Köpenick

Köpenick became the temporary home of the American rowers during the 1936 Berlin Olympics, placing their preparations beside the Grünau regatta course and within a town whose welcoming appearance sharply contrasted with its recent history. Joe Rantz and his crewmates encountered clean streets, friendly residents, and a modern police academy; they could not see the persecution hidden behind that orderly welcome. The location therefore joins the team’s immediate Olympic hopes to the larger reality of Nazi rule.

Olympic Setting and the Rowers’ Arrival

After arriving in Berlin aboard the SS Manhattan, the American athletes joined a bus procession through the city before separating from most of the other competitors. While the majority travelled to the Olympic village in Charlottenburg, the American oarsmen boarded two buses for Köpenick, a village southwest of Berlin. Their lodging was a police cadet training academy only a few miles down the Langer See from the Olympic rowing course at Grünau, a practical proximity that made the lake and the races the focus of their stay.

The academy was a new building of glass, steel, and concrete. Most of its police cadets had been moved elsewhere to make room for rowers from several countries, though police horses remained in a stable on the ground floor. The Americans found the building clean, brightly lit, and efficient, but cold, with cold-water showers. Its comforts were limited in a way that recalled their old shell house at Poughkeepsie. North German Lloyd caterers served hearty American-style meals, and the boys spent time on their bunks reading or writing home.

Their presence in Germany had followed a struggle over who would pay to send the winning crew to the Games. At Princeton, the Americans learned that the Olympic organizers might not finance their passage; the working-class rowers could not pay their own way. A Seattle campaign rapidly assembled the required $5,000, drawing donations from businesses, civic groups, and the athletes’ hometowns. Joe Rantz’s Sequim contributed $75, while Don Hume’s Olympia raised $299.25. By the time the crew settled into Köpenick, the money crisis had been answered by public support from home, but the athletes were also becoming national celebrities.

Streets, Landmarks, and the Lake

During a free afternoon, the rowers explored Köpenick, taking photographs, browsing shops, and buying souvenirs. They considered the new Germany clean and orderly, its residents friendly, and the nearby towns of Köpenick and Grünau pleasant and peaceful. Their impressions were shaped by the places they could see and the hospitality offered to visitors; the exclusions and violence that had been temporarily obscured from view remained outside their experience.

On his first walk through town, Rantz passed narrow cobbled streets lined with bakeries, cheese shops, and butcher shops. Hand-painted or carved signs in Gothic script identified the businesses. He went by the Rathaus, with its clock tower, side towers, and arches, and reached the old synagogue on Freiheit Street, marked by a Star of David above its roof. At the southern end of town, a bridge over a moat led to a castle built for a Prussian prince in 1690, with formal gardens behind it.

Rantz sat in those gardens and looked along the Langer See toward the regatta course at Grünau. The Olympic races, still more than two weeks away, would decide whether the crew’s hopes were fulfilled. In that moment the lake appeared peaceful to him. The view made Köpenick more than a place to sleep: it brought the nearby course, the town’s historic landmarks, and the uncertain outcome of the team’s Olympic campaign into a single landscape.

The History Beneath the Welcome

The town’s calm surface concealed a history the American rowers did not know. In June 1933, members of the Sturmabteilung had rounded up hundreds of Köpenick’s Jews, Social Democrats, and Catholics. Ninety-one people were tortured to death. Their bodies were placed in the Spree and the Langer See, waterways that the visiting athletes would later encounter as part of a seemingly tranquil setting. The account makes clear that the rowers could not have known this history as they explored the town.

The concealment extended beyond the past. Sachsenhausen concentration camp was under construction north of Berlin that summer. In later years, more than two hundred thousand people—including Jews, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Roma, Soviet prisoners of war, Polish civilians, and Czech university students—would be held there, and tens of thousands would die. Near Köpenick, the AEG Kabelwerk factory was visible, but the rowers could not see the forced labor that would soon be imposed there: laborers would work long shifts, live in nearby camps, and suffer from disease and deprivation.

The synagogue on Freiheit Street stood within the boys’ walking route, but they did not know that it would be looted and burned on the night of November 9, 1938, during Kristallnacht. Nor did they know the worries of the Hirschhahn family, Jewish residents who worked in a clothing shop on Freiheit Street. Richard and Hedwig Hirschhahn ran the shop while their daughters, Eva and Ruth, served customers. Richard had fought and been wounded in the Great War and believed his service would protect his family; Hedwig had recently returned from Wisconsin, and the family had begun considering a move there. American friends were staying with them that week to see the Olympics.

A Place of Contrast

Köpenick’s narrative significance rests on the gap between what the visitors experienced and what the town contained. The American crew encountered a clean academy, friendly people, familiar food, historic streets, and a lake that seemed peaceful. The book places those observations beside the persecution of the town’s residents, the camp being built beyond the boys’ view, the coming use of forced labor, and the synagogue’s destruction. The athletes’ limited knowledge is not presented as evidence that the danger was absent; it shows how the Olympic visitors’ experience of welcome could coexist with a carefully obscured reality.

That contrast also links the Olympic setting to the rowers’ own circumstances. The Washington crew came from a public university competing for recognition and resources against more established eastern programs. Its members could not finance their own passage to Berlin; a fast-moving campaign across Seattle and the athletes’ hometowns made the journey possible. In Köpenick, their immediate attention was on health, training, and the approaching race at Grünau. The town’s apparent quiet gave them a temporary home, while its concealed history made that home an uneasy setting for an international celebration.