IN THE SUMMER of 1937, the Nazi Reichssportführerfn1 Hans von Tschammer und Osten travelled to England. His visit coincided with the conclusion of the Davis Cup semi-final between Germany and the USA at Wimbledon. The previous year he had watched Australia, led by the great Jack Crawford, beat the German pair of Gottfried von Cramm and Henner Henkel 4–1 in the semi-finals and he did not want to witness another defeat. Cramm had won the first singles match but in the second Henkel was annihilated by Wimbledon champion Don Budge in straight sets in only fifty minutes. According to one spectator, quoted in Christopher Hilton’s How Hitler Hijacked World Sport, at the moment of defeat Henkel looked towards the royal box, where Tschammer und Osten was sitting. ‘Their eyes met for one pregnant moment and then I saw Henkel flinch under [Tschammer und Osten’s] disdainful gaze and turn away like a dog that knows it will be whipped. It was a small incident, but frighteningly revealing and altogether alien to the sunny, smiling scenes so closely associated with lawn tennis as we like to know it here.’
Bear in mind that the Reichssportführer was regarded as one of the most charming Nazi leaders – though admittedly the competition for that description was not hotly contested. According to Ulrich Hesse-Lichtenberger in Tor! The Story of German Football, Tschammer und Osten ‘was one of those strange men German fascism either produced or was built upon. He possessed personality in spades but apparently no character.’ Unlike most Nazi leaders he was clubbable and loved to spin yarns while ‘downing glass after glass’. A smiling, damned villain who ‘knew next to nothing about sport’.
Unlike his close friend Adolf Hitler, Tschammer und Osten was an aristocrat. He had been a leading member of the Sturmabteilung, the Nazi paramilitary force that had been instrumental in helping Hitler gain control of Germany but whose power had diminished after the ‘Night of the Long Knives’ on 30 June 1934. Though many SA men were imprisoned or executed on falsified charges of plotting to overthrow their Führer, most notably their leader Ernst Rohm, Tschammer und Osten had remained in a position of influence. A handsome man, his penchant for white suits and leather boots and caps meant he stood out in a crowd. He was not one for the day-to-day bureaucracy and surrounded himself with others willing to do his bidding while he channelled his energies into ‘wine, women and song’.
Two days later he was back at Wimbledon. The tie stood at 2–2 with the final singles game to come, between the plain American ‘Hayseed’ Budge and Germany’s finest player, the elegant, aristocratic Gottfried von Cramm. There was an undercurrent of irony as Tschammer und Osten took his place in the royal box at Wimbledon, the Nazi flag billowing side by side with the American Stars and Stripes above Centre Court. Cramm was the pride of German tennis and his blond hair and good looks made him the poster boy for Aryan supremacy – an embodiment of the health, power and vitality which the Nazis so passionately championed. Yet he despised Nazism. Tschammer und Osten was aware of his antipathy but was happy to use his talents as a propaganda tool.
The match has entered sporting legend. The writer James Thurber described it as ‘something so close to art that at the end it was more as if a concert had ended than a tennis match’. Cramm won the first two sets with sublime tennis before Budge, fearsomely competitive and supremely fit, fought back and claimed the next two. Eventually, after a brutal final set in which both men squandered chances to win, Budge emerged the winner 6–8 5–7 6–4 6–2 8–6. At its conclusion Tschammer und Osten applauded with the rest of the enraptured Centre Court crowd, most of whom had been supporting the dashing German. But behind the smiling facade he was beginning to wonder whether Cramm was worth the effort. The Nazis loved winners but their best tennis player had now lost three Wimbledon championships and had once again failed to secure a Davis Cup for his country. This would not have mattered had Cramm been a Nazi, and had he not been carrying a secret: he was homosexual, and the Gestapo knew it. To make matters worse, his lover was Jewish. Cramm needed to keep winning to avoid prosecution, ruin or worse. It’s no exaggeration to say he was playing for his life. Even though he and Budge became the toast of the tennis world for producing such an epic encounter, the loss would have terrible consequences for Cramm.
Tschammer und Osten had another week to spend in England after the tennis. Next he attended the British Athletics Championship at the White City Stadium. While German athletes had little success on the track, they managed to win several field events, among them Luz Long in the long jump. Long had finished second in the Berlin Olympics to Jesse Owens, the black American athlete whose success and popularity with the home crowd had been the only blight on the Games for the Nazis.
After a visit to a swimming competition between Germany and England at Wembley, which appears to have gone unrecorded and unreported, the remainder of the Reichssportführer’s tour was taken up with selling the Nazi brand to interested parties in England. He gave a talk at the German Embassy about physical education in his home country, interspersed with clips from Leni Riefenstahl’s forthcoming epic about the Berlin Games, Olympia, and followed that with a visit to the German Sports Group in London. By invitation from Brigadier General Andrew Thorne he visited the Army School of Physical Training in Aldershot. Thorne, a decorated First World War veteran, had been military attaché to the British Embassy in Berlin between 1932 and 1935 and during that time had got to know many of the Nazi leaders, including Hitler. Both the German leader and Thorne had fought at Gheluvelt in 1914 and had shared their experiences with each other at length.
Next on Tschammer und Osten’s itinerary was a tea reception held by the Anglo-German Fellowship, followed by a dinner at Claridge’s as guest of the newly formed National Fitness Council, a body set up to promote health and well-being among the British population. His hosts were Lord Aberdare and Lord Portal. Aberdare, who as Clarence Bruce played ninety-six first-class matches for Middlesex between 1908 and 1929, was the Council’s chairman; he also served on the International Olympic Committee and would organize the 1948 London Olympics. Lord Portal was Charles Portal, then Air Vice Marshal of the RAF, who three years into the future would mastermind Britain’s response to the Blitzkrieg launched by Tschammer und Osten’s Nazi confrères. Also present was Lord Burghley, aka David Burghley, Conservative MP for Peterborough and a gold medallist in the 400m hurdles at the 1928 Olympics. Perhaps his greatest achievement had come the year before, in his final year at Cambridge, when he sprinted around the Great Court at Trinity College in the time it took the college clock to toll twelve o’clock – which became the inspiration for the famous scene in Chariots of Fire in which Harold Abrahams accomplishes the same feat racing against Lord Andrew Lindsay, whose character was based on Burghley. In reality Abrahams never achieved the feat and Burghley was never beaten, which is why he didn’t allow his name to be used in the film.
As these personalities suggest, Tschammer und Osten was courted by some of the most pre-eminent names in British sport. Throughout his stay he was a guest of Oliver Hoare, the president of Wimbledon. Hoare’s brother was Samuel, the former Home Secretary who had resigned in 1935 following Mussolini’s invasion of Abyssinia (Ethiopia). In a pact with the French Prime Minister, Hoare had agreed to grant the Italians concessions in Abyssinia as an act of appeasement, aiming to dissuade Mussolini from forming an alliance with his fellow fascist Hitler. The plan was an abysmal failure: the Italians seized control of the entire country and forged an even closer relationship with Germany, a partnership which would have disastrous consequences for Europe and the world.
The Reichssportführer’s published itinerary did not include cricket, but the minutes of the MCC Committee reveal that on 23 July Hans von Tschammer und Osten did visit Lord’s. There he was ‘entertained to lunch’ and watched ‘Big’ Jim Smith take five wickets as Middlesex bowled Worcestershire out for 153 and a defeat by 214 runs.fn2 Any cricket lover who has been fortunate enough to visit Lord’s will understand the seductive scene the Reichssportführer faced. Gazing across the most famous ground in the world from the committee dining room on the top floor of the pavilion, one’s belly sated, watching Big Jim blow away the brittle Worcestershire batting as the sun bathed the ground would have been enough to melt the hardest of hearts – and be sure that Tschammer und Osten’s heart was as hard as they come despite the bluff and clubbable veneer. He was also a member of the German landed gentry, and in that dining room he was in the company of men he would have considered of good breeding. The MCC was then, as now, hardly a nest of Bolshevism, so it’s unlikely he overheard too many opinions he disagreed with. Perhaps, his lips loosened by the wine he so enjoyed and basking in a post-prandial glow, he might well have let slip a white lie about his Führer and close friend’s admiration of cricket, a tidbit eagerly snapped up by chairman of selectors Sir Pelham Warner and the other guests? Maybe the panjandrums of the MCC warmed to this suave, jovial man who undermined the commonly held view that most Nazis were vulgar oiks?
When he returned to Berlin Tschammer und Osten wrote a report for his beloved Führer which carries written confirmation that Hitler read it. In it Tschammer und Osten claimed that his visit strengthened Germany’s sporting relationship with England, and he drew a disparaging comparison between the various British ‘boys’ clubs’ he was taken to see and the ‘wholesome care and education provided to every boy and girl’ in the Hitler Youth. In contrast, Lord’s had made a favourable impression. ‘This is the so-called “Mekka” of English cricket,’ he rhapsodized.
It appears likely that the idea of a tour to Berlin was hatched in that committee dining room at Lord’s. However, according to James Coldham it was during his visit to England the previous year, before the 1936 Olympics, that Tschammer und Osten watched some cricket and was said to be so impressed that when he returned to Berlin for the Games he ‘drew the attention of the sports-attachés and journalists of cricket-playing countries at the Olympic Games to the Berlin Cricket League and sent personal invitations to various clubs to visit Berlin on cricket tours’.
One of those invitations arrived on the MCC’s mat at Lord’s, where it came to the attention of Sir Pelham Warner. ‘Plum’ Warner was not only chairman of selectors, he was a former England captain, current editor of The Cricketer magazine, and the pre-eminent cricket administrator of his time, though these days he is probably most remembered for his spinelessness as MCC tour manager during the infamous Bodyline series in Australia in 1932/33. He mulled over the invitation before deciding it might be a good idea to give it to Major Maurice Jewell, the captain of the Gentlemen of Worcestershire and an acquaintance of Warner’s: the pair had been on an MCC tour to South America together in 1926/27, and Warner had stayed as a guest at Jewell’s house, The Hill in Upton-on-Severn, on several occasions. The Major accepted the invitation and the tour was on.
But the record indicates something rather less organized. The archives of the Deutsche Reichsbund für Leibesübungen (or DRL, the Nazi Ministry for Sport) were destroyed during the war so there is no record of the invitation sent to the MCC or any response. Neither is there anything in the MCC’s archives at Lord’s. If the tour had been arranged a year in advance there’s a good chance it would have been reported in the Worcestershire press, in particular the august Berrows Journal (est. 1753), which had always taken a keen interest in the Gents’ exploits. But their first article about the tour was published on 31 July 1937, only a few days before the team was due to depart for Berlin.
There is another factor: Middlesex’s opposition that day was Worcestershire. The German press reported that Tschammer und Osten and Major Maurice Jewell had spoken before the tour. It was almost certainly at that match on 23 July. As an MCC member, a former captain of Worcestershire, a friend of the chairman of selectors and still heavily involved in the running of the county club, it’s also extremely likely the Major was at the same lunch as Tschammer und Osten. Did the subject of a tour to Germany arise then? And did Jewell offer the services of the Gentlemen of Worcestershire, a deal brokered by Plum Warner? There are clues to suggest it was organized in haste: many of the regular Gents players were missing from the final party, and during the tour one German magazine reported that the Gents had cancelled a number of fixtures to be there, which would not have been necessary had it been arranged a year in advance. It is also possible that an invitation was sent and accepted, the Gents of Worcestershire were the team chosen to tour, but the matter was forgotten until the Reichssportführer’s arrival in England, and then an itinerary was hastily put together. Immediately after their meeting, according to the German football magazine Die Fußball-Woche, the Major wrote a letter to Berlin (to whom is not known – presumably the Ministry for Sport) declaring his intention to bring a team and listing the names of his players.
The news of the tour broke the day after Tschammer und Osten’s lunch at Lord’s: Sir Home Seton Charles Montagu Gordon, 12th Baronet Gordon of Embo, Sutherland, mentioned it in his weekly column ‘In the Pavilion’ in The Cricketer, published on 24 July. Despite his grand title, Sir Home Gordon was a roving cricket journalist, instantly recognizable around the county grounds of England by the red carnation he always wore in his buttonhole. He revealed that the Worcester Gents were visiting Berlin on their annual tour and they would arrive in the German capital ten days later. But he didn’t disclose the identity or standard of the opposition. Cricket in Germany was a mystery to the English.
fn1 Minister for Sport, essentially.
fn2 The very next day, after bowling an unbroken spell of twenty-one overs to skittle Worcestershire, Jim Smith played a Test match for England against New Zealand at Old Trafford (no resting of bowlers back then). He bowled thirty-six overs in the match, took four wickets for just sixty-three runs and never played another Test in his life. Big Jim was also a big-hitting batsman: he once scored a fifty in eleven minutes against Gloucestershire and hit a six that cleared the Old Grandstand at Lord’s.