How a talented German-Jewish high jumper’s dreams came crashing down in 1936

The gold medal-winning women’s high jump at the most recent Olympic Games was 1.94 meters. Back in 1936, it was only 1.60 meters, a height Margaret Lambert could have easily cleared. But she never had a chance to try, for the simple reason that she was Jewish.

“The Margaret Lambert Story,” a new short documentary premiering November 9 on the Olympic Channel recounts how the German-born Lambert, then known at Gretel Bergmann, was cheated out of competing in the 1936 Berlin Olympics by the Nazis. The film kicks off the Olympic Channel’s “Foul Play” series exploring the darker side of Olympics and sports history, delving into controversial topics such as religion, gender and race.

The athletically gifted Lambert, who died earlier this year at age 103 at her home in Queens, New York, was essentially a pawn in Nazi Germany’s propaganda game as it fought international calls for a boycott of the 1936 Olympics in Berlin.

Successful at the national level in high jump and other athletic events by the time she graduated high school, Lambert moved to England to train and compete after being banned from sports clubs and associations in Germany after the Nazis’ rise to power in 1933. In 1934, she won the British national championships with a jump clearing 1.55 meters.

Lambert would have stayed in England had her father not come to visit her in 1935 asking her to come home to Germany. The Nazi government wanted Lambert to return to train and try out for the German Olympic team, and threatened reprisals against her family if she did not acquiesce.

It was obvious that the Nazis were only interested in using her to convince the international community — especially the US and some European countries —  that Germany did not discriminate against Jews, but with Lambert’s family’s welfare at risk, she felt she had no choice but to return.

Despite not being given the same training advantages as the other German athletes, the 22-year-old Lambert beat the other women high jumpers by tying the German national record of 1.60 meters at the Olympic trials in June 1936.

Soon after this accomplishment (as it turned out, sufficient to win the Olympic gold medal), Lambert received a letter that she was dismissed from the German Olympic team. “Looking back on your recent performances, you could not possibly have expected to be chosen for the team,” she was told in a letter dated July 16 — exactly one day after the American team had set sail for Germany.

Shortly afterward, Lambert’s national high jump record was expunged.

“The didn’t just fake her out, they faked the whole world out. They used her. It was incredibly elaborately contrived,” says Lambert’s son Gary in the Olympic Channel film.

The other two German women’s high jumpers were told that Lambert was injured and could not compete. The Germans did not replace Lambert, and ultimately Hungarian jumper Ibolya Csak won the gold medal with a 1.60 jump. Lambert’s former teammate Elfriede Kaun won the bronze.

It was later revealed that one of the two German jumpers, Dora Ratjen, was actually a male who later in life went by the name Heinrich (alternately as Hermann or Horst) Ratjen. There has been much speculation as to whether Ratjen was a man deliberately posing as a woman, or whether he was born intersex and raised by his parents as a girl.

There is also controversy over whether the Nazis, who recruited him as a jumper with potential for beating Lambert, were aware of Ratjen’s gender. However, Lambert’s testimony indicates that they knew.

“My roommate Dora Ratjen was a very interesting person,” Lambert said in an interview for the film, recorded a year before her death.

Lambert recalled that she had a cordial relationship with Ratjen, but that Ratjen was quite secretive and was given a separate room in which to shower and change.

“I never saw her naked,” Lambert said.

As consolation for kicking her off the team, the Nazi authorities offered Lambert standing-room-only tickets for the women’s track and field events, “though expenses for transportation and hotel accommodations unfortunately cannot be supplied. Heil Hitler!”

Lambert did not attend the Olympics. Instead, she made plans to emigrate to the US, arriving in New York in 1937. With only $10 in her pocket, she changed her name from Gretel to Margaret and went to work as a masseuse and housemaid, and later as a physical therapist. In 1938, she married Dr. Bruno Lambert, a sprinter she had met at a German training camp in 1935 who had also emigrated to the US. The couple went on to have two sons, Glenn and Gary.

Lambert continued to compete, winning the United States women’s high-jump and shot-put championships in 1937 and the high jump again in 1938. However, when World War II broke out while she was training for the 1940 Olympics (which were ultimately cancelled), she shifted her focus toward getting her family out of Germany.

Lambert was able to get her parents and two brothers out, but other family members, including her grandparents, as well as her husband’s parents and extended family perished in the Holocaust.

“After that, she was basically an obscure Queens housewife until 1996,” New York Times sports journalist Ira Berkow told The Times of Israel.

That year, Berkow wrote a front-page article about Lambert, who had received a letter from the National Olympic Committee for Germany inviting her to be its guest of honor at the Olympic Centennial Games in Atlanta.

According to Berkow, Lambert had been resentful over the decades for what had been done to her, but she decided to accept the invitation.

“That New York Times story changed her life. She became a celebrity of sorts. She decided to not hold the current generation in Germany accountable, and to make a contribution to the world by sharing her story,” Berkow said.

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum featured Lambert’s story in a temporary exhibition that opened in 1996 and subsequently travelled until recently. There is also an online version of the exhibition, as well as a book based on it authored by Dr. Susan Bachrach, curator of special exhibitions.

In researching the 1936 Olympics and Lambert, Bachrach found directives from Reich Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels to the German press telling it what it could and could not publish in the run-up to the games, when the world’s eyes were on Germany and its racial discrimination policies.

“One directed the press not to say anything negative about Gretel Bergmann. This was of course before she was kicked off the team,” Bachrach said.

Lambert, who had sworn she would never set foot on German soil again, returned there in 1999 when the stadium in her hometown of Laupheim, was renamed in her honor. (A sports complex in Berlin was named for her in 1995.)

Lambert’s German national high jump record was reinstated in 2009.

The Olympic Channel is not the first to air a film on Lambert. Her story was recounted in an 2004 HBO documentary, “Hitler’s Pawn,” and fictionalized in a 2009 German feature film, “Berlin 36.” Lambert also published a memoir, “By Leaps and Bounds,” in 2005.

Bachrach, who met Lambert at the USHMM exhibition opening, recalled her as a woman of incredible strength and resilience.

“She personally exemplified Nazi racial policies — who belonged in Germany and who didn’t,” Bachrach said.

“The Nazis were willing to sacrifice an Olympic gold medal just to prevent a Jew from representing Germany,” she said.

Watch Lambert’s testimony for the USC Shoah Foundation Institute: