The Berlin Olympiad was one of the Nazis' greatest propaganda victories. Visitors and journalists were impressed by Germany's order, discipline, and might. It even seemed that the Jews had vastly overstated their suffering. Even the president of the United States was misled. In a conversation with the president of the World Jewish Congress, Stephen Wise, Roosevelt said that, according to two witnesses who had been in Germany, the synagogues were full and there seemed nothing especially grim about the situation at that time. Indeed, the Nazis made every effort to portray Germany as a respectable member of the community of nations and to soft-pedal the persecution of Jews. In the build-up to the Winter Games, anti-Jewish signs were removed from main streets and overt anti-Jewish activity was restrained. In response to pressure from foreign Olympic delegations, several Mischlinge and one full-blooded Jew, the ice-hockey player Rudi Ball, were placed on the German team.
In the United States, the question of participating in the Olympics became a matter of public debate. On October 22, 1935, General Charles Sherrill, a ranking American representative on the International Olympic Committee, wrote the following in the The New York Times:
'There is grave danger in this Olympic agitation. Consider the effect on several hundred-thousand youngsters training for this contest throughout the United States, if the boycott movement gets so far that they suddenly are confronted with the fact that somebody is trying to defeat their ambition to get to Berlin and compete in the Olympic Games. We are almost certain to have a wave of Anti-Semitism among those who never before gave it a thought, and who may consider that about 5,000,000 Jews in this country are using the athletes representing 120,000,000 Americans to work out something to help the German Jews.... This Anti-Semitism resulting here might last for years.'
In response to Sherrill's remarks, the Committee on Fair Play in Sport made the following statement in the New York Times of October 23, 1935:
'He has gratuitously attempted to make the Olympic Games a purely Jewish issue. The issue is not Jewry against Germany, but fair play. It has been denied not only Jewish athletes in Germany, but also to Catholic and Protestant sport clubs, which do not accept Nazi doctrines of conscience. General Sherrill's attitude that the Jews should not stir up too much row lest they invite suppression in this country, as well as in Germany, marks him as an unconscious Anti-Semite, even conceding that he sincerely believes he is a friend of the Jews.'
The Germans, in turn, considered sports one of the arenas in which they should wage a struggle to justify their doctrines. For example, Goebbels wrote in his diary on June 20, shortly before the games began, about the victory of the German boxer Max Schmeling over the American Joe Louis in the heavyweight championships: 'Schmeling fought and won for Germany. The white trounced the black, and the white was a German.' However, Goebbels's remarks on the first day of the games were less jubilant: 'We Germans won a gold medal and the Americans won three, two of them by blacks. White humankind should be ashamed. But for what does that count there, in that uncultured country?'
The person who most angered the Germans was the black runner Jesse Owens, who won four gold medals, set several world records, and earned the following half-enraged, half-gloating headline in the The New York Times: "Hitler Ignores Black Medallist."
