Staffan

August 2, 1936. Day two of the Berlin Olympics. A 25-year-old Berlin police sergeant named Hans Woellke steps into the shot put ring with 100,000 people watching. He throws 16.20 meters, an Olympic record. It's the first gold medal of the Games and Germany's first ever Olympic title in track and field. Nazi Germany had built the whole spectacle to show off the "new Germany," and the very first champion is one of their own, a policeman no less. Hitler is thrilled. He calls Woellke up to his box and shakes his hand in front of the stadium. Bronze medalist Gerhard Stöck comes up too. Later that afternoon he does the same for German javelin thrower Tilly Fleischer and the three Finns who swept the 10,000 meters. Then he leaves before the high jump finishes. The next morning IOC president Henri de Baillet-Latour pulls Hitler aside. Olympic protocol says the head of state is a guest, not a host handing out personal congratulations. Greet every champion or greet none of them. Hitler chooses none, at least in public. That's the actual background to the famous Jesse Owens "snub." Owens didn't win his first gold until August 3, the day after Hitler had already been told to stop. Owens himself later said he felt more snubbed by his own president, who never invited him to the White House. Back to Woellke. The police promote him from sergeant to lieutenant on the spot. He's a national hero, the face of German athletics. Seven years later he's a captain in Schutzmannschaft Battalion 118, an auxiliary police unit fighting partisans in occupied Belarus. On March 22, 1943, Soviet partisans ambush a column of the battalion on the road near the village of Khatyn. Hans Woellke, Olympic champion, is killed. What happened next is why anyone in Belarus knows his name. The battalion, joined by the SS Dirlewanger unit, goes into Khatyn looking for revenge. They round up every resident they can find and force them into a barn. They pile straw against it, pour on fuel, and set it on fire. When the burning doors give way and people try to run, they're cut down with machine guns. 149 people are killed. 75 of them are children. One adult survives. A blacksmith named Iosif Kaminsky, badly burned, wakes up among the bodies and finds his son Adam. The boy dies in his arms. Today there's a memorial at Khatyn. The centerpiece is a bronze statue of Kaminsky holding his dead son. Nearby is a symbolic cemetery for 186 other Belarusian villages that were burned along with their people and never rebuilt. Khatyn is still constantly confused with Katyn, the forest where the Soviets massacred Polish officers. Different place, different crime, and most people have never heard of it. So the man who won the very first gold medal at Hitler's Olympics, the one whose handshake set off the Jesse Owens legend, ended up being the reason an entire village was wiped off the map.

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