Schutzstaffel

The Schutzstaffel is presented not through an institutional history but through acts that expose the coercive force beneath the 1936 Berlin Olympics’ public spectacle. Its officers help enforce the regime’s control of appearances, stand conspicuously among the Games’ elite visitors, and later seize Jewish residents for persecution and deportation. Across these episodes, the polished image offered to foreign guests and the violence facing people under Nazi rule occupy the same narrative landscape.

Role in the Olympic Image

As Berlin prepared to receive foreign visitors, the regime arranged the city to appear orderly and welcoming. That effort extended beyond streets and buildings to the management of information: visiting journalists were promised special accommodations, good equipment, prime vantage points, and secretarial help. But reporting on German Jews was treated as a threat to be contained. Journalists who tried to interview Jewish people or investigate what the book calls the Jewish question were to be directed to a secret-police office, questioned about their intentions, and secretly followed.

The account places this surveillance alongside the city’s visible decorations. Along railway routes, buildings were whitewashed, flower boxes were installed, and swastika and Olympic flags filled the view. Berlin’s central avenues and approaches to the rowing course at Grünau were similarly transformed into monumental displays of Nazi and Olympic banners. The contrast matters: the welcoming landscape was not simply a decorative setting but part of a presentation that concealed the persecution taking place beyond the visitors’ view. The Schutzstaffel belongs to the enforcement behind that managed appearance, even when the control of journalists is described as a broader regime policy rather than assigned to the organization alone.

Officers at the Games

The Schutzstaffel’s involvement in the Olympic ceremony becomes visible through a confrontation over Leni Riefenstahl’s camera position. Riefenstahl had arranged for a camera and cameraman to be secured to a railing near the platform where senior Nazi officials would preside, seeking a close view of Adolf Hitler before the assembled crowd. Earlier in the afternoon, Schutzstaffel officers began untying the equipment and cameraman. They said Joseph Goebbels had ordered its removal.

Riefenstahl claimed that Hitler had personally authorized the position. When the officers hesitated, she climbed over the railing, tied herself to the camera, and refused to leave before the Games began. High-ranking guests arrived as she remained there, angry and in tears. Goebbels then confronted her and demanded that she remove herself and the equipment, arguing that it disrupted the ceremonial arrangement. The episode shows the Schutzstaffel acting on a ministerial order to control the staging of a public event, while Riefenstahl’s appeal to Hitler’s permission exposed a conflict over who could determine the ceremony’s visual composition. The account does not resolve that conflict as a formal contest between institutions; it records the officers’ attempt to carry out Goebbels’s instruction and the filmmaker’s resistance.

The organization also appears as part of the Games’ ordinary social scenery. At a dinner at Berlin’s Adlon hotel, Washington’s rowers encountered international officials, wealthy American and British guests, and elegantly dressed German women. Schutzstaffel officers sat at separate tables, wearing gray-and-black dress uniforms and peaked hats bearing silver skulls and crossbones. They drank French wine and ate beefsteaks or sauerbraten while other diners appeared untroubled by their presence. The scene does not depict an arrest or a direct threat; instead, the officers’ severe uniforms make their power visible inside a setting of hospitality and celebration. Their presence helps show how coercive authority could sit openly within the carefully cultivated social world of the Olympics.

Persecution in Köpenick

The account’s most consequential description of the Schutzstaffel concerns the Hirschhahn family in Köpenick. Richard Hirschhahn and his wife, Hedwig, worked in a clothing shop; their daughters, eighteen-year-old Eva and nine-year-old Ruth, helped serve customers. The family was Jewish and worried about the direction of events in Germany. Richard had fought and been wounded in the Great War, and believed his service meant Germany would not harm his family. Hedwig, recently returned from Wisconsin, and the others had begun considering a move there. American friends were staying with them during the Olympic week.

The visitors could have seen the family at work, but could not see what would follow. Schutzstaffel men would come for Ruth first. She had asthma and was too weak to work, and the account says she would be taken to her death. Her parents and Eva were left behind in Köpenick for forced labor. Eva would work in a Siemens munitions factory; Richard and Hedwig would make German military uniforms in a sweatshop. The persecution thus reaches into the same neighborhood streets and shops through which Olympic visitors passed, turning familiar places of work and family life into part of a system of exploitation.

In March 1943, Schutzstaffel men returned for Richard and Hedwig and put them on a train to Auschwitz. Eva evaded them, escaped into Berlin, and survived the war; she was the family’s only survivor. The difference in their fates is stated without softening the machinery behind it: Ruth was killed because illness made her unable to work, her parents were deported after years of forced labor, and Eva’s survival depended on escaping capture. These later events make the Olympic scenes of flags, ceremonies, and comfortable hotel dining newly legible. The organization that appeared among the Games’ guests and helped police their presentation also belonged to the violence that destroyed families in the city beyond the spectacle.

Narrative Significance

The Schutzstaffel’s appearances are brief, but they connect distinct forms of power. At the Olympics, the organization is associated with surveillance, the control of access, and the disciplined public presence of uniformed officers. In Köpenick, its men enact the seizure and deportation of individual people. The movement from ceremony to persecution is not a change of subject so much as a change in what the narrative allows the reader to see: first a city arranged for visitors, then the threatened lives that arrangement could not reveal to them.

The organization’s role also sharpens the contrast between visibility and concealment. Swastika banners were displayed across Berlin, Schutzstaffel uniforms could be seen in a hotel dining room, and the Olympic ceremony was filmed and carefully staged. At the same time, journalists investigating the persecution of Jews were to be questioned and followed, while the future fate of the Hirschhahn family remained invisible to the visiting rowers. The book therefore presents the Schutzstaffel both as a visible emblem within the Games’ public world and as an agent of violence beyond the image that world projected.