Jesse and Adolf: The rest of the story

“Jesse Owens, the son of sharecroppers, grandson of a slave, won four gold medals in track and field at the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin, Germany, exploding Adolf Hitler’s myth of ‘Aryan supremacy.’  Hitler, the most evil man in history, stormed out of the Olympic stadium in a rage to avoid having to shake hands with the gallant young African American.”

And so forth. If you know any history at all — especially if you’re a White liberal who idolizes any black who has “stuck it to the man,” then no doubt you’ve read all that before — a number of times. But keep this in mind: History is written by people, and people have their own agendas and prejudices. And historians often harbor a LOT of those.

Yes, Owens was a young black American, a magnificent sprinter and jumper, who won the four gold medals at Berlin. And historians have assured us for years that he thus spoiled the whole Olympics for the evil Nazis and their even-more-evil leader by “exploding the myth of Aryan supremacy.” And that Adolf Hitler presumably shook the hand of every White winner in that Olympics, but refused to shake Owens’ hand because of his race.

Well, let’s see: If there was a “myth of Aryan supremacy” to explode, then I’d say Jim Thorpe exploded it pretty well at the 1912 Olympics in Stockholm. Thorpe was a Native American (Sac and Fox) who won two gold medals that year, in the pentathlon and decathlon. As a matter of fact, Thorpe was a much more versatile athlete than Owens, who was not born until the year after Thorpe’s victories. But of course, Thorpe was partially of European heritage, so maybe he doesn’t count as an Aryan myth exploder. By the way, Thorpe was voted the No. 1 American Athlete of the 20th Century.

Owens’ big wins (BOOM! There goes another racist myth!) don’t seem to have disheartened the German athletes overmuch. In the Berlin games, Germany won 101 medals total, 38 of them gold. Coming in a very distant second was Owens’ team, the United States, with 57 total and only 24 gold. Some myth; some explosion.

Of course, the assumption on the part of liberal journalists was that the Nazis assumed no black could ever defeat a German Aryan in Olympic competition. I doubt that’s quite the way Hitler and his followers saw it, although of course given his racial views Hitler was angered at seeing his athletes defeated by a black American.

But years later, in his autobiography, Owens described how, just after he won one of his gold medals, he happened to look up at the box where Hitler and his entourage were sitting, and that Hitler looked straight at him, stood up, and waved to him. “So I waved back,” Owens declared.

Owens doesn’t mention Hitler shaking his hand. But there’s more to the story than that. On the first day of competition, Hitler shook the hand of each German winner of a medal. But the Olympic Committee sent word to him that, as the leader of the host nation, if he was going to congratulate winners in that way, he had to do it for all of them — not just his countrymen. So Hitler did not shake any more hands of victors after that.

Or did he?

Three years ago, an 83-year-old German sportswriter, Siegfried Mischner, told a London newspaper that in the 1960s, Jesse Owens approached several reporters, including Mischner, asking them to, in effect, “re-write” part of the history of the Berlin Olympics.

How? He told them that Hitler had, indeed, shaken his hand — but behind the honors stand, out of sight of the crowds. Hitler did not want to be seen doing it — but apparently he wanted to congratulate a great athlete in person, regardless of his race. And Owens felt that Hitler had been unfairly treated by the world press in regard to the Olympics, where he was as the leader of the host country, in Owens’ own words, “the man of the hour.”

Then Jesse Owens pulled something from his wallet and showed it to the reporters to back up his claim. It was a faded photograph, taken at the scene, showing himself and Adolf Hitler, right hands clasped. It would have “exploded a myth” of another kind had the picture been made public.

“I saw it,” Mischner insisted. He quoted Owens as saying to him: “That was one of my most beautiful moments.”

Mischner admitted that neither he nor any of the other reporters were willing to report on the photo, or have it re-produced. The “most evil man in history” must not be rehabilitated in any way; Adolf Hitler must not be shown in any way as human or as even a marginal “good guy.”

Mischner told the newspaper three years ago: “All my colleagues are dead. Owens is dead (he died in 1980). I thought this was the last chance to set the record straight. I have no idea where the photo is, or if it even exists.”

Obviously I have no idea, either, but I suspect that Owens’ family may have destroyed it after his death.

But other pictures from that era, reflecting on Adolf Hitler, do still exist. The one accompanying this story shows the Fuehrer and a young friend, a little German girl named Bernile Nienau. She shared Hitler’s birthday — April 20 — and when her mother brought her to Hitler’s Berchtesgaden estate in the Alps in 1932, as part of a large crowd hoping to see him, word was passed to Hitler of their shared birthday. He asked the mother to bring little Bernile up to the estate for a chat and a dish of strawberries. Thereafter, little Bernile was invited regularly to come with her mother to visit him at his estate overlooking the mountains.

A year or so after the first visit, Hitler’s aide Martin Bormann ferreted out information that Bernile’s grandmother was Jewish. He passed this information on to Hitler, assuming that the anti-Semitic Fuehrer would never want to see her again. But Hitler continued to invite his little friend and her mother to visit him, right up into 1938.

So, does that all make Hitler NOT an evil man? Of course not; no one could cause millions of deaths and years of world upheaval without being evil. Of course he was.

But Joseph Stalin and Mao Tse-tung were evil men, too; each of them was responsible for causing more deaths than Hitler. That’s something you won’t read often in history books; but it’s true.

Adolf Hitler’s very dark side was not his only side. He was a loving son to his mother, who took care of her faithfully through her final illness (she died at Christmas 1907, when Adolf was 18 years old). He was a brave soldier in the German army in World War I — not especially popular among his comrades, as he was viewed as rather odd; but with a reputation for never abandoning a comrade in battle.

In his years as German chancellor, he treated the people who worked for him — cooks, waiters, valet, chauffeur, secretaries — with decency and respect, and paid them wages that were high for the 1930s.

And there are a number of reminiscences about him in autobiographies by Germans who were children before and during World War II, and whose parents were high Nazi officials. One thing they agree on: He genuinely liked children, and enjoyed their company. There are home movies on YouTube showing him interacting with youngsters, as if he were a benevolent uncle.

So now you know the rest of the story about a major 20th Century event, and a major, though much-hated, 20th Century figure. I’m sure I’ll be labeled something nasty and shameful by some of the liberals who might read this, for saying it. But I don’t care. I may be retired, but I’m still a reporter.