Revisionist History - Hitler’s Olympics, Part 3: Mustache to Mustache

Episode Date: July 11, 2024

With the fate of the Olympics on the line, Charles Sherrill travels to Germany to take up the question of Jewish athletes directly with the Führer. We dig through a dusty archive to uncover a long-buried account of their meeting. The wolf met with the chicken. Guess who won? See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Pushkin. October 31st, 1935. Park Avenue. Meet Tim and Ann. We greet you friends from the advertising club of New York City and present another interesting luncheon meeting of this organization. The meal is served. Grilled Boston scrod with crisp bacon,

or breaded veal steak, Vienna style, followed by old-fashioned strawberry shortcake. The plates are cleared away. The president of the club introduces the head table, a long row of distinguished gentlemen, and then the agenda of the day. The Olympics to be held in Germany in 1936. Forgetting the thought of every nation the world over. It seemed fitting then that we should go to our guest of the day. He gestures to a man sitting next to him with a fabulous, thriving mustache. Charles Hitchcock Sherrill.

Why do we call on General Sherrill? First of all, he's an athlete himself. He's probably the only man who won seven intercollegiate championships while attending Yale. He lists Sherrill's many accomplishments. His time as a diplomat, his training as a lawyer, his service in the New York National Guard. Probably though I should emphasize above everything else the fact that for 15 years he's been a member of the American Olympic Committee, International Olympic Committee. And we've asked him to come here to clear up the fog, which some feel exists about this 1936 Olympic situation.

And there is no better man to clear up this Olympic situation than Charles Hitchcock Sherrill. Of course, he opens his advertising club talk with a joke. Your president has spoken as though I was dead and in a coffin, and he was speaking at the funeral. He left out what I think is the most important thing that he put, and that is that I have led the happiest life of anybody you ever met in your life. He beams, he looks around happily, his eyes twinkle.

This is his kind of room. He launches into a brief and modest account of his sprinting accomplishments at Yale. He speaks of his key role in the invention of the crouching start and how the press loved to talk about it. I have a wife at home who seriously objects to my athletic path. She says, why is it that whenever you achieve anything, they must print half-naked pictures of you. And then Charles Sherrill tells the assembled group the story of how he has rescued the Olympic Games from the doubters and the naysayers, not once, but twice. Welcome to Episode 3 of Hitler's Olympics, our story about the 1936 Games, the most important Games in the history of the Olympics. In the previous installment, we met our would-be hero, Charles Sherrill, who single-handedly brokered the deal in Vienna, a promise that he believed

would save the 1936 Olympics, a promise from the Nazis not to exclude Jewish athletes from the Games. But now the deal is imperiled. There are renewed calls for an Olympic boycott, and our hero has been compelled once again to come to the rescue. All human societies organize themselves into a pyramid, with ordinary people at the bottom and elites at the top. And the crucial thing about the world Charles Sherrill grew up in, America in the late 19th and early 20th century, is that the top of the pyramid is really, really small. It's a pinprick. It's basically rich white men. And if you were also handsome and a fraternity brother from Yale, so much the better. Charles Sherrill was all those things. He was at the very apex of the pinprick. And right from the beginning, what distinguished Charles Sherrill was his intuitive

understanding of the rules that governed the top of the pyramid. Like, for example, never say a discouraging word about another person in that tiny group at the very, very top. I'm reading to you now from Sherrill's unpublished memoirs, where he recounts the story of the time he was part of a group visiting the White House and presented the First Lady, Grace Coolidge, with a bouquet of roses that had been named in her honor. I did this, Cheryl writes, with the comment that the presentation of Coolidge roses to Mrs. Coolidge was but holding the mirror up to nature. She replied, not exactly, because the roses are blondes and I am a brunette.

Ernest Gafalas all round. Rule number two. If you are outside this tight little circle at the top of the pyramid, Charles Sherrill doesn't see you. This is a crucial point. There is a certain kind of racist who is racist because he or she harbors an obsession with the other. In the Jim Crow South, for example, swimming pools were segregated because white people didn't want

to share the same water as black people. The idea that something might wash off black skin and linger in the water grossed them out. It kept them up at night. It was visceral. That's not Charles Sherrill. He has plenty of black people in his life. They work in the kitchen. They take his coat. But the thought that he is sharing his Manhattan townhouse with them does not keep him up at night. He has arranged his life so that he doesn't have to think about them at all. So when it comes to the 1936 Olympics and Jews in Germany, you might be wondering,

is Sheryl an anti-Semite? Well, not like Hitler was an anti-Semite. Hitler got all worked up about Jews. People like Sheryl, on the other hand, kept their voices down. What is the attitude of this kind of person in this era towards Jews? Let's see, where to begin? Nick Lemon, historian. So you're really talking about these sort of upper patrician classes, right? So typically these people lived inside a series of institutions that were quote-unquote restricted, which meant, you know, in the broadest sense, only gentlemen could be in them, and in the specific sense usually meant no Jews.

So this would apply to, clubs, neighborhoods that often had deed restrictions, that no Jews could live there. Very, very often workplaces had rules against Jews being hired. It was understood that Jews weren't allowed in this world of sort of upper class gentlemen and ladies. People in Cheryl's class arranged their lives so that they didn't have to deal with Jews. And I think they would have thought, you know, Jews are coarse, they're vulgar, they're not gentlemanly, they think about money all the time things like that.

But they didn't think of Jews to use one of Hitler's favorite words as vermin. Cheryl's great friend on the International Olympic Committee was the group's president the Belgian count Henri de Bailly-Latour. Remember, Latour's wife was the one

who wrote Hitler a thank you note when he invaded Belgium. Now, she wouldn't call herself a Nazi. She would say that sending a thank-you note to your invaders upon the occasion of your country's invasion was just good manners, like sending a Bundt cake to the family that moves into the mansion across the street. The Count, meanwhile, once said of Jews in a letter to a friend that he wasn't fond of them. He wrote that Jews usually, quote, shout before there is a reason to do so. The Jews, in the view of the cultured men of the European aristocracy, were annoying and vulgar and a little bit exasperating.

But the count was quite clear that you couldn't ban Jews from the Olympics. Just because a particular race was annoying and vulgar didn't mean that they couldn't participate in, say, the long jump. People like Baillatour and Charles Sherrill liked Jews in theory, but just not in practice, in contrast to the Nazis, who didn't like Jews in practice or in theory. In 1935, that distinction seemed important. Oh, rule number three from the top of the pyramid. Remember when we said in the last episode that another of the people Sheryl reminds us of is Candide's Pangloss? The man who believes that all is necessarily for the best end. Essentially, everything happens for a reason, and a good reason at that. I mean,

how could it not when you're living a life like Charles Hitchcock Sheryl? I have led the happiest life of anybody you ever met in your life. That's not just a statement of character and disposition. It's an ideological belief. He looks around at those who would question the status quo, radicals, communists, suffragettes, Jews, and he says, what are you complaining about? From where I sit,

at the top of the pyramid, the view is pretty great. Okay, final rule of pyramids, and maybe the most important. From his happy perch, high up on the pyramid, Charles Sherrill constructs the following syllogism. If we are really happy with things just as they are, then what do we make of those at the very top, responsible for keeping things just as they are? We like them a lot. Charles Sherrill's great literary accomplishment, apart from the books he wrote about stained glass,

was an ambitious work of history. He told the story of Otto von Bismarck, the 19th century strongman who unified Germany. Bismarck was a master strategist, steely character, enormous bushy eyebrows, a furious mustache, a jaw chiseled from the finest Bavarian granite, a row of medals on his crisply starched tunic. They called him the Iron Chancellor. And in his treatise, Cheryl compared Bismarck with his other great man crush, the Italian strongman Benito Mussolini, Il Duce, the inventor of modern fascism. Cheryl admired Bismarck, but Mussolini?

For Il Duce, he had true passion. In the course of his research, he would visit Mussolini in his massive office, as he would write, It is a fashion for writers upon Mussolini to describe this lofty room, devoid of all decoration, as an

entirely appropriate background for this forthright statesman. Possibly they are right, but I see a wider, bolder background for him. Il Duce would come striding over, and Cheryl's heart would go all aflutter. Looking back on the memory, he wrote, If he has known you several years, the greeting is pleasingly cordial, his Caesar-like features lighting up, and those piercing eyes softening into friendliness, and then a good manly handshake. Was Sheryl's Bismarck and Mussolini a good book?

Probably not. It got a three-sentence review in the American Journal of Sociology, ending with the line, Cheryl's special field of competence would appear to be handling and assessing columns of marching men. A lesser man would be crippled by a sentence like that, but not Charles Sherrill. Because when Sherrill sent Mussolini his book, Il Duce liked it so much, he gave Sherrill the highest of all Italian military and civilian honors. He made him a Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the Crown of Italy. A gold star plus a striking right shoulder sash.

Mussolini sent it in a box to New York, where it arrived in time for Cheryl's 25th wedding anniversary. A dinner at the Pierre Hotel with 142 guests, where the honor was pinned on Cheryl's chest by the Italian Consul General in the presence of the French, Argentine, Spanish, and Cuban ambassadors and Dutch, Swedish, Greek, and Czechoslovak ministers.

A guest list that all of us have dreamt about for our 25th wedding anniversary. Let the assistant professors of sociology write what they choose about the book. Our hero is now a knight of the Grand Cross, of the Order of the Crown of Italy. Now, think back to Dorothy Thompson, America's most celebrated foreign correspondent, who famously interviews Hitler in 1931 when he is on the cusp of power.

Thompson's day job is not a lot different from Sheryl's. As part of his diplomatic duties or his role at the IOC, Sheryl goes around Europe meeting with heads of state and aristocrats. As a foreign correspondent, Thompson does the same thing. I'm sure they meet some of the same people. But she's not at the top of the pyramid. She was raised by a struggling preacher. Her mother died when Thompson was a child.

Her life experiences haven't made her comfortable with power or left her thinking that the world is just fine the way it is. Quite the opposite. When Thompson got out of college, she immediately threw herself into the suffrage movement. She spent three years on that fight, and when it finally looked like women might get the vote, she decides, I want to find the next fight.

And she buys a ticket on an ocean liner. And then she landed in Europe just as fascism was starting to build. The historian Sarah Churchwell. It's actually important that we all remember that fascism was by no means a German phenomenon, especially in the 1920s, or uniquely, certainly not a uniquely German phenomenon. And in the 20s, it's Mussolini, who of course gives it its name. So Thompson traveled to Italy. She encountered Italian fascists. She was educating herself about Italian and European fascism.

She marries a Jew, a Hungarian writer, a radical. She meets his crowd, artists, writers, outsiders. This was an experience, a relationship, that opened her eyes and her understanding to political conversations in Eastern Europe around the rising tensions and all of the, you know, the volatility of the European political situation at that time. So by the time Hitler came into power in 1933,

she'd spent a decade becoming a pretty expert, certainly for an American. She probably had a more nuanced understanding than virtually any other American of her generation because she'd spent the best part of that decade living among Europeans who were breathing and debating and arguing and figuring out what these new fascist movements were going to mean. But I was curious, I want to go back to the thing about, she starts with the suffrage movement.

And I wondered whether that experience kind of permanently sensitizes you to the kind of the plight of the powerless in a certain way. Like, it might be really hard to be pro-fascist if you spent your early 20s fighting for women's suffrage, don't you think? Yeah, absolutely. So she certainly, she had a strong sense of sympathy and identification with people who saw themselves as being an oppressed class, an oppressed minority. The point is that when Dorothy Thompson thinks of Mussolini, it is not to remark on his manly handshake and piercing eyes. And when she goes to see Hitler, she doesn't defer to him just because he's on the cusp of running Germany. She sees him for what he is, an angry, vicious demagogue.

But if you are Charles Sherrill, looking at that same man, what do you see? You see someone very different. To be continued... question. Join me for my new mini-series on the art of fairness. We'll travel from New York to Tahiti to India on a quest to learn how to succeed without being a jerk. We'll examine stories of villains undone by their villainy and monstrous self-devouring egos and we'll delve into the extraordinary power of decency. We'll face mutiny on the vast Pacific Ocean, blaze a trail with a pioneering skyscraper, and dare to confront a formidable empire.

The art of fairness on cautionary tales. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. In the summer of 1935, the deal to save the games that Cheryl had hammered out in Vienna two years before is imperiled. The Germans had promised to keep their Olympic team open to Jewish athletes. But Nazi anti-Semitism is accelerating, and people around the world are threatening again to boycott the Games. Sheryl is worried that his diplomatic masterstroke will come to nothing. He knows he has to act, and now he sees the mistake he made back in Vienna. He dealt with underlings. He realizes it's time to confront Herr Hitler himself. Does he go through Puzzi, Hitler's Wagner-playing, Harvard-trained PR man? Probably. Puzzi was always

the point of entry for Americans wanting an audience with Herr Hitler. If Charles Sherrill had lived to see how things turned out with the Nazis, he would have edited his papers, particularly the Chief Offender, Scrapbook 35. That he would have buried in the backyard of his estate in the Hamptons, along with his knight Grand Cross of the Order of the Crown of Italy. That's what people like Charles Sherrill did after the war, cleaned house. But Charles Sherrill died too soon. And so there it remains in the archives of the New York Historical Society. A love letter in seven double-spaced type pages. His Excellency Reich Chancellor Adolf Hitler received me at noon, August 24th, 1935, in his own private Munich residence.

Let me first of all frankly confess that this will not prove a journalistic interview with Germany's chief of state. It merely narrates a foreigner's visit to an undeniably great leader. As a gift, Sheryl brings Hitler two of his books, his treatise on German stained glass windows, and of course his masterwork comparing Mussolini and Bismarck. Then they talked, man to man, for an hour and ten minutes.

He wrote, I was immediately struck by the fact that Hitler deliberately chose the seat facing the window and its bright sunlight. When in 1921, I talked with 15 European prime ministers plus four presidents, and two years later, nine kings, none of them did this, nor have any leading statesmen I have since then met. Charles Sherrill had nothing but respect for a man unafraid to sit facing the window. He goes on. His photographers do him grave injustice in two regards. They do not show enough the strength of his upper head above the expressive eyes,

and give no hint of the engaging human being he can be when he wants to be. Dorothy Thompson, remember, looked into those same eyes and found the peculiar shine which often distinguishes geniuses, alcoholics, and hysterics. It's like they're meeting a different man. Thompson found Hitler formless, cartilaginous, ill-poised, and insecure. But Sherrill finds himself drawn to Hitler's famously short mustache. It's not like Sherrill's mustache, which of course is full and luxuriant and suggestive of all manner of daring and panache, but something this concise yet emphatic for the Fuhrer totally works. It suits Hitler's face while speaking because revealing all of the expression around the mouth. Welcome to the top of the pyramid, my little mustachioed friend. So what did the two men talk about?

Here's Sheryl again. Because I am a member of the International Olympic Committee, we naturally spoke of our 1936 Games scheduled for Berlin. In these, he expressed keen interest. Then Sheryl brings up what he calls the unfortunate Jewish question. Not the Nazis' anti-Semitic policies writ large, of course, but the annoying controversy over Jews on the German Olympic team and how it's threatening to derail the games. Sheryl has a proposal for Hitler, a simple way to calm the waters back in the United States. Just put a Jew on the

Olympic team. One will do. Cheryl even has someone in mind, a fencer named Helene Maier. Maier is German and living in Los Angeles. She's one of the greatest fencers of all time. Technically, she's only half Jewish, since her mom is a proper Aryan. Cheryl thinks that fact will help persuade Hitler. Plus, Maer is blonde and blue-eyed and really looks the part. Hitler pushes back. So Cheryl brings up the Vienna Declaration that he'd hammered out two years previously at the Hotel Imperial. Germany's agreement in principle not to exclude Jews.

Hitler says he's never heard of the Vienna deal. Cheryl is shocked. What? How is that even possible? He doubles down. Hitler responds, German sports are for Aryans only. Cheryl comes at him again. It's back and forth, back and forth. Later, in a note to Frank and Roosevelt's private secretary, Cheryl describes the scene. My book, Bismarck and Mussolini, lay before him, and he faced a fine Lembock portrait of Bismarck. It was a last chance. So I went right at him with a question. What would Bismarck, master of foreigner psychology, do today? He was polite, but showed nothing. Had my appeal won? No sign. Two titans duking it out at the top of the pyramid, mustache to mustache. It was dreadful nerve for me to tackle him in his own Munich home, but I am only a private citizen and he can't eat me. Cheryl leaves the meeting. Has his bold

gambit worked? Daring Herr Hitler to put himself in Otto von Bismarck's shoes? WWBD? What would Bismarck do? Cheryl dashes off a letter to his friend, Baila Thur. Prepare yourself, he says, for the very real possibility that all of my brilliant diplomatic stratagems in Vienna two years ago have come to naught. Please speak to him, Sheryl pleads. We need Hitler to compromise for the sake of the games, he writes. will be a trying test for even your remarkable tact and savoir-faire. And the sooner you meet the situation, the better the hope for your success instead of a destructive explosion. Did our hero endure a sleepless night? In his agonies, did he turn the essential question on himself, WWBD? What would Bismarck do if, say, Mussolini reneged on an agreement? But then he gets a note in the mail. It's there

in the famous scrapbook 35, a little embossed card inviting him to the Nuremberg rally in mid-September, the annual propaganda festival put on by the Nazi party. I'm sure you've seen film clips, thousands of soldiers marching in lockstep, chanting, Heil Hitler. Sheryl lives for moments such as these. Remember, even the American Journal of Sociology has noted his taste when it comes to columns of marching men. So he accepts the invitation from the Nazi party. He packs an overnight bag. They offer him a ride on Hitler's train. He says yes.

And then in his scrapbook, there then follows many pages of press coverage, swastikas, Nazi propaganda that he collected. My colleague Ben-Nadav Haffrey reporting on what he found in Cheryl's papers at the New York Historical Society. There's an amazing photo of him at the Nuremberg rally

at some official event surrounding it with all these medals on his tuxedo jacket, sort of gazing up at the ceiling in awe because you imagine he's in some vast hall, surrounded by just, they look, they're such prototypical Nazis. So it's just this man kind of daftly wandering around this grand hall surrounded by these deeply evil people and completely unaware of the historical significance of what he's witnessing.

Other than that, it's a very important event and therefore must be prepared for his scrapbook. The 1935 Nuremberg Rally is where Hitler announced the so-called blood laws, outlawing marriage between Aryans and Jews and stripping German Jews of their citizenship. It was the clearest articulation yet of the Nazis' murderous anti-Semitism. And for many Americans, Nuremberg put the conundrum of the games into sharp focus. If that's who these people are, can we really go there? But that's not how Sheryl sees it.

So what does he do at the Nuremberg rally? He collects signatures. He and his scrapbook has autographs from people he met at the Nuremberg rallies that are scrawled on this, one of the brochures from it describing what's going to happen on September 11th, 1935. And then there's all these pencil signatures from what I can only assume are prominent members of the Nazi party. He's fanboying the Nazi party. But it's like, yeah, he's not even, I don't think that Charles Sherrill would approve of a campaign to exterminate the Jews. I think all he can recognize is force, willfulness, and power. And so he understands that this will be a good one for the scrapbook or the after dinner toast. But there's something about that. The autographs thing. I found

very, it's, it's really chilling. And there's like is there has to be a it's it feels like a different category than the banality of evil. It's like the there we have to invent a new term for the relationship Charles Cheryl bearsality of evil. It's like the, we have to invent a new term for the relationship Charles Sherrill bears to this evil. I'm with you. He's so, he's, he's got, he's just,

he's just, he's, he's just unbelievable. At the end, a top Nazi official pulls him aside and tells him, Herr Sherrill, we have good news for you. We are inviting the half-Jew,

Helene Mayer, to join the German Olympic team. Mission accomplished. He sails for home on the SS Normandy, the largest and fastest passenger ship of its day. He steps off the boat and is mobbed by reporters. I am more convinced than ever that America should take part in the Olympics, he says, and I am probably the best friend the Jews have in America. Then he makes a threat. I'm not here to stop any anti-Semitic waves, but I warn of the danger of such a development

if five million Jews in the United States can make 125 million Americans pull the chestnuts out of the fire for the Jews in Germany. Jews, Sheryl is saying, shouldn't complain about anti-Semitism because that will cause anti-Semitism. Besides, have I not given you exactly what you wanted? Helene Mayer, a brilliant fencer and a Jewess, or at least the daughter of a Jew, which ought to count for something, right? Aren't you happy now? Charles Sherrill chose to resolve the dilemma of the pure competition in an impure place by layering a flimsy piece of wallpaper over the menace that was the Nazi regime

and hoping no one will look underneath. Remember Dorothy Thompson's taxonomy of who goes Nazi? Mr. B. It's like she was writing with Charles Sherrill in mind. His code is not his own. It is that of his class, no worse, no better. He fits easily into whatever pattern is successful. That is his sole measure of value, success. Nazism as a minority movement would not attract him. As a movement likely to attain power,

it would. He goes home to his Manhattan townhouse, rests his weary head in triumph, and a week later, takes the stage at the advertising club of New York City, where he will say, I have led the happiest life of anybody you ever met in your life. It's been said that nice guys finish last.

But is that really true? I'm Tim Harford, host of the Cautionary Tales podcast, and I'm exploring that very question. Join me for my new miniseries on the art of fairness. We'll travel from New York to Tahiti to India on a quest to learn how to succeed without being a jerk. We'll examine stories of villains undone by their villainy and monstrous self-devouring egos and we'll delve into the extraordinary power of decency. We'll face mutiny on the vast Pacific Ocean, blaze a trail with a pioneering skyscraper and dare to confront a formidable empire. The art of fairness on cautionary tales. Listen on the iHeartRadio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Charles Sherrill will not live to see the Berlin Olympics. He will die of a heart attack at his Paris townhouse the following June, a few weeks before the spectacle of the opening ceremonies in Berlin. That is a shame. Few would have enjoyed that bit of fascist pageantry more than Charles Hitchcock Sherrill. So the advertising club speech is really the last time we will see him in his element. And he has a message for the world that day. It's about the Jews. They are violating the rules of the pyramid. People are supposed to be nice to each other. People are supposed to accept the world as it is. Be glad for it. People at the

bottom are supposed to stay out of sight. And everyone should revere the people at the top. But ever since he stepped off the Normandy and said that bit about how Jews shouldn't really complain about anti-Semitism because that will cause anti-Semitism, people had been mean to him. This is what he wanted to tell the august members of the Advertising Club of New York. He has been wronged. After all my years of urging a square deal for Jews,

they call me anti-Jewish. Many Christians have been asked me by telephone, telegraph, and letter about the type of communication that had been coming in since my arrival from abroad ten days ago. In the first place, almost all the Jewish letters, I'm sorry to say, have been either abusive or threatening. He goes on and on. He is aggrieved. Heavy hangs the head that wears the crown. This forces me, and I say it with deep emotion,

to desist from those friendly efforts in the future. But neither that incident nor the torrent of Jewish abuse recently poured upon me can succeed in making me anti-Jewish. He doesn't hate the Jews, he's trying to say, but he will not stand with them again because his feelings have been hurt. And then our wounded lion raises his heavy head and says, enough. Everybody has a perfect right to have an opinion on this much-discussed question, but now that the decision to go to Berlin has been definitely made by the only American group having the right of decision, that would be people like Charles Hitchcock Sherrill,

the people at the top of the pyramid. It would be well to remember General Grant's saying at the close of our civil war, let us have peace. And with that, the room rises in loud agreement. On to Berlin. General Sherrill, you have quickened our democratic faith by telling us of that noble international democracy, the Olympic Games, and let us run with patience the race that is set before us. Thank you. stirring by Flan Williams, Sarah Bruguier, and Jake Gorski. Engineering by Nina Bird Lawrence. Our executive producer is Jacob Smith. Special thanks to Karen Shikurji. I'm Malcolm Gladwell.