Travellers in the Third Reich: The Rise of Fascism Through the Eyes of Everyday People

by Julia Boyd

There were more surprises in store. Herman Goldberg, a Jewish baseball player from Brooklyn, wanted to know what lay beyond a certain door in his Olympic village quarters. He opened it to find another door and behind that a chain. Unloosing the chain he went down to the basement where he found himself in a huge cavernous area built of reinforced concrete, fifteen inches thick. ‘I didn’t know what it was for but I sure found out … Panzer tanks.’ Then a caretaker appeared shouting, ‘Raus raus raus, get out of there, get out of there.’15 Wildman, equally inquisitive, wanted to know more about the gliders he saw everywhere. ‘From what we understood, they’d just have to yank the front nosepiece off, hook a motor on it and turn it into a fighter plane.’ The same went for the buses that ferried them between the Olympic village and Berlin. Wildman noticed brackets round the top of the bus. After persistently asking the bus driver what they were for, he eventually got the answer – ‘Well that’s where the machine guns go.’ It was a shock to realise that an ordinary-looking bus could within minutes be transformed into an armoured vehicle.16 Such sinister discoveries, coupled with the fact that, when the Americans travelled to and from Berlin, they would often see young men crawling on their bellies through the woods with rifles and full packs, gave gymnast Kenneth Griffin ‘a sort of eerie feeling that Germany really was preparing for war’.