Untermyer Protests Olympics Plan

by Tschammer von Osten, Nazi official designated by Hitler to represent Germany in athletics.

SEES REICH “FITTED FOR JOB

Before the meeting Brundage pointed out that the committee had two major questions to consider. One was whether political, social and religious conditions under Hitler are such that America should have no athletic relations with Germany and the other is whether the Reich may be counted on to handle the games properly.

“Perhaps the first, being outside the realm of sports, should not be allowed to influence our decision,” Brundage said. “The second certainly should, but judging by the excellent preparations being made for the Olympics, I am convinced Germany is fully qualified for the job.”

Brundage admitted that strong pressure from Jewish organizations had been exerted upon him before he left for Europe, urging non-participation by America in the 1936 games.

The National Executive meeting of Avukah chapter delegates, representing Zionist student youths in more than forty colleges in the United States adopted a unanimous resolution expressing opposition to award of the 1936 Olympics to Naziland. The resolution also favors non-participation by American athletes in the German sports competition.

UNTERMYER LETTER

Samuel Untermyer, president of the Non – Sectarian Anti – Nazi League to Champion Human Rights, sent an open letter to Brundage yesterday protesting in behalf of the organization against American participation in the Berlin Olympics.

“Holding these games in Germany in 1936,” Mr. Untermyer writes, “would violate the economic boycott and cultural isolation which the civilized world has been formed to employ against the brutalities of the current regime in Germany. The abuses of Jewish, Catholic, Labor, and Liberal individuals and organizations that have been the avowed policy of the Third Reich have been nowhere more exhaustive than in the realm of sports. The restrictions against Jewish athletes have not abated one jot in the fifteen months since the German government solemnly undertook to eliminate such measures, but have on the contrary been extended with machine-like precision to include every field of sport and skill within the scope of Olympic competition. The Olympic ideal of fair play and good sportsmanship irrespective of creed, color, race, and social condition, constitutes a criminal utterance in Germany today for which large numbers of innocent citizens have been exiled, expropriated, tortured and slain. There is no reason for participating in these games in Berlin, for twenty-one nations have not agreed to compete there in 1936 and a congress can be readily arranged to select a site more harmonious with Olympic ideals. The anarchic character of the Third Reich, symbolized by the wholesale slaughter of June 30, makes it a grave responsibility to send thousands of young people there. There is a serious moral problem involved in accepting the hospitality of a nation either so poor or so dishonest that it defaults on every just financial obligation. Large sectors of the democratic and sport-loving American people will be deprived of participating in or visiting a Berlin Olympiad, out of respect for solemn pledges they have made to refrain from traffic of any sort with Germany.

YOUTH RESOLUTION

“Before entering upon a detailed statement of our reasons for urging you to refuse to participate in the games at Berlin in 1936 we beg herewith to submit a copy of the resolution that was unanimously adopted at the meeting of the first American Youth Congress, held at the New York University on August 16, 1934:

“(a) To oppose the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin and demand that the American Committee rescind their decision to send a team to the Olympic Games in Berlin;

“(b) That American athletes boycott preparation for the Berlin Olympiad.”

“The organizations that voted on this resolution represented 2,000,000 young Americans of all faiths, races, creeds and political views. . .

“In addition to the above, many non-Jewish organizations, including the American Federation of Labor, have endorsed the boycott of German goods and services and may thereby be fairly assumed to be opposed to the participation of our country in the Olympic Games to be held in Germany.

ASKED GUARANTEE

“At the meeting of the International Olympic Committee, held in Vienna June 7, 1933, the president asked the German delegates if they would guarantee the observance of the articles in the charter dealing with the organizing committee and the rules of qualification, just as they had been guaranteed by the governments of countries where preceding Olympiads had been organized, and that the application of the Olympic rules dealing with the committee of organization and the qualifications of participants would be scrupulously observed, even though certain limitations of our international rules should seem to be inconsistent with recent orders laid down in Germany.

“To that question His Excellency Dr. Theodore Lewald, the then president of the German organization, who has since been uncovered as having perpetrated the heinous crime of having had a Jewish grandmother, replied, with the consent of his government . . .

“3. As a principle, German Jews shall not be excluded from German teams at the Games of the Eleventh Olympiad.”

“After this declaration Mr. Garland, American representative of the National Olympic Committee wished to have it known that the American Olympic Committee, who were desirous of having the United States strongly represented at the next Olympic Games in Europe, would have had to give up participation altogether if German Jewish althetes had not been assured the same terms as members of the same faith in other countries.

RESOLUTIONS PASSED

“Subsequently, at a meeting of the American Athletic Union of the United States, at its annual convention, held in Pittsburgh on November 20, 1933, resolutions on this subject were passed . . .

“I cannot here begin to recapitulate or describe the number or extent of the insults and humiliations to which the German Jews have been and are being subjected in connection with this subject. Suffice it to say that it will be impossible for any self-respecting Jew from any part of the world to enter Germany or to subject himself to the degradation that would be involved in his participating in the Olympiad of 1936 in that country, either as a contestant or an observer.

“The application of the ‘Aryan’ paragraph of the German law would also exclude the participation of Negroes, such as Metcalfe, who are connected with American amateur sports. It would also exclude American Indians, Asiatics and teams from nations whose dominant blood-strains are not within the grotesque definition of ‘Aryan’ as evolved by the present German government, which is the laughing-stock and subject of contemptuous derision of the entire civilized world.

CITES LABOR QUESTION

“Permit me also to call attention to the essential fact that your authority to investigate conditions in Germany applied only to the Jewish situation and that it did not take into account the discriminating and destructive action against German organized labor, the confiscation of its vast properties on account of which almost every labor organization in the civilized world has officially boycotted German merchandise; nor did it take into account the action taken against the Catholic youth groups which, it seems to me, must necessarily prevent those elements from participating in the International Olympic Games if held in Germany.

“The pledges given you by Herr Tschammer von Osten, the special Olympics minister, you yourself termed ‘very peculiar’ when you learned that they were not to be made public in Germany. You will not be surprised therefore, to learn that you had scarcely taken ship when a new decree was promulgated (September 22) categorically forbidding Jews to take sports or exercises in a body. Your own familiarity with the nature of athletic activity will acquaint you with the paralyzing effect of such a prohibition on sports of every sort; this final measure shuts down every prospect, even a verbal one, of just treatment for a single Jewish athlete in Germany. And with the perspective of complete forgetfulness, with which the German government has enshrouded its pledges of fifteen months ago, officially given to the International Olympic Committee, what weight is to be attached to von Osten’s individual promise given sotto voce and sub rosa?

POINTS TO SELF-RESPECT

“The unsportsmanlike and humiliating condition now imposed is in and of itself so grave an affront to the Jewish athletes that it automatically bars every self-respecting Jew from participation.

“How any fair-minded representative of your organization could permit himself, by voting for this resolution, to become a party to any such insult to his fellow-members is inconceivable.

“Frankly, I was surprised and shocked at the argument put forth by you in favor of holding these Games in Berlin, as reported in this morning’s Herald Tribune.

“As I see it, there is not the remotest analogy between your suppositious case of Japan in 1940 and the situation that confronts American participation in the Berlin Olympiad. If in 1940 it should appear that the Japanese government had deprived its own citizens of their Japanese rights of citizenship and had heaped upon them every conceivable torture and form of persecution merely and solely because they were white, and excluded them from participating in sports, I doubt whether we would hesitate long about refusing to take part in a meeting in Japan.

“How any impartial person who has not been thoroughly infected with the poisonous virus of anti-Semitism can for a moment expect Jews to participate in these Games, in the fact of this record, is impossible to imagine.

“The decision to participate in these Games would necessarily mar, if not destroy, the harmony and freedom from racial and religious distinctions that have heretofore marked the career of American sports-life. Nothing more unsportsmanlike than such an award has ever been known in sports circles.

NOTHING “POLITICAL”

“There is nothing either ‘internal’ or ‘political’ about the grave problems of equality, Americanism and decent sportsmanship that confront your organization. The unprovoked massacre and persecution by a government of a country that was once civilized, of its innocent minorities merely because of their race or creed, has never been regarded by the world as an