Hitler’s Olympics, Part 2: Pangloss, Polonius, Prufrock

07/04/24 • 32 min

9 Listeners

Charles Sherrill was everything a gentleman of his generation was supposed to be: rich, handsome, charming, Ivy-Leagued. He was impossibly well connected and extravagantly mustachioed. He was also the person who, as much as anything, decided whether American athletes would participate in the 1936 Olympics. Faced with one of the great moral dilemmas of the day, America needed the wisdom of Solomon. Instead, it got the wisdom of Sherrill.

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Previous Episode

Hitler’s Olympics, Part 1: The Blue-Eyed Tornado

In the early 1930s, Adolf Hitler granted a rare interview to the American journalist Dorothy Thompson. When Hitler later came to power, and prepared to stage the 1936 Berlin Olympics, Thompson’s warning about the man she’d met would frame the central debate over the games: Should we go?

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Hitler’s Olympics, Part 3: Mustache to Mustache

2 Recommendations

With the fate of the Olympics on the line, Charles Sherrill travels to Germany to take up the question of Jewish athletes directly with the Führer. We dig through a dusty archive to uncover a long-buried account of their meeting. The wolf met with the chicken. Guess who won?

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Revisionist History - Hitler’s Olympics, Part 2: Pangloss, Polonius, Prufrock

Transcript

Speaker 100:00:00.280

Before we get to this episode, I want to let you know that you can binge the first part of this season right now with a Pushkin Plus subscription. That's four whole episodes before they release to the public. You'll be able to binge the rest of the season on August first with that same subscription. Sign up for Pushkin Plus on Apple Podcasts, or by visiting pushkin dot fm, slash Plus. Now onto the episode Pushkin We Can't. I have never had a sing