Charles H. Sherrill

Charles H. Sherrill was a former U.S. ambassador to Turkey whose support for Avery Brundage’s anti-boycott campaign gave public weight to claims that American opposition to the Berlin Olympics would harm Jews. Though he had often proclaimed himself a friend to American Jews, after visiting Nazi Germany he helped cast the boycott movement as a threat to them rather than a response to their persecution.

Background and German Visit

Sherrill was one of Brundage’s most important allies in the American Olympic Committee’s fight against a boycott. Like Brundage, he had recently toured Germany. He attended the 1935 Nuremberg Rally as Adolf Hitler’s personal guest and also met privately with Hitler. The book describes him, like many visiting Americans, as mesmerized by Hitler’s force of personality and by his apparent success in reviving Germany’s economy.

Sherrill returned to the United States with assurances about conditions in Germany. Rather than acknowledge the increasingly visible evidence of what was happening to Jews there, he began systematically to deny it. His visit thus supplied the setting for a striking reversal: his professed friendship toward American Jews coexisted with his defense of a position that discounted reports of persecution abroad.

Public Rhetoric and the Boycott

Sherrill mixed warnings into his pro-Jewish declarations. He said, “I shall go right on being pro-Jewish, and for that reason I have a warning for American Jewry,” and described the Olympic agitation as dangerous. He predicted that it could provoke antisemitism among people who had not previously considered the issue, suggesting that they might believe “5,000,000 Jews in this country are using 120,000,000 Americans to pull their chestnuts out of the fire.” The numerical contrast made his warning sound like a defense of a threatened majority, while shifting attention away from the treatment of Jews in Germany and toward the consequences of American protest.

In this argument, Sherrill’s public self-presentation as a friend to Jews did not lead him to support the boycott. Instead, he warned American Jews against agitation and invoked the possibility of domestic antisemitism as a reason to oppose it. His position reinforced Brundage’s broader campaign, in which advocates of protest were portrayed as the source of imported conflict rather than as critics of Nazi persecution.

Outcome and Narrative Significance

The dispute was settled in favor of participation: America was going to the Berlin Olympics. The next question was which athletes would carry the American flag into the Nazi state. Sherrill’s role belongs to the political struggle that preceded that selection. His visit, assurances, and warnings show how a claim of personal sympathy could accompany the denial of evidence and help make opposition to a boycott appear, in public argument, to be a threat to the very people it sought to defend.