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

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Yeah, yeah.

Now, let's talk about the, you have the fascinating thing about the guy, Krieger,

who goes from Germany to Arkansas.

Yes, he does.

To Fayetteville.

Yes.

I'm talking to a professor at Yale Law School, James Q.

Whitman, about an all-but-forgotten figure named Heinrich Krieger.

In the early 1930s, Krieger was a student in Dusseldorf, an intellectual, who set out for his semester abroad.

We have no pictures of him, so we'll have to use our imaginations.

A proper upper-class European, waistcoat, little round glasses, bowler hat, in his briefcase, a battered copy of of Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil.

I'm guessing he's never been to America before.

He takes a steamship from Hamburg to New Orleans, the SS Westmoreland, his heart beating furiously with a mixture of apprehension and excitement.

He disembarks, takes a train north and west, and arrives in Fayetteville, Arkansas.

Rents a room in the house of a German professor named of Gustav on Maple Street, right by the University of Arkansas School of Law.

The law school was only 10 years old.

Classes were held in the old chemistry building on campus.

Today, Fayetteville has 100,000 people.

Back then, it's just over 7,000.

A dusty little place, a whole world away from Dusseldorf.

Did the University of Arkansas Law School get a lot of overseas students in the 1930s?

I don't think so.

This is almost a comic notion that someone's coming from

the cradle of European civilization to Fayetteville in 19 in the early 1930s.

I mean, it's like the culture shock that poor man went through.

I don't know how he ended up there.

I truly don't.

Yeah, yeah.

And he goes there.

How much time does he spend in just a year?

I think he was an exchange student for a year.

And he ends up writing, and you've read this book he writes.

Oh, yes, yeah.

And it's quite a good book if you accept its basic starting premise.

It's well done, you know.

So describe to us what he produces in his time in Fayetteville.

He produced a book called Race Law in America.

Oh, I nearly forgot to mention.

Herr Krieger is a Nazi.

A serious one.

My name is Malcolm Glaubwell.

You're listening to Hitler's Olympics, our series of the 1936 Berlin Games.

Dorothy Thompson, Charles Sherrill, Avery Brundich, Jesse Owens, the main subjects of our series so far, were all Americans, trying to make sense of what was happening in Germany in the early days of the Nazi Nazi regime.

The Olympics forced us to look at them, but the Germans were looking at us too.

The bronze medalist in the men's 400 meters in Berlin was an American named Jimmy Luval.

He went on to become a chemist at Stanford University.

I happen to be somewhat obsessed with Jimmy Luval for a whole series of reasons that have nothing to do with his running career, but that's for another time.

In 1988, Laval sits for a long interview about his experiences at the Olympics, and at one point, he describes what happened when the team first got to Germany.

We arrived eventually in Hamburg, disembarked.

They took us up to the Rathaus

and

served us.

Each of us had a small glass of 25-year-old port.

Well, up to that time, I'd never realized how delightful a good wine could taste.

This was excellent wine.

The Germans saw all these Americans coming from across the ocean and welcomed them with open arms.

I mean you heard all this rigor all about Hitler but certainly the German people were as nice as they could be.

I had a

German colonel invite me out to his home

for dinner one night.

I had dinner with he and his children, his two daughters and his wife.

Very pleasant.

Two or three of us went along.

We saw no sign of any intolerance of any type.

No sign of any intolerance.

Jimmy Naval was black.

He was from Los Angeles, which in the 1930s was functionally as segregated as Birmingham.

In Los Angeles, white people did not invite him to their houses for dinner or give him a glass of 25-year-old port.

The runner who took gold in the 400 meters, Archie Williams, was also African-American, also from California.

He took us out to this beautiful, looked like a country club, where they, the Olympic village, where they had, was landscaped, was beautiful,

and all the buildings were brand new.

In fact,

it later was to become what amounted to a military academy.

And it was set up with the cottage-type barracks, and they had all, every country had its own dining hall.

And since we had one of the largest teams and we had all the goodies, all the foreign athletes wanted to be be our friends immediately.

In addition to that, we had some kind of a card which allowed us to ride any transportation anywhere in Berlin free of charge.

All you had to do was just show it to the conductor and sit out and you could go wherever you wanted to.

Sit down and go anywhere you wanted to.

If you were black in Los Angeles in the 1930s, you couldn't even go to the beach.

We got on the train to go to Berlin.

We arrived in Berlin and there was this mob of young people, a lot of girls.

Voice Jesse, voe is Jesse, voe is Jesse.

Remember that Jesse had set four world records here in the United States that year, so they wanted to see him.

Well, Jesse got off the train and these little girls had scissors and they started snipping off his clothes.

I'm not kidding.

It was wonderful.

Now how did Jesse respond to all that?

Well, Jesse got back on the train as fast as he could.

The Germans were fascinated with the black athletes.

The Nazis were probably as obsessed with the way white Americans treated black people as Americans were with the way Nazis treated the Jews, because America had mastered a problem that the Nazis were desperately trying to solve for themselves.

Remember Putzi, Hitler's Harvard-educated piano-playing PR guy?

He set up Dorothy Thompson's 1931 interview with Hitler, where she concludes that Hitler's eyes have the peculiar shine which often distinguishes geniuses, alcoholics, and hysterics.

After Thomson's article, Hitler refused all interviews with foreign journalists for about a year.

But finally, Putzi convinced Hitler to sit down with Putzi's best friend from Harvard, a radio commentator from Wisconsin named H.

V.

Kaltenborn.

Putzy and Kaltenborn did theater together in college.

Putzy has his friend come to Hitler's chalet in the Bavarian Alps.

It's August.

The views are gorgeous.

Hitler's laundry is flapping on the clothesline in the backyard.

Putzy takes a picture of Hitler and his Harvard buddy standing next to each other on the porch.

Hitler's all in black, looking very stern.

Kaltenborn will later write, He dislikes talking to strangers.

Instead of answering an interviewer's questions, he makes excited speeches, thus seeking to create for himself the atmosphere of the public meeting in which he is at home.

Kaltenborn asks Hitler about the Jews.

For a moment, he bored into me with his clear blue eyes, which are his most attractive feature.

People were always fixated on Hitler's eyes.

You have a Monroe doctrine for America, he roared at me.

We believe in a Monroe doctrine for Germany.

You exclude any would-be immigrants you do not care to admit.

You regulate their number.

You demand that they come up to a certain physical standard.

You insist that they bring in a certain amount of money.

You examine them as to their political opinions.

We demand the same right.

We are concerned about any anti-German elements in our own country, and we demand the right to deal with them as we see fit.

Hitler has never visited America.

He doesn't even speak English.

But here he is holding forth on the fine points of U.S.

immigration law and foreign policy.

as first articulated by James Monroe in his seventh annual message to Congress in December 1823.

There's a project going on within Germany in the 30s to kind of find a legal basis for what they want to do with the Jews, right?

An incredibly naive question would be, why would they bother to find legal basis?

It's not a naive question.

It's a crucial, well, it may be naive, but it's a question crucial for understanding what went on.

Our Yale law professor, James Q.

Whitman, again.

Part of the answer has to do with German culture much more broadly.

Germans do tend to

insist that things be properly legally codified, and that was even true of the Nazis.

In 1932, when Kaltenborn and Hitler meet, the Nazis aren't yet at the stage where they've settled on mass murder as a solution to their Jewish problem.

That's years away.

They're still trying to figure out how to marginalize the Jews in a way that seems acceptable.

The Nazis, it's important to remember, especially in the early years,

had to run a state which was not entirely managed by Nazis.

They had to have the German bureaucracy on their side.

They had to do things that would appeal to

people, most of whom were trained in law, and would expect law to be, to govern what was done by,

through the Nazi program.

So they looked to the U.S., where the Constitution promised its citizens equal protection under the laws, but where the laws made black people second-class citizens.

The U.S.

systematically oppressed a racial class, but the country was still respected around the world.

So how exactly was the U.S.

doing it?

If you were a Nazi in Germany, this seemed like a really important question.

It's like if you were a kid doing card tricks in your bedroom and your parents take you to a full-on magic show in Las Vegas, and you watch the lady get cut in half.

And you turn to your dad and you say, wait, what?

Which brings us back to Herr Krieger, our eager law student from Dusseldorf with his waistcoat and his little round glasses.

Put yourself for a moment in his elegant handmade brogues.

You're young and idealistic.

You are really interested in helping out this grand national project to do the Jewish thing right.

So where do you go for inspiration?

Well, You don't spend a year at Harvard Law School.

The Germans knew all about Harvard.

Putsy went to Harvard.

What could you learn from the brightest legal minds of Massachusetts?

Not so much.

You need to go somewhere where Americans had spent years working through the nitty-gritty of how to get away with marginalizing people.

You need to go to the American South.

Did Herr Krieger consider the University of Alabama Law School?

Possibly.

A logical choice given his agenda.

Or maybe Ole Miss.

In Oxford, Mississippi, they knew a thing or two.

Definitely on the shortlist.

He must have spent many long hours going over the pros and cons of each possible destination until one day, over Schnapps in the Krieger family's elegant townhouse on Rothosverstrasse, right on the Rhine promenade, young Krieger turns to Papa Krieger and says,

Water,

it is to be Fayetteville, Arkansas.

And so it was.

In Fayetteville, he learns from local politicians.

He has long conversations with his law professors.

After a year, he says, Here is too much to master.

I must stay longer in the United States of America.

He moves to DC so he can do more research at the Library of Congress.

Krieger writes up everything he's learned just in time.

He came back to Germany, and it seems that the Justice Ministry in Berlin was looking for somebody who knew about American law.

And somebody said, gee, I know this kid, Krieger.

And he was enlisted.

Yeah.

But what they couldn't figure out is

so so the German legal establishment, as it sort of searches for ways to

think about

their version of a race problem, they must be kind of,

they are generally aware of what's going, obviously, going on in the United States.

But what Krieger is doing is he is

giving them

what he's giving, he's giving them a concrete picture of the range and diversity of strategies, legal strategies that Americans use.

Absolutely, and done in a very sensitive way, a concrete and extensive picture of what's going on

in the United States.

You're perfectly right.

There have been plenty of interest in American race law before that, but the knowledge was kind of scattershot.

This was a much, much more systematic treatment.

I mean, I hate to say it's not a fine book, but it's quite a well-done book.

And what is Krieger's conclusion?

There is much, much more to American race law than anyone back home in Dusseldorf has realized.

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So imagine that there is this guy from Germany who comes over and whatever it is, 33 or 34.

What is that man learning about South?

I think

if he went to small towns and small communities, what he would find would be very, very complex, unexpected relationships that crossed racial lines, also crossed gender lines.

Lisa Lindquist Dorr is a historian at the University of Alabama and an expert on Jim Crow.

I called Dorr because of a fascinating bit of research she did a couple years ago.

She collected every example she could find of accusations of black on white rape in the state of Virginia between 1900 and 1960.

She was interested in what happened to a black man during the high water years of segregation if he was alleged to have sexually assaulted a white woman.

Now, if you remembered to kill a mockingbird, you'd assume that any black man accused of raping a white woman in the South ended up dead.

But that's not what Lisa Lindquistor finds.

She looks at 288 cases.

17 of the accused are killed through extra-legal violence.

They're lynched.

50 are executed by the state.

48 people get sentenced to the maximum prison sentence.

52 get five years or less.

But 121, 42%,

the largest of all categories, are either acquitted, pardoned, or paroled.

Take, for example, a 1931 case involving a black man in Norfolk, Virginia named William Harper.

Harper.

A woman named Dorothy Skaggs, who was married to a sailor, left her home to go to a guitar lesson.

And she later testified in court that while walking along the street, she was struck on the head, dragged into an alley and raped by a black man.

William Harper was arrested.

He was identified.

His trial was very predictable, and he was sentenced to death.

And then the defense revealed new evidence.

and he was given a new trial.

And at the second trial, Harper produced six white witnesses who testified that on the night in question, Dorothy Skaggs was not on her way to a guitar lesson, but was at a roadhouse across state lines in North Carolina, drinking and dancing with a man who was not her husband.

Harper was quickly acquitted, but the case was not over.

Dorothy Skaggs and a white woman who corroborated her story of rape were brought to trial on charges of perjury.

Both were initially convicted and sentenced to five years in prison, but both eventually were granted new trials and subsequently acquitted.

So you almost met.

It's like a mess.

It's like a.

It is right.

For the white men of Virginia, clearly, there are three separate considerations here.

First, there's a black man who might have raped one of our own.

That makes us really unhappy.

But wait, she also cheated on her husband.

That also makes us unhappy.

And then, hold on, should we really make a practice of just out and out believing a woman who says she's been raped?

Because once you start going down that road, I mean, God knows where that ends.

If segregation was,

if the foundation of it was simply white supremacy, it gives white men one card to play.

But what you're describing is they have two cards they can play and they can choose when they play them.

And if it suits their interests, they can either use the male card or the white card.

Right.

Right.

And not only that, they always have the two cards that even women who they claim an assault and they're believed in court and the guy goes to prison.

If they do anything even subsequently, men can continue to play that men card and say, now we don't believe her anymore.

Look what she has done.

She has behaved poorly.

The point is that Jim Crow isn't really systematic, not in Virginia or Arkansas or anywhere else.

It's not some rigid set of rules.

It's a jerry-built contraption with a million different exceptions and contradictions, which allows you to lynch the black guy when you want or go the formal legal route and have him executed, or if the whole thing feels a little too complicated, just blame the accuser.

It is not

so rigid and brutal

that every

instance of misbehavior causes a crackdown.

And that's, in your mind, that's why it survives as long as it does.

Right.

It's flexible and it can incorporate all kinds of relationships across racial, gender, class lines that might otherwise seem to violate the rules.

What is it that allows

the South to construct this kind of flexible, resilient...

I mean, you know, I'm thinking back to our German who comes over to the South.

When our German goes home,

much of what he reports, the Nazis find shocking.

And the thing they find shocking is the very thing you're describing, that they think what they need to have have is a very clear, consistent rule, which they follow to the letter.

And what they can't get over is this idea that it's just kind of discretionary.

It appalls their legal minds.

Oh, I'm sure.

So I was just curious,

how did they get there?

Is it because

their world was so messy that they had to accommodate that messiness?

I suspect so, because whites don't want to lose all the benefits they get from African Americans, whether it's buying their stuff or having them work in their houses or on their farms.

White Southerners very much want to be able to benefit from and profit from a

system based on white supremacy.

And yet to do that, it's going to incorporate all sorts of interactions all the time in their daily lives that are often incidental, very difficult to police.

This is what Heinrich Krieger reads about in the Law Library at the University of Arkansas, and then later at the Library of Congress.

He reads court cases, state constitutions, and criminal codes.

He may well have read about that William Harper case.

It was all over the newspapers.

What's the right word to describe the way he makes sense of what he finds in that year in Fayetteville?

Is it

surprise?

Is it shock?

Yeah, that's a great question.

It's very hard to read him because on the one hand, he shows a certain level of admiration and support for what he sees in the United States.

That is to say, a racial awareness that he detects in the South.

Like, you know, people know we are, we know we are white.

We know that there are racial others.

We have to deal with it.

But he's also strangely disgusted with the way the United States handles it.

I'm talking to the historian Jonathan Wisen, another of the scholars fascinated by Heinrich Krieger's time in the South.

On the one hand, he's approving, and on the other hand, he's surprised by the violence.

Krieger is appalled by lynch mobs, but he's a Nazi.

It's not the racial violence that bothers him.

The thing about lynching that he can't take is that it's so messy and disorganized.

What are the rules?

It's hard to pin him down because he has a whole range of emotions that I think capture the general German view.

You know, the Americans are so violent.

How could they be doing this?

So he's really intrigued by this disconnect between

how close Americans are to kind of acting on their racial impulses, but how badly they are doing it.

And so it's a strange mixture of disgust, surprise, support, dismissal.

It's a fascinating and puzzling read in that regard.

Yeah.

He agrees with America in theory, but disagrees in practice.

Absolutely.

Krieger actually writes an article on that for the George Washington University Law Review about the way the U.S.

handles Native Americans.

And if you asked Krieger to sum up what he concluded in that article, he would have said, Las Manit on Fango.

Don't get me started.

The Olympics are this chance, like this moment where the whole world is put into dialogue in some way with Nazi Germany before it's just painfully obvious what they're going to be.

I'm talking to Ben Nadaf Hafrey, my partner in this series on Hitler's Olympics.

Midway through, Ben and I realized that we weren't all that interested in what happened at the Olympic Games, who won what, and all that.

We were interested in what was going on around the Olympic Games, the contortions the Americans had to go through to justify going to Berlin at all.

And Krieger's time in Arkansas is just a flip side of what we've been exploring all along.

Almost every episode we have is about an encounter between a German and an American.

And

the kind of complicated,

tangled ways in which each party strives to make sense of what happened or make sense of the other.

And

it's a hugely important moment for the U.S.

and Germany because the U.S.

is the ascendant power in the world, and Germany is at a moment in its history when it desperately wants to be the other, right?

The other great superpower.

And I think that's what we're describing here.

Yeah, I think that's true.

And I also, and I think that the broader significance of that to me is the sort sort of implication of the Dorothy Thompson who goes Nazi question, which is that the wrong understanding and the popular understanding of World War II is that the Nazis kind of come out of nowhere and are this singular evil who then must be defeated.

And then good triumphs.

And that's that.

And of course, it's not the case.

I mean, they are profoundly evil, but they're not actually that singular.

And neither is the fascist impulse.

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Hey there, Malcolm Glabo here.

I was just in London, and I spent most of my time doing what I love most there, walking, miles and miles, through Clerkenwell and Covent Garden and Shoreditch, stopping for Espresso, thinking, writing, hanging out in Proofrock Coffee, my favorite coffee shop in the city.

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The meeting is where?

In Berlin?

It's in Berlin.

In Potsdam, actually.

James Whitman.

In the course of his research, he uncovered a transcript of a crucial conference held just outside Berlin in June of 1934.

By that point, the Nazis have seized power and put out a big proposal, the Prussian Memorandum.

It's all about how they want to handle the Jewish question.

And all the country's biggest legal experts are gathering in Potsdam to try and figure out if and how they can translate those ideas into law.

So the radicals were demanding bans on sexual relations between Jews and Aryans.

It's one thing to say that, though, but how do you make that work in practice?

Well, it was a tough question.

You know what?

It remains a tough question now.

The Nazis were having...

understandably, a great deal of difficulty determining who would count biologically as a Jew.

It's It's worth emphasizing that they didn't know anything about genetics, right?

There was a lot of concern that if there was racial mixing between Jews and Aryans, eventually the

awful Jewish blood would come to the surface.

There were others who thought that whatever the Jewish blood was, it would be swamped in any case if there wasn't very much of the mixing.

But nobody really knew.

The scientists who were involved complained that there's absolutely no physiological way of determining who's a Jew.

Yeah, so how do I...

The fundamental problem here is, how do I erect a legal system which seeks to, in some, you know, create a second-class status for Jews when I don't know what a Jew is?

So who's thought about this issue?

Well, of course, the Americans had.

And Heinrich Krieger had just written it up in his recent book, Race Law in the United States.

It would become Krieger's great contribution to to Nazi ideology.

He gave them a concrete understanding of the American way of prejudice, a legal understanding, something you could start from if you were interested in building a whole new system of racism from scratch.

The difficulties that the Nazis, the main difficulty that the Nazis faced in trying to create a new race law was that all of the traditions of European criminal law jurisprudence insisted that you had to abide by a norm of what we call formal equality.

That is, you just speak of the defendant and the state, party the first part, party the second part, but there's no room from their point of view in specifying characteristics of the individuals, including specifying their membership in a particular race.

And that was the rule all through the world, but Americans didn't care.

Then the Nazis had to make sense of all the ways Americans banned interracial marriage and sex.

So there were many, many anti-miscegenation statutes.

And

the anti-miscegenation statutes took a huge variety of views on who counted as a member of whatever race.

The most extreme view, of course, was the notorious one-drop rule.

Among those states that used the one-drop standard, meaning even a single black ancestor made you count as black, was Arkansas.

Maybe that's why Heinrich Krieger ended up in Fayetteville.

You can bet he had many late-night conversations about it in in some Fayetteville dive bar.

In states where there was no one-drop rule, well, there was just a very unteutonic patchwork of laws.

But the others just came up with a huge variety of,

as the Nazis said, politically determined judgments about who was going to count.

What's more, and very interestingly, to the radical Nazis, the question was effectively left to a kind of judicial discretion.

Somebody appears in court and the question is, does everybody regard this person as

black or

does this person kind of look that way to me?

And that seemed extremely appealing to the radical Nazis.

Just cut the whole knot by making a political decision on the spot.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So they're kind of liberated by

American indifference to legal formalities on this question.

As many Europeans who come to study in this country still are.

Yeah.

Think about all the crucial meetings that led to the American decision to send athletes to the Games.

Charles Sherroll goes to Vienna and convinces the German delegation to commit, in principle, to including Jews on their team.

Then, when it seems like the Germans might not be keeping their word, Avery Brundage goes over to visit them.

and the Nazis convince him that what they're doing to Jewish athletes is no big deal.

Then Sheryl goes back to see the Nazis a second time and brokers the grand bargain.

Just put this half-Jewish fencer, Helene Mayer, on your Olympic team and everything will be fine.

Jesse Owens decides to go to the games and gets hugged on the field by his German competitor, Lutz Long, and builds a myth out of it.

We understand what is motivating all of them.

Grundage wants a seat on the International Olympic Committee.

Cheryl is surfing the endless waves of his own ego.

Jesse Owens is trying to justify his decision to go to the games.

But what of the Nazis on the other side of the table?

The easiest answer is that they're con men.

They played the Americans' first song.

They meet Cheryl and Brundage and say to themselves, oh my god, these guys are children, puppets.

But I don't think that's right.

The Nazis aren't rolling their eyes at the Americans.

They're learning from them.

The Germans look at Jesse Owens and Jimmy Laval and Archie Williams and all the other black athletes and they say, they came.

After all you put them through.

You get to bask in the glory of their success without having to treat them like human beings.

So this whole audacious project we're launching where we want to take a portion of our population and treat them like second-class citizens and still also win the respect of the world, be crowned a superpower.

Maybe it's possible.

Maybe we don't even need some kind of principled justification, some set of reasoned-out laws.

Maybe we can just make it up as we go along.

The modern Olympics were created to bring cultures together to promote international understanding, and Berlin may be the platonic ideal of that because it's where the Germans learn to think like Americans.

Although there were some limits.

These Germans, even quite serious Nazis, were

quite alarmed to learn about the one-drop rule.

They were indeed,

as they described it as inhumane.

How can you possibly visit all this discrimination on someone who just somewhere way back in the ancestry

had some, you know, little bit of a drop of Jewish blood?

But I mean, this is like this, one of those insane moments where I'm just curious, when you, how did you, when you were reading this and you come across those moments where even the Nazis are,

you know,

are taken aback by what's going on, what's your reaction?

My reaction was, well, good Lord.

I mean, who would have imagined that there was American racism that went too far for Nazis?

And where do you suppose Heinrich Krieger goes after he's done with his mission to the American South?

South Africa.

to study apartheid.

Heinrich Krieger reminds us that you can't tell the story of the 1936 Olympics by focusing just on the 1936 Olympics.

That's what Ben and I started to understand: you have to broaden the lens.

And in our next episode, we turn the clock back to 1932 and ask the same questions we've been asking of Berlin about the games that came before Berlin.

A little thought experiment that will take us to Los Angeles for a drive down Olympic Boulevard.

Revisionist History is produced by Ben Nadaf Hafri, Tali Emlin, and Nina Bird Lawrence.

Our editor is Sarah Nix.

Fact-checking by Arthur Gompertz and J.L.

Goldfein.

Original scoring by Louis Guerra, mastering by Sarah Bruguer and Jake Korski.

Engineering by Nina Bird Lawrence.

Our executive producer is Jacob Smith.

Special thanks to Karen Shikurji, Laura Walker, and Sabina Schmidt.

I'm Malcolm Gladwell.

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