After my grandfather hugged Jesse Owens, the Nazis told him: ‘Never embrace a black man again’

The very sight of Berlin’s Olympic Stadium can trigger a complex mixture of awe and dread. For England’s players, whose predecessors performed the Nazi salute here in 1938, this eerie citadel serves on Sunday night only as their setting to make themselves immortal. And yet its structure also stands as a memorial to the most monstrous ideology ever conceived by man. 

The Marathon Gate is where, 88 years ago, Adolf Hitler mounted the stairs to open the Games he hoped would affirm the Nazi gospel of Aryan supremacy. But the track and field are where a black athlete, the youngest of 10 children of an Alabama sharecropper, would win four gold medals to deliver the ultimate repudiation of that vision.

Jesse Owens’ place among the icons of sport is indelible. The figure far less known is the Leipzig-born long jumper whom he befriended under the Fuhrer’s gaze: Luz Long. The impeccably Germanic name, combined with the blond hair and blue eyes, made him a natural prospective superstar for the state. On the surface, the photograph of the medal ceremony – Owens raising his hand to his head in honour of the Stars and Stripes, Long stretching his right arm out in a Hitler salute – is an expression of the distance between them. What it cannot convey is the fact that Long, taking silver to Owens’ gold, had bounded across to his rival in the sandpit and hugged him.

So far, so touching. Except the watching Nazi hierarchy regarded it as anything but. “After the Games, Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s right-hand man, called him and said, ‘You are ordered never to embrace a Negro again,’” explains Long’s granddaughter, Julia. From that day on, he was placed under surveillance, his levels of racial consciousness subject to constant suspicion. Not that he gave any impression of regretting the gesture, intended less as a provocation of the regime than as an expression of kinship with the champion. “Sometimes,” he would reflect in a letter, “you just do what the heart commands.”

‘Was he a Nazi? No – he had to survive’

One sun-drenched morning during Euro 2024, I meet Julia and her mother Ragna, Luz’s daughter-in-law, in Munich. Together, the two women are the keepers of this particular Olympic flame, ensuring that the memory of Long is not buried beneath the sands of time. Owens, for his part, never forgot the solidarity that his rival displayed, or the huge personal risk involved. “Even if you melted down all my medals and trophies, they couldn’t make the 24-carat friendship I felt for Luz Long at that moment any more golden,” he later said. “Hitler must have gone mad when we hugged.”

The nature of Hess’ subsequent remarks to Long make that assumption plausible. The problem was that Hitler still had to use Long, the finest long jumper in Europe at the time, as an emblem of Nazi Germany’s athletic prowess. “Luz didn’t have the feeling, politically, of left or right,” Julia says. 

“He didn’t live his life according to the line of the Nazis,” Ragna agrees. “But they needed him. He was a model athlete for the Third Reich.” As such, Long was compelled after the Berlin Games to join the Sturmabteilung (SA), the Nazis’ original paramilitary wing. On the annexation of the Sudetenland in 1938, he was central to the propaganda, required to be the final runner in a “Reich loyalty relay”.

All this created a picture of Long as a willing footsoldier. The reality, his descendants maintain, was starkly different, with even his Heil Hitler salute borne of what Julia calls “coerced compliance”. “I want to share the whole story of Luz,” she says. “People know him as a long jumper, but he was also a father, a husband. It’s time to talk about the values he had, and how he balanced those with being a representative of the Third Reich. He had a lot of integrity in my eyes. His attitude was that he had to protect his family. He needed to be a member of the SA because he could not achieve his dream of being a lawyer without it. We are always being asked, ‘Was he a Nazi?’ No, he wasn’t. These were different circumstances – he had to survive.”

‘Black is the best, clearly the best’

Long’s actions on August 4, 1936, the day of the Olympic long jump final, hardly suggested somebody blinded by the Nazis’ fanaticism. Where the state-controlled press had labelled Owens and his fellow African-American athletes “black auxiliaries”, Long demonstrated no such prejudice. Indeed, the story told by Owens was that during qualifying, the German had imparted some crucial technical wisdom, instantly solving his problem with overstepping. Having taken Long’s advice by placing a towel at a mark just before the take-off, helping him to refine his run-up, he would go on to take gold with a distance of 8.06 metres, an Olympic record.

The reason for Long offering the tip, Ragna argues, was rooted less in pure generosity than in a desire to beat the best. “He wanted to make sure that Jesse qualified,” she says. “People were saying at first, ‘Oh, perhaps, Jesse doesn’t like the German food’ or ‘Hitler’s making him nervous, so now we have a chance’. But Luz’s thinking was simply, ‘I want to fight against him, and I have to beat him.’ In the end, he was very sad only to take silver. He didn’t show it, though.”

On the contrary, he offered Owens only profuse congratulations. It was far from the only signal that they viewed themselves, away from the hatred of the Nazi rhetoric, as kindred spirits. As the competition unfolded, German photographers captured an iconic image of the pair in friendly conversation, lying down on the stadium lawn. 

Recounting his defining battle with Owens, Long wrote: “I can’t help it, I run to him, I hug him. He says to me: ‘You forced me to give my best. For me, it is the highest recognition as a sportsman, to have forced him to give his best. At the long jump ceremony, the German flag is raised in an Olympic stadium for the first time since 1896. ‘The ‘battle of the colours’ is over. Black is the best, clearly the best, 19cm ahead of white.”

“Black is the best”: it was an extraordinary statement for anyone representing Nazi Germany to make, especially in the pages of a Leipzig newspaper that had to be unquestioningly loyal to Hitler. But it appeared to reflect Long’s sincere convictions. After leaving the podium with their medals around their necks, he and Owens walked arm-in-arm towards the stands, taking in the applause of the 110,000-strong crowd. Owens would describe how their duel had been the toughest challenge he had ever faced.

Long could not fail to understand how finishing second to a black man would be regarded by the purveyors of master-race theory. Preparing for the 1936 Games, he and his German team-mates had posed alongside banners declaring: “Track-and-field athletes, think of the Olympics. We must not disappoint our Fuhrer.” He was aware, according to Julia, of his function as an instrument of state control. “He sensed it at international championships,” she says. “‘We have to do what the regime wants. We are the representatives of Adolf Hitler.’ All the fame came to Hitler in ’36. He was portrayed as the one who loved sport, who cared for the athletes. So, they had to go along with it.”

‘My father had seen Luz in 1936’

In her mother’s flat in Grosshadern, one of Munich’s southwestern suburbs, reminders of Luz are everywhere. Julia shows me a picture that Henry, her seven-year-old son, has drawn of his great-grandfather and Owens together. 

On the mantelpiece is the International Olympic Committee President’s Award, given to the Long family in 2021 by Thomas Bach to acknowledge “both the athlete’s sporting achievements and his humanity”. 

The ties to Berlin have endured: when the Olympic Stadium was reopened in 2004, it fell to Julia and Gina Hemphill-Strachan, Owens’ granddaughter, to light the cauldron.

Between them, Julia and Ragna have become assiduous custodians of one of the most powerful stories in sport. One question, perhaps, is why. It was not until 1971 that Ragna met Luz’s son, Kai-Heinrich, the man she would marry. At the time, she had no idea of the background. “When my father found out his name, he asked me, ‘Has he anything to do with Luz Long?’” she recalls. “My father had seen Luz in the stadium in 1936. He was a fan of his. Can you imagine, his daughter and Luz’s son now together? Incredible.”

From there, a fascination kindled within her to discover more about Luz’s life. One reason was her husband’s reluctance to flesh out the details, finding it too painful a subject to discuss. As inspirational as his father’s connection with Owens had been, the chapter brought far from the happiest endings for either. Revered though he might be today, Owens returned home to the United States to experience bigotry scarcely less rancid than in Berlin. At the Waldorf-Astoria in New York, Owens was compelled, due to his colour, to take the freight elevator to his own victory reception.

‘My husband and my mother-in-law suffered all their lives’

For Long, the looming spectre of war dashed his ambitions both in the legal profession and in sport. After passing his law exams in June 1939, his release was demanded by the Nazis for the 1940 Olympics in Helsinki. Those Games, of course, never took place. Within a year of Long’s marriage in 1941 to Gisela, with whom he had two sons, he was called to fight on the front line in Sicily. He sought to reassure his wife with a letter dated May 29, 1943, in which he spoke of camping in tents on a beautiful meadow surrounded by mountains. Two months later, Gisela received a military notice announcing that Luz had been lost.

It would take her seven years to establish what had happened to him. “I have so many letters from her, where she tried and tried to find information,” Ragna says. “The feeling was that Luz was so famous, someone would notice him at a hospital. But he had fallen on the spot. He had bled to death.” In the eyewitness accounts of his comrades, his cries for help had gone unheeded. He was 30 years old.

Not until 1950 did Gisela learn from a friend working at the Hamburg office for prisoner of war inquiries that Luz’s grave had been found, identified by his dog tag. Under the instruction of Allied commanders, he had been buried immediately by locals due to the heat at the US military cemetery in Gela, on Sicily’s southern coast. “I didn’t understand any of this at the beginning,” Ragna says. “When I met my husband, I only knew that he had a famous father. But he and my mother-in-law suffered all their lives. Kai’s brother, Luz and Gisela’s only other child, died at only nine months old from meningitis. Penicillin would have saved him, but they didn’t have it.”

‘I want to honour my grandfather’

In the shadow of these horrors, a sense of grace did eventually materialise. In 1951, Owens, while on a trip to Germany as a promoter for basketball’s Harlem Globetrotters, made contact with Kai, meeting him at Hamburg’s Hotel Atlantic and introducing him at the match as “the son of my old sports friend Luz”. Thirteen years later, during filming for Jesse Owens returns to Berlin, he and Long Jnr met one final time back at the stadium, recreating the fabled lawn picture for posterity.

Each year, Ragna says ruefully, she can feel the tale of Jesse and Luz receding further over the horizon. After Kai’s death in 2021, it falls to her daughter to tell it to the world afresh. She has a book, The Luz Long Story: Beacon of Hope, being published in English next month, with plans for a children’s version. “It’s a way for everyone to know my grandfather,” she says. “I want to honour him. My son has a picture of him with Jesse in his room. He is just starting in sport, and at his age you have to understand how to lose. So I always ask him, ‘What would Luz do?’”

The empathy and sportsmanship he summoned towards Owens in 1936 provides the answer. Somehow, under the full weight of the Nazis’ apparatus of terror, he distinguished himself through his belief in human dignity. This is, as the monumental yet sinister colonnades of the Olympic Stadium hove into view once more, a message worth preserving.