aspirations of being
23:02
Speaker 2: a badass dictator, and Dorothy Thompson has him drinking tea
23:06
Speaker 2: like your grandmother. Now you might say it's not surprising
23:11
Speaker 2: she looks at Hitler this way. He's Hitler. But the
23:14
Speaker 2: truth is that lots and lots of people who go
23:17
Speaker 2: to see him in those years don't see the real Hitler.
23:20
Speaker 2: Like the Canadian Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King. Here
23:23
Speaker 2: is his diary entry after meeting Hitler. My sizing up
23:27
Speaker 2: of the man as I sat and talked with him,
23:30
Speaker 2: was that he is really one who truly loves his
23:33
Speaker 2: fellow man and his country, and would make any sacrifice
23:37
Speaker 2: for their good. That he feels himself to be a
23:39
Speaker 2: deliverer of his people from tyranny. It gets worse. His
23:45
Speaker 2: face is much more prepossessing than his pictures would give
23:48
Speaker 2: the impression of It's not that of a fiery, overstrained nature,
23:53
Speaker 2: but of a calm, passive man, deeply and thoughtfully in earnest.
23:58
Speaker 2: His eyes impressed me most of all. There was a
24:00
Speaker 2: liquid quality about them which indicate keen perception and profound sympathy.
24:07
Speaker 2: Dorothy Thompson saw the particular sheen of geniuses, alcoholics and hysterics.
24:13
Speaker 2: King saw keen perspective and profound sympathy. I'm sorry, I
24:19
Speaker 2: can't resist. Here's a little more from the diary entry.
24:22
Speaker 2: As I talked to him, I could not but think
24:26
Speaker 2: of Joan of Arc. Joan of Arc I would point
24:29
Speaker 2: out that Mackenzie King was the longest serving Prime minister
24:32
Speaker 2: in Canadian history. He did as much to shape twentieth
24:35
Speaker 2: century Canada as anyone. He's not some naive, but he
24:38
Speaker 2: sits down next to Hitler for an hour and a
24:40
Speaker 2: half and totally loses his marbles. He is particularly strong
24:46
Speaker 2: on beauty, love's flowers, and will spend more of the
24:50
Speaker 2: money of the state on gardens and flowers than on
24:53
Speaker 2: most other things. It was really, really easy to be
24:59
Speaker 2: sed by Adolf Hitler. The German people were seduced by
25:03
Speaker 2: Adolf Hitler. Even Neville Chamberlain, the British Prime Minister, would
25:07
Speaker 2: be seduced by him.
25:08
Speaker 1: This morning.
25:10
Speaker 7: I had another talk with the German Chancellor Hey Hitler.
25:16
Speaker 2: In nineteen thirty eight, when everyone was worried that Hitler
25:18
Speaker 2: was going to invade Czechoslovakia. Hitler looked Neville Chamberlain in
25:22
Speaker 2: the eye and said, I'm not going to invade anyone anymore,
25:25
Speaker 2: and Chamberlain, a politician of more than twenty years at
25:28
Speaker 2: that point, believed him.
25:31
Speaker 7: We regard the agreement signed last night and the Anglo
25:34
Speaker 7: German naval agreement a symbolic of the desire of our
25:39
Speaker 7: two peoples never to go to war with one another again.
25:46
Speaker 2: But who isn't seduced by Hitler? Dorothy Thompson.
25:50
Speaker 3: I mean, look, let's just not underestimate just how smart
25:52
Speaker 3: she was.
25:53
Speaker 2: Sarah church well again.
25:54
Speaker 3: But her intelligence was emotional intelligence as well, and I
25:58
Speaker 3: think she saw earlier than anybody else I've read. She
26:02
Speaker 3: understood that Hitler was an emotional movement. She was very
26:06
Speaker 3: alert to when she was being emotionally manipulated. We may
26:09
Speaker 3: want to trace that back to her childhood being raised by,
26:12
Speaker 3: as you said, you know, a kind of ineffective preacher,
26:14
Speaker 3: a bad preacher. She was onto it. You know, she
26:17
Speaker 3: knew when people were trying to manipulate her, and she
26:21
Speaker 3: was allergic to it.
26:23
Speaker 2: This makes me think there should be a kind of
26:24
Speaker 2: a you know how people. This is a weird analogy,
26:27
Speaker 2: but there's all this kind of literature about the particular
26:30
Speaker 2: ways in which children of alcoholics make sense of their
26:35
Speaker 2: childhood there growing up with someone who was emotionally unpredictable.
26:39
Speaker 2: I think there's a parallel thing with Preacher's kids. You
26:41
Speaker 2: grew up with someone whose job it is on a
26:44
Speaker 2: weekly basis to reach out and connect to an intimate
26:48
Speaker 2: group of people, and you're sitting in the church observing
26:51
Speaker 2: that every Sunday. For it's like a It's a really
26:55
Speaker 2: interesting education for a child to see your father up.
26:58
Speaker 3: There, right, It's like, yeah, the Wizard of Oz. Right,
27:01
Speaker 3: you constantly see the man behind the curtain, and so yeah,
27:04
Speaker 3: I think that you are. Yeah, you're onto them, She
27:08
Speaker 3: writes in and I saw Hitler, that she could see
27:12
Speaker 3: that it was starting to become a religion, that he
27:15
Speaker 3: functioned like a religious leader.
27:18
Speaker 2: Now, if you are Mackenzie King and you go and
27:20
Speaker 2: see Hitler and see a man who just wants to
27:23
Speaker 2: plant lots of flowers, then of course you're going to
27:25
Speaker 2: send a team of athletes to the Nazi Olympics. You
27:28
Speaker 2: change your beliefs to make them consistent with your actions.
27:32
Speaker 2: You stand up and say this looks like cake. It's
27:35
Speaker 2: not actually cake. It's coco patter and sweetener and whipped
27:39
Speaker 2: localorie cream cheese. But if you're honest with yourself, you
27:43
Speaker 2: can't do that. If you're Dorothy Thompson, you say, there's
27:46
Speaker 2: a conflict here between the kind of things the Olympics
27:49
Speaker 2: stood for and what the Nazi Party stood for, and
27:53
Speaker 2: for her, the correct path to resolving that conflict is
27:56
Speaker 2: to change our behavior. When she writes up her interview
27:59
Speaker 2: with Hitler, Thompson has a crucial paragraph at the end and.
28:03
Speaker 3: So yeah, so she says, take the Jews out of
28:05
Speaker 3: his program and it collapses. She says, it's based entirely
28:09
Speaker 3: on a hatred of the Jewish people. And she says,
28:12
Speaker 3: and the argument is simple, and she sees straight to
28:15
Speaker 3: the heart of it, which is the Jews are responsible
28:18
Speaker 3: for everything.
28:21
Speaker 2: She read that passage in Mankomff about black haired Jewish
28:25
Speaker 2: youth raping German girls, and she doesn't explain it away
28:29
Speaker 2: or ignore it or creates some elaborate rationalization about how
28:33
Speaker 2: he doesn't really believe that anymore, that he was young
28:36
Speaker 2: and those were different times, blah blah blah. No. Dorothy
28:39
Speaker 2: Thompson says that Minkomf is exactly what Hitler stands for,
28:44
Speaker 2: and we have to watch out because the German public
28:47
Speaker 2: are starting to agree.
28:49
Speaker 3: She says, you know right. In that same section, she
28:51
Speaker 3: says that the reason for his appeal is that the
28:54
Speaker 3: people listening to him have somebody to blame. They have
28:59
Speaker 3: an outlet for their resentment and their frustration.
29:02
Speaker 2: It's nineteen thirty two. Hitler isn't even in power yet,
29:06
Speaker 2: and one of the most famous journalists in America is
29:09
Speaker 2: laying it all out. There's a monster lurking on the
29:12
Speaker 2: ground floor of the KAISERHF and he has a dangerous
29:15
Speaker 2: obsession with the Jews. We can't sign up for his
29:18
Speaker 2: propaganda show, we can't go to the Olympics, and what
29:22
Speaker 2: happens we go. I'd never heard of Dorothy Thompson before
29:39
Speaker 2: we started this project, but midway through, like everyone else,
29:43
Speaker 2: I fell in love with her. And I think my
29:45
Speaker 2: favorite of the many things she wrote is an article
29:48
Speaker 2: in Harper's magazine in nineteen forty one, a few months
29:52
Speaker 2: before Pearl Harbor It begins. It is an interesting and
29:56
Speaker 2: somewhat acar parlor game to play at a large gathering
29:59
Speaker 2: of one acquaintances, to speculate who, in a showdown would
30:03
Speaker 2: go Nazi. Going Nazi, of course, is the easiest way
30:07
Speaker 2: to resolve the cognitive dissonance of the Berlin Games. I
30:11
Speaker 2: have come to know the types the born Nazis, the
30:14
Speaker 2: Nazis whom democracy itself has created, the certain to be
30:18
Speaker 2: fellow travelers, And so she lays out the types. Here
30:22
Speaker 2: is her, mister b a man of his own class,
30:26
Speaker 2: graduate of the same preparatory school and university, rich, a sportsman,
30:30
Speaker 2: owner of a famous racing stable, vice president of a bank,
30:34
Speaker 2: married to a well known society belle. He is a
30:37
Speaker 2: good fellow and extremely popular. But if America were going Nazi,
30:41
Speaker 2: he would certainly join up and early. Why mister B
30:46
Speaker 2: has risen beyond his real abilities by virtue of health,
30:49
Speaker 2: good looks, and being a good mixer. He married for money,
30:53
Speaker 2: and he has done lots of other things for money.
30:56
Speaker 2: His code is not his own, It is that of
30:58
Speaker 2: his class, no worse, no better. He fits easily into
31:03
Speaker 2: whatever pattern is successful. That is his sole measure of value. Success.
31:09
Speaker 2: Nazism as a minority movement would not attract him as
31:13
Speaker 2: a movement likely to attain power. It would. We're going
31:17
Speaker 2: to meet a real mister B, and another Thompson type too,
31:21
Speaker 2: a mister C, who she describes like this. Mister C
31:26
Speaker 2: is not a born Nazi. He is the product of
31:28
Speaker 2: a democracy hypocritically preaching social equality and practicing a carelessly
31:34
Speaker 2: brutal snobbery. He is a sensitive, gifted man who has
31:38
Speaker 2: been humiliated into nihilism. He would laugh to see heads roll.
31:44
Speaker 2: We're going to meet the perfect mister C, as well
31:47
Speaker 2: A lot of people in that brief window before the
31:49
Speaker 2: Olympics and before the war that would engulf the world
31:53
Speaker 2: went Nazi. How did that happen? That's the real story
31:58
Speaker 2: of the Games, Behind the Games. Welcome to Hitler's Olympics.
32:11
Speaker 2: Over the next eight episodes, we'll meet all kinds of
32:14
Speaker 2: people from the lead up to the nineteen thirty six Games.
32:17
Speaker 2: We'll talk about Charles Cheryl, diplomatic athlete, internationalist, man of parts,
32:23
Speaker 2: the ranking American member of the International Olympic Committee. Ben,
32:28
Speaker 2: Is it not safe to say that we became obsessed
32:30
Speaker 2: with Charles Cheryl? Is this project?
32:35
Speaker 1: Ben?
32:36
Speaker 2: I believe the only two people in the history of
32:38
Speaker 2: mankind to maintain a Charles Cheryl text chain.
32:41
Speaker 8: Certainly technologically and circumstantially, that's got to be true.
32:46
Speaker 2: We'll spend some time with Avery Brundage, a champion athlete,
32:49
Speaker 2: a self made millionaire who saw in the nineteen thirty
32:52
Speaker 2: six Games a chance to expel his personal demons and
32:56
Speaker 2: seize control of the entire Olympic movement.
33:00
Speaker 8: Rarely encountered someone so single minded and who also has
33:05
Speaker 8: such a profound lack of self awareness.
33:08
Speaker 2: Then there's Jesse Owens, winner of four gold medals, the
33:11
Speaker 2: African American star of the nineteen thirty six Games.
33:15
Speaker 3: That was the beginning to the end of a very
33:18
Speaker 3: long dream.
33:19
Speaker 2: I'm sure you've heard of Jesse Owens, but we're going
33:22
Speaker 2: to tell you a story about Owens but you haven't heard.
33:25
Speaker 2: And then the strange tale of a very proper German
33:29
Speaker 2: law student named Heinrich Krieger who embarked on an epic
33:33
Speaker 2: fact finding mission to Arkansas. This is almost a comic
33:38
Speaker 2: notion to someone's coming from this, from the cradle of
33:41
Speaker 2: European civilization to Fadville in the early nineteen thirties. I mean,
33:45
Speaker 2: it's like, I don't know how he ended up there.
33:47
Speaker 2: I truly don't. Billy Garland a real estate tycoon with
33:51
Speaker 2: a grand vision, lots of counts and barons and assorted
33:55
Speaker 2: European aristocrats who in the nineteen thirties used the Olympic
33:59
Speaker 2: movement to cling to their past glory the way a
34:02
Speaker 2: toddler clings to a teddy bear. Not to mention side
34:05
Speaker 2: trips to a small town in Alabama, a lesson from
34:09
Speaker 2: a legendary triple jumper, and a seminar on a crucial
34:13
Speaker 2: but all but forgotten Supreme Court case called Giles v. Harris.
34:19
Speaker 2: But in the next episode, we start with a man
34:21
Speaker 2: who claims, among other things, to have invented the crouching start.
34:26
Speaker 2: Charles Hitchcock. Cheryl are mister b.
34:32
Speaker 6: I have led the happiest life of anybody you ever
34:34
Speaker 6: met in your life.
34:46
Speaker 2: Religionous History is produced by Ben n Daph Haffrey, Tolly Emlin,
34:51
Speaker 2: and Nina Bird Lawrence. Our editor is Sarah Nix. Fact
34:55
Speaker 2: checking by Arthur Gomperts and Jail Goldfein, Original scoring by
35:00
Speaker 2: Luis Garra, mastering by Flaw Williams, Sarah Buger and Jake Gorsky.
35:06
Speaker 2: Engineering by Nina Bird Lawrence. Our executive producer is Jacob Smith.
35:11
Speaker 2: Special thanks to Karen Chakerji, special thanks to rufus Wright
35:16
Speaker 2: for reading us our putsy in this episode, and a
35:19
Speaker 2: big thank you to Jacob Goldstein for introducing us to
35:22
Speaker 2: Dorothy Thompson. I'm Malcolm Gladwell.