Berlin

Berlin is the destination toward which the Washington Huskies rowing team’s ambitions gather, but it is also the carefully prepared stage of the 1936 Summer Olympics: a city whose monumental sports grounds and polished public welcome served a political performance. The book sets the crew’s hard-won passage to Berlin against the regime’s effort to make the city appear modern, hospitable, and powerful, while later returns to the landscape reveal what that performance concealed.

The Olympic site and the city

In October 1933, Adolf Hitler and architect Werner March visited the Olympic site on elevated ground west of central Berlin. Grunewald Forest lay to the west; to the east, the city’s church spires and rooflines rose above autumn-colored trees. The existing racetrack constrained expansion of the old stadium. Hitler demanded its removal and called for a much larger stadium, capable of holding at least 100,000 people, surrounded by a unified sports complex, the Reichssportfeld. The plan was not merely to accommodate competitions: the grounds were conceived as a public testament to German ingenuity, cultural superiority, and growing power.

The transformation made the site a distinct landscape within Berlin. By spring 1935 the old Olympic stadium was being demolished, and March’s plans covered a complex of more than 325 acres. During the summer, more than 500 companies contracted by the Nazi state worked to prepare it for the games. Hitler ordered that nearly all the work be done by hand, including tasks machines could have performed more efficiently. The labor force was restricted to nonunion workers of German citizenship and Aryan ancestry. Thus, the construction that advertised national achievement also embodied the regime’s political and racial conditions for participation.

West of the stadium, workers leveled the Maifeld, a vast assembly ground, and raised a limestone bell tower more than 248 feet high. Its bell bore a slogan summoning the world’s youth. The site’s scale and symbolism joined sporting venues to mass ceremony: the complex was designed not only for athletes and spectators, but for the display of an ordered national community. Nearly a decade later, in the final days of the Third Reich, the tower and its surrounding stonework would belong to a radically different scene, as very young members of the Hitler Youth defended Berlin against advancing Russian forces. The future conflict shadowed the monumental promise built into the grounds.

A city prepared for display

As the 1936 games approached, Nazi leaders treated Berlin as a setting whose appearance could be managed. Public signs barring Jews from facilities were taken down and stored for later use, while an antisemitic newspaper was temporarily removed from newsstands. The measures were part of a broader effort to hide persecution from foreign visitors and present Germany as clean, efficient, cultivated, and welcoming. The city’s apparent openness was therefore not evidence that the regime had abandoned its exclusions; it was an orchestrated surface, maintained for the duration of international attention.

The contrast between construction and presentation is central to Berlin’s role in the narrative. The new sports grounds made power visible through size, architecture, and ceremony; the temporary removal of hostile public signs made state persecution less visible. Both depended on planning. In one case, buildings and assembly spaces were enlarged to impress a watching world. In the other, evidence of exclusion was cleared from the streets so that visitors would encounter a more acceptable image of the country. Berlin becomes not simply the host city, but a political stage on which what could be seen—and what had been hidden—was deliberately arranged.

The crew’s destination

For the Washington rowers, Berlin first existed as an objective that had to be earned. Al Ulbrickson’s Olympic ambition emerged as the crew began its new season: he privately committed himself to winning gold, then told reporters that his oarsmen would keep the Olympic trials in mind from the start of fall training. He acknowledged the difficulty of the challenge, particularly California’s advantage, but made the attempt public. The prospect of reaching Berlin linked an athletic goal to the crew’s selection, its training, and the financial means to remain in school.

That ambition became a collective undertaking. After Washington’s crews were celebrated at a public gathering, Ulbrickson told the crowd that the path ran through victory at Poughkeepsie and onward to Berlin. The Olympic destination also exposed the limits of the athletes’ resources. At Princeton, the rowers learned that Olympic organizers lacked money to send the winning crew overseas. These were working-class athletes, unable to cover their own passage. Donations arrived from businesses, local communities, and the rowers’ hometowns: $75 came from Sequim for Joe Rantz, while the first day of a public fundraising drive brought in $1,523 through the sale of fifty-cent tags. A $5,000 certified check followed from the Seattle Chamber of Commerce. Berlin was therefore reached not only through rowing, but through a public effort to pay for the journey.

Arrival, ceremony, and aftermath

On August 1, the American athletes waited in formation on the Maifeld for Adolf Hitler and the opening of the Eleventh Olympiad. The ceremony’s immense scale reflected the regime’s investment in propaganda, publicity, and pageantry. On their arrival in Berlin, the Americans had already encountered the city’s staged welcome: at Lehrter Station, crowds packed the reception area as the athletes formed columns and marched past a black locomotive marked with swastikas. The welcome made the visitors conspicuous participants in the spectacle, even as it presented the city as hospitable and orderly.

The American rowers spent time in Köpenick and Grünau, where they explored streets, shops, and quieter corners of the area around the rowing venue. The towns seemed to them pleasant and peaceful, comparable to places at home. That impression belonged to the summer’s carefully managed public face; it sat beside the evidence that the city’s openness was selective and politically staged. The difference between what visitors experienced and what the regime concealed gives the Berlin episodes their uneasy double perspective.

After the Olympic competition, the Americans received their gold medals at the Reichssportfeld. Bobby Moch, the shortest member of the crew, stepped onto the highest podium platform, and the medal ceremony placed the American, German, and Italian crews alongside one another. The Washington athletes then prepared their shell for shipment home. In New York, Joe Rantz appeared in a celebratory procession holding a rowing jersey bearing an eagle and swastika. The image carried the marks of the Berlin games back into the American celebration, joining the crew’s victory to the symbols of the host regime.

A later visit gives Berlin a further, retrospective meaning. In 2011, the narrator visited the Olympic Stadium and traveled by S-Bahn to Köpenick, then in what had been Soviet-occupied East Berlin. The streets and old buildings still bore occasional marks of wartime damage. On Freiheit, a vacant lot marked the place where Köpenick’s synagogue had stood before its destruction on November 9, 1938. The remembered Olympic welcome and the later absence of the synagogue belong to the same city, but they disclose different histories: the managed image offered to foreign visitors, and the violence and loss that image could not permanently conceal.