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I'm Malcolm Gladwell, and I'd like to take a moment to talk about an amazing new podcast I'm hosting called Medal of Honor.
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You'll be able to binge the rest of the season on August 1st with that same subscription. Sign up for Pushkin Plus on Apple Podcasts or by visiting pushkin.fm slash plus. Now, on to the episode. My name is Margaret Lambert. I was born in
A name that I hate, Gretel. It's too Teutonic. I hate that name. And Gretel Bergman. And I was born April 12, 1914, in a very small town in the south of Germany. And it was a great life. In 1996, Margaret Lambert sat down for an interview with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. She was 82 years old. She looked at least 15 years younger.
Being an Olympic-level athlete will do that to you. She started out talking about her childhood in a little German town called Laupheim. There was this little club in that town. You just went there. I could go there unescorted because it was close to my house. And I was happy as a lark. What did you like about sports? I just loved it.
And you were good at it? And I was good at it. There was nothing different at that stage about being a Jewish athlete? None whatsoever. By the 1930s, Lambert's sport of choice was the high jump, one of the more graceful Olympic sports. You've probably seen it. It's the one where the jumper runs up to an impossibly high bar and then rises effortlessly above it. I had great success in it.
thanks to my long legs and my big feet, I suppose. In 1933, the year Hitler came to power, she jumped a little higher than one and a half meters. That's like four feet and nine inches. It was one of the highest jumps in the country. She would be a shoe-in for the German Olympic team. Except... Once Hitler became chancellor, you started to worry a little bit, you know. But everybody thought this is going to blow over. He's not going to last.
But it soon became very clear that this was not going to blow over. Four days after becoming chancellor, Hitler was already censoring the press. Things developed quickly from there. And then later that year, Lambert got a letter from her sports club. You are no longer welcome here because you're Jewish.
Heil Hitler. And that was the end of that. So they just threw me out of the club and everybody commiserated, you know, what are we going to do? What's going to happen here? And it was a horrible life. But there was still one way that Margaret Lambert might have a chance to compete at the 1936 Olympic Games. A chance that had a lot to do with one man, Avery Brundage.
Welcome to Revisionist History, my show about things overlooked and misunderstood. I'm Malcolm Gladwell. Today on the show, Ben-Nadav Hafri and I are back with Avery Brundage, the apostle of Olympia, the kingpin of cognitive dissonance, the man who made the modern Olympic Games happen.
Brundage believed, above all, in the values of the Olympic religion. Amateurism, total equality of opportunity, the only true meritocracy. Brundage wanted to become an Olympic official. And by 1934, he'd almost done it. He was up for a seat on the International Olympic Committee, something he must have wanted more than anything else. And then Adolf Hitler got in the way.
So Avery Brundage had to make a choice to resolve the dissonance of whether his pure games could be held in an impure place. Today on the show, Avery Brundage's very consequential resolution.
Things started changing for Margaret Lambert and the rest of Germany's Jewish population as soon as Hitler came to power. You were banned from all public places, no theaters, no restaurants, no swimming pools. You couldn't go anyplace and you could not associate with non-Jewish people. Fitness was really important to the Nazi project.
So important that eventually, in the elite Adolf Hitler schools, students would spend about as much and sometimes even more time playing sports than they did on academics. Sports had a military function. If Germany wanted to go to war again, a strong, healthy population was going to be really important. Strength also matters if you're trying to prove you're the master race. So does emphasizing the weakness of outsiders, groups you could make weak in part by denying them access to the same training the Aryans had.
But sports for me, of course, was the thing I wanted the most. Next to the Jewish school, there was a yard and we tried to straighten that out, but we had to fight the teachers' chickens and they used that same place for their activities and it was not very appetizing, so we gave up on that pretty fast.
While Margaret Lambert was chasing chickens around a bumpy field, the Nazis were realizing just how badly they wanted the Olympics. For money and propaganda power, sure, but also, I think, for a much stranger reason. They worshipped the ancient Greeks. When Goebbels, Hitler's famed Nazi minister of propaganda, goes to Sparta in the 1930s, he says that to him, it was just as if he were in a German city.
It's why a leading brand of German sunscreen was called Spartacrem. As the scholar Helen Rosch writes, Nazi fascism was seeking the rebirth of a past so mythic and so ancient that it predates the nation entirely. So what better way to prove your connection to that mythic and ancient past than to host the Olympic Games?
Adolf Hitler tried to use these Olympics as his propaganda vehicle to show the world how powerful he was, to show the world how unified Germany was. And I think he tried to scare the world into not standing up against him somehow. And he wanted, of course, the United States and all the big nations to be there.
So the crucial question for our purposes is, well, hindsight's 20-20. How much of all this could Avery Brundage and the IOC have really known in 1933? The answer is, not everything, but enough. The news parade goes forward.
I mean, this is a national radio broadcast in the U.S. from March 1933. That's just two months after Hitler became chancellor. "Atrocities are being enacted daily in Germany by the Nazi storm troops of Hitler. Numerous Jewish citizens have been brutally tortured. Horrified citizens in America look on in astonishment as ruthless adult Hitler continues a savage campaign of anti-Semitic brutality."
That summer, a New York Times journalist read a report on Germany put out by the American Jewish Committee and wrote, It is impossible to read it without carrying away the conviction that the Nazi leaders are guilty of something more than employing violence and terror.
Meanwhile, the consul general for the United States in Berlin was writing back home to the State Department about how Germans were pushing an anti-Jewish sport agenda, how Berlin wasn't safe, and how even if the Nazis had told Charles Sherrill they'd give the Jews equal opportunity, they really weren't doing that. A movement for the U.S. to boycott the 36 Olympics began to gather momentum. Other countries were thinking about boycotting, too.
But by then, Avery Brundage was the president of the U.S. Olympic Committee. And he'd grown fond of saying things like this. All the participants are equal before the starter's pistol and there are no social distinctions or family distinctions.
That same year, he wrote to a colleague that "the very foundation of the modern Olympic revival will be undermined if individual countries are allowed to restrict participation by reason of class, creed, or race." The very foundation. So by this logic, Margaret Lambert, that German-Jewish highjumper, should have been Avery Brundage's ideal athlete, right? Unpaid, highly skilled, and obsessed with sport.
If someone like her wasn't going to get a fair shot at the Nazi Olympics, then surely Avery Brundage would have to try and stop the Nazi Olympics. But first, he had to figure out if the rumors about Germany were true. We'll be right back. This show is sponsored by BetterHelp.
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Stop comparing and start focusing with BetterHelp. Visit betterhelp.com slash Gladwell today to get 10% off your first month. That's betterhelp, H-E-L-P dot com slash Gladwell. I'm Malcolm Gladwell, and I'd like to take a moment to talk to you about an amazing new podcast I'm hosting called Medal of Honor.
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with the statement that the Olympic movement today is the most important social force in the world. The word Olympic is the magic word. The year after Hitler came to power, Avery Brundage had almost made it to the International Olympic Committee. His ticket back to the most rarefied part of Olympia, where he could rub shoulders with all the princes and aristocrats in that particular gentleman's club. And this is something I think Avery Brundage really wanted.
Why does he want to hang out with these kind of potses? Malcolm and I, once again, psychoanalyzing Avery Brundage, talking about a letter he wrote to the IOC. There's one moment that's quite telling in one of these when he's writing to Ed Strum, one of the members of the IOC. And you see his typewritten note, anything may happen in these perilous days. And then he crosses out perilous and he handwrites in parlous.
And there's a kind of like, Avery Brundage is not saying the word parlous. Like he's second guessing his own vocabulary to fit in with these guys. Yeah. And that is the world of the IOC, right? The IOC is a
fundamentally 19th century institution. It's just one count and barren after another, kind of living out the glory days of their... And then Brundage comes along and he is an entirely different animal. He's like, yes, I may have done all these things that you guys could never even dream of. I built these buildings. I made my own fortune. I trained in a ditch until I was good enough to compete in the Olympics. But I still think princes rock.
And I'll go on the record as saying as much. What kind of a world is this when it's come to the point where being a prince is a handicap? I ask you. It's very Groucho Marx. I don't want to belong to a club that would have me as a member, isn't it? But like he knows that the only way he's going to get in that club is if he, as the president of the American Olympic Committee, brings the Americans to the games. So why is that?
So he is at that point the most powerful man in amateur sport in America. So he really like, he holds the cards and the United States is both like,
the most significant participant in the Olympics. They're going to bring a huge team. There's going to be a medals race between them and the Germans that will be extremely dramatic and make for really good viewing. But also they have a lot of moral authority. And if the United States abstains from the Olympics, it majorly undermines the Olympic project. Has it been made explicit that
to Brundage that his future in the IOC is contingent on him bringing Americans to Berlin? I haven't seen anything that states it explicitly, but I think it is very clear that the members of the IOC want the Olympics to happen. They want them to happen in Germany. But as Americans learn more about what the Nazis were up to, as the last traces of Weimar democracy vanished, the pressure in the U.S. to boycott the Games got really intense.
And Avery Brundage was right in the middle of it. Publicly, he was pro-going to the games, but he expressed at least some concern about what was happening in Germany. And yet, in his archives, I found private letters to the IOC from as early as 1933. And in them, he frames the boycott campaign as a Jewish plot to sabotage the Olympics. And from the beginning, he knew what crowd he was playing to.
The president of the International Committee, Count Henri de Bayer-Latour, wrote to Avery Brundage saying they should work together hand in hand while we are handling this difficult question. I am not personally fond of Jews and of the Jewish influence, but I will not have them molested.
So that's a clue. But then there's also the matter of Brundage's lengthy correspondence with Siegfried Edström. Edström was sort of like the Swedish Avery Brundage, an engineer who'd made good. He was a member of the IOC. The two were friends. He's the one who wrote the letter we talked about in the last episode, suggesting that he nominate Brundage for a seat on the IOC. And Brundage, of course, responded enthusiastically. But...
How did he begin that letter accepting this most precious of all prizes? He didn't lead with his enthusiasm. Instead, he started by complaining about the boycotts.
Undoubtedly, the International Olympic Committee will be swamped with protests from Jews and Jewish organizations from many different countries. I assume that the IOC will take the same stand as the American Olympic Committee will. To it, that it is concerned with athletic affairs only, and that it will not be drawn into political, religious, sociological, or racial controversies of any kind. Then he said how much he'd like to be on the IOC.
Inside, deep inside that kind of engineer, self-made man's brain is this romantic streak. I want to be part of this grand, you know, sporting amateur enterprise. And it's beautiful and it speaks to me. And it's, you know, it's this pure thing in an impure world. I really do think that what happens to him in 1912 at the Olympics, that failure remains with him forever.
But the concerns weren't going away. Hitler had already made himself a dictator. Germany was rearming. And war was once again on the horizon in Europe.
So the American Olympic Committee decided they needed to send someone to Berlin to figure out for themselves what was going on. They chose, of course, Avery Brundage. On September 12th, 1934, two days after the Nuremberg Rally that year, Avery Brundage arrived in eastern Germany. His plan was to meet with Jewish sports officials to suss out just how bad things had actually gotten. There was, however, one problem. He didn't speak German.
So he did this whole trip with Nazi interpreters, including the head of all Nazi sport, the Reichsportführer Hans von Schamer und Austin. Von Schamer und Austin was a rather severe-looking Nazi official, a small man with thinning-slicked hair and a paralyzed right hand.
He was meant to assure Avery Brundage that the Nazis weren't discriminating against Jewish athletes, which maybe would have been easier had all the sports clubs in Nazi Germany not recently received a copy of a book called The Spirit of Sport in the National Socialist Ideology, which included passages like this.
There is no room in our German land for Jewish sports leaders and their friends infested with the Talmud. For pacifists, political Catholics, pan-Europeans, and the rest. They are worse than cholera and syphilis. Much worse than famine, drought, and poison gas. Do we want them in the Olympic Games in Germany? Yes, we must have them. We think they are important for international reasons. There could not be better propaganda for Germany.
What does it mean? It means they would pretend that Jews could be allowed at the Games in hopes that it would help the Nazis hoodwink the world about how they were actually treating the Jews. You'd think that Avery Brundage, champion of Olympic ideals like no politics in sport, would hate to see the Olympics used that way. Instead, here's our second warning sign about this trip. Brundage quickly saw von Schammer and Austin as a friend.
He spent six days exploring Germany with his various Nazi counterparts. I have to imagine that he also visited the Reichsportfeld, the site of the giant new stadium being built for the games. Brundage knew construction. After all, it was his business. And this stadium would be epic. Big enough to fit more than 100,000 people. This is what I can't get over. Every one of the characters we've met so far
have a meeting with the Nazis. It's like Dorothy Thompson goes, you know, Charles Sherrill has this big meeting with Hitler. Each makes this pilgrimage to the promised land, right? We don't know in 34 exactly what Brundage is thinking.
He's playing his cards pretty close to his chest. Yeah. We actually, not a lot is known about these meetings, but we did find an archival account from a dentist and Jewish sport official who was present at one of these meetings at the Hotel Kaiserhof in 1934. We had it translated. Kaiserhof, I would point out, the same hotel where Dorothy Thompson interviewed Adolf Hitler.
Oh man, I missed that. This is where it's all happening in Berlin. When you have to do your Nazi meet and greets, you go to the Kaiserhof. Point is, this was not friendly territory for the Jewish sports officials. The Hotel Kaiserhof was a grand luxury hotel on Wilhelmplatz, directly opposite the Chancellor's office. Remember, Hitler once had an office there. There were marble floors, a dining room in a three-story glass-roofed atrium.
So what do we know about what happens at the meeting?
So he begins to ask them a series of questions about Jewish participation in sport. So he asks, are Jewish boys allowed to play sport in large numbers? And the Reich Sportfuhrer says, yeah, absolutely. And the Jewish leaders have to sit there and nod.
But then they say, they make a caveat. They're like, well, you know, maybe they can play in large numbers, but there's a problem. We don't actually have any municipal sports fields. And Brundage immediately dismisses this and says, well, in the US, we don't have municipal sports fields either. We just have our own fields for each athletic association.
If you imagine this from the perspective of the Jewish sports leaders, it's a high wire act. Here, sitting before them, is Brundage, the man best positioned to put pressure on the Nazis, who are also seated at the table. But the Jewish sports leaders have no sense, really, of Brundage's position on all this. How could they? So what do they do? They have to try and read between the lines of every question he's asking.
Then he asks, "Can Jews join the associations?" They say, "Yes, but only if they're Jewish associations." And he's like, "Well, in my club back in Chicago, we don't allow Jews either." Next question.
They say like, oh, well, you know, we have our own sports fields, but they keep getting closed down because the Nazi party is shutting down our sports fields. They're breaking into our games. They're beating people up. And Brundage, according to this account of the meeting, which I have to believe is reliable, just seems kind of bored by this and doesn't ask follow-up questions about this report. What this dentist writes of Brundage is that it was clear that Brundage wanted to save the Olympics in Berlin. Um...
And there's one sort of glimmer of hope towards the end where Brundage asks if a Jewish athlete runs 100 meters in 10.3 seconds.
So whitewash.
Yeah, it's a whitewash. And Brundage accepts this and moves on from the meeting and declares that there's no problem. Soon after that meeting, Avery Brundage heads back to the United States with his verdict. All good. So the day after he gets back, the American Olympic Committee meets and votes unanimously to go to Berlin. Brundage stuck to his guns. Participation in these games must not be construed
to be an endorsement of the policies or practices of the Nazi government. Measures have been adopted to ensure that there will be no violation of the fundamental principles of fair play and good sportsmanship or the Olympic standards of freedom and equality to all. Later, Margaret Lambert, the Jewish Highmember, had this to say about Avery Brundage's trip. He just left himself being
lulled into some false security by these Nazis saying everything is fine. We're doing everything we said we would do. And he came back to the United States and said everything is fabulous over there and we'll be going. We'll be right back. I'm Malcolm Gladwell, and I'd like to take a moment to talk to you about an amazing new podcast I'm hosting called Medal of Honor.
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The most charitable interpretation is basically what Margaret Lambert, the high jumper, said. He let himself be lulled into some false security. Picture Brundage, the hoodwinked idealist, who maybe just believed so firmly that the Olympics were a world apart from the universe of politics and money that it didn't matter if they were held in Nazi Germany. But another way to understand what he did is to consider that his visit to Germany and his time with the Nazis...
it may all have seemed a little familiar to him. Remember Dorothy Thompson's 1941 essay, Who Goes Nazi? The first time we read it, we recognized Charles Sherrill as her Mr. B. But Avery Brundage is the perfect incarnation of Thompson's Mr. C. Do you have in front of you her description of his kind of fascist? Here we go. Mr. C is a brilliant and embittered intellectual. He was a poor white trash southern boy, or in our case,
Midwestern boy, a scholarship student at two universities where he took all the scholastic honors, but was never invited to join a fraternity. He has always moved among important people and always been socially on the periphery. His colleagues have admired his brains and exploited them, but they have seldom invited him or his wife to dinner. He is a snob loathing his own snobbery. That's Brundage. He despises the men about him. He despises, for instance, Mr. B.,
Because he knows what he has had to achieve by relentless work, men like Bee have won by knowing the right people. But his contempt is inextricably mingled with envy. Even more than he hates the class into which he has insecurely risen, does he hate the people from whom he came. He hates his mother and his father for being his parents. He loathes everything that reminds him of his origins and his humiliations. He is bitterly anti-Semitic because the social insecurity of the Jews reminds him of his own psychological insecurity."
That's him.
That is him. And this is the key part. Quote, but Mr. C is not a born Nazi. He is the product of a democracy hypocritically preaching social equality and practicing a carelessly brutal snobbery. Avery Brundage may have thought he had found himself in Stockholm in 1912 at the Olympics, but I think he really found himself in 1934 at the Kaiserhof Hotel.
Hundreds of thousands of people protested the decision to go to the Games. Avery Brundage didn't care. He became even more convinced that the whole boycott was just a Jewish plot to use the Olympics for their own political purposes. He kept a file of anti-Semitic propaganda. It's labeled in his archives, "Jewish Problem." And really, it's not that surprising.
Because we know now from reading his letters that while he was questioning Jewish sports leaders in front of the Nazis at the Kaiserhof, Avery Brundage knew that he was also being assessed by Siegfried Edstrom, the IOC official sitting in the room with him, who had, earlier that year, sent this note to Brundage: "The Nazis' opposition to the influence of Jews can only be understood if you live over in Germany.
In some of the more important trades, the Jews governed the majority and stopped all others from coming in. In the hospitals, most of the doctors were Jews, and the Jews had preference. In the law courts, it was the same. Many of these Jews were of Polish or Russian origin, with minds entirely different from the Western mind. An alteration of these conditions were absolutely necessary if Germany should remain a white nation.
The only objection I have is that they made the alteration so rashly and thereby caused a great deal of opposition. I am not an anti-Semite myself. On the contrary, some of my best friends are Jews. But I try to look upon the question from both sides. That is why I have written this letter to you. It was like Avery Brundage had been handed a script.
A year after that trip, Brundage wrote his own letter to the president of the IOC. "The picture of conditions in Germany obtained from reading our newspapers is entirely different from that gained by an inspection of the country. The great Jewish merchant advertisers may have something to do with this. The public mind has been poisoned against Germany, and highly organized minorities are extremely effective on questions which are decided by popular vote." Nobody fooled Avery Brundage.
Avery Brundage knew exactly what he was doing. He'd gone Nazi. Margaret Lambert, the high jumper, had been contacted again by the Nazis a few months before Brundage's visit.
According to that interview she did with the Holocaust Museum, the Nazis had begun threatening her family, trying to force her to try out for the Games so they could show how open they were to having Jews on the team. To compete in the Olympic Games is a thrill of a lifetime. And it doesn't happen to everybody. On the other hand, I was so afraid. Supposing I am allowed to compete. Supposing I win and I was competing.
convinced that I would win a medal and possibly the gold. Supposing I do this, what do I do? I'm going to stand on that podium and say, "Heil Hitler," like all the others? And this to do for a Jewish girl would never do. I was scared stiff.
And this was going around in my head day and night, day and night, day and night. What's going to happen? Am I going to compete? Am I not going to compete? How do I conduct myself if I do compete? I was so, so torn apart about it. I didn't know what to do.
The Nazis put Margaret Lambert, who was then named Gretel Bergman, on the provisional Olympic team, trying out for the Games. Von Schamer und Austin crowed about this in a quite unconvincing letter to Charles Sherrill. You will find from this that we work entirely in the spirit of the Olympic statutes. As before, Ms. Bergman is being treated like all Olympic candidates, in spite of being a Jewess. In spite of being a Jewess pretty much covers it.
The invitation was nonsense, but the IOC knew that. She had poor facilities to train in. I was still a Jew. I was not allowed to use any of this. But you could frame it as a kind of classic Olympic story, right? Like poor young Avery Brundage practicing with his own discus in an abandoned lot. And Lambert didn't even have anybody to compete against to make her sharper. You don't have any competition. You have to only fight yourself. She made the Nazis into her opponent.
She pushed herself to beat an idea that was so much bigger than her. And at a meet just before the games, it worked. But it made me better because I was so full of rage. The madder I got, the better I jumped. But I was so mad...
that I equaled the German record. I must have cleared it by 15 inches at the time. She left that meet and went home, waiting to hear whether she'd made the team and wondering what would happen if she had. I looked for the mail every day, what's going to happen, you know, and I was really scared. Are they going to break my leg? What are they going to do to eliminate me? But it was very simple. One day a letter came
And it said, in view of the fact that you have been doing very poorly lately, we did not select you for the Olympic team. Heil Hitler. And that was the end of it. To be clear, Margaret Lambert had not been doing poorly. The Nazis were just keeping her off the team. I mean, just think about how it would have looked to have a Jewish woman win gold at the Nazi Olympics. And I sat, I remember me sitting outside in the stoop.
And I got this letter, and I must have used every profanity I knew. And I knew a lot of them. I think that was the first time I really realized that my candidacy as an Olympic athlete was really all a sham. It was just something that the Germans did to fool the whole world. Of course, Avery Brundage hadn't needed fooling.
I do believe that he loved the idea of the Olympics. Amateurism and pure competition. Using sports to prove your worth. A kind of utopia protected from the corruption of the real world. But Margaret Lambert should have been his reality check. If someone like her couldn't win in Nazi Germany, that should have made him sit up and pay attention. Instead, in that room at the Kaiserhof Hotel, when the worst had come out, he just seemed bored.
It's that indifference that got him his seat on the International Olympic Committee, just a month before the Berlin Games. He took it from the only IOC member who'd resisted having the Games in Nazi Germany, who'd written in his last months on the IOC, "If our committee permits the Games to be held in Nazi Germany, there will be nothing left to distinguish it from the Nazi ideal." He was forced to resign.
On August 1st, 1936, the Olympic torch was carried by relay for the first time ever, from Olympia in Greece all the way to the Reichsportfeld in Berlin. When it got to the stadium, Avery Brundage was in the audience. The Olympic bell, inscribed with the words, I call the youth of the world, rang out. Meanwhile, Margaret Lambert was applying for a visa that would allow her to leave Germany. She would never again live in her home country. Brundage had what he always wanted.
A seat in the ruling class of his perfect Olympia. Just in time to watch Adolf Hitler give the opening speech at the Olympic Games. I hereby announce the opening speech of Adolf Hitler.
Revisionist History is produced by me, Ben Natafafri, Tali Emlin, and Nina Bird-Lawrence. Our editor is Sarah Nix. Fact-checking by Arthur Gompertz and J.L. Goldfein. Original scoring by Luis Guerra. Mastering by Flan Williams, Sarah Begir, and Jake Gorski. Engineering by Nina Bird-Lawrence. Our executive producer is Jacob Smith.
Special thanks on this episode to Karen Shikurji, to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and to Alexander Wells for his translation of the Kaiserhof meeting. I'm Ben out of Haffrey.
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