Fighting within the family may have begun, but by the summer of 1936 there was so much new business coming their way that the problems were kept at bay for a time. The Olympics were coming to Germany and with the Games came opportunity. The brothers would find an extreme level of notoriety when they convinced a young, would-be athlete to wear their shoes in the Olympic Games. The Dassler’s set their sights on romancing American runner Jesse Owens well in advance and made a plan to get near him so they could offer him a pair of their custom, hand-made, running shoes.
Thanks to Hitler, the eyes of the world were closely focused on the Olympic Games that year and the brothers knew it was the perfect venue to showcase their product. Hitler had every intention of using the Olympics as his personal propaganda tool to show the world the grandeur and power of Nazi Germany. In an effort to add mystique and bravado to the games, the Nazis invented many of the ceremonial aspects of the Olympics that are still celebrated to this day. The first ever running of the torch and the grand opening ceremonies were both established by the Nazis. The eerie video and imagery from the 1936 games often shows crowds giving the Nazi salute with the Swastika banners looming in the background.
The Dasslers managed to work their way into the Olympic village in order to get close enough to Owens to convince the runner that their innovative shoes were the right ones to wear in the most important sports competition in the world. It turned out that Owens was indeed impressed with Adi’s custom-fitted spiked shoe. Spikes had been around since 1890, when Reebok founder Joseph William Foster had introduced them to the United Kingdom. The Dassler shoes were so impressive that Owens allowed the Dasslers to fit the shoes directly to him.
Jesse Owens went on to bring home four gold medals for America. The sweeping victory made Owens famous and crushed Hitler’s hopes of dominating the games with Aryan supremacy. Albert Speer, Hitler’s chief architect, once recalled the Nazi leader’s aggravation with Owens. Speer described Hitler as ‘highly annoyed by the series of triumphs by the marvellous coloured American runner, Jesse Owens. People whose antecedents came from the jungle were primitive, Hitler said with a shrug; their physiques were stronger than those of civilised whites and hence should be excluded from future games.’ This win was what would legitimise the footwear of the Dassler brothers and ensure their future. It was a bold move to provide Jesse Owens with footwear, to say the least, because it’s not the kind of thing that would sit well with the Fuhrer. The Dasslers’ business got a huge boost out of the experience, and Jesse Owens went on to be regarded as the sprinter of the century; something that the company would highlight in their advertising thereafter.
It wasn’t long after those games that Nazi Germany began expanding their territory and became engulfed in all-out war. Inevitably, the landscape of the German economy began to change as the Second World War raged on. The only way Hitler could continue his reign of terror on Europe was to completely convert the whole of Germany into an industrial war complex. The ‘total war’ economy began to emerge, as all manufacturing began to move away from luxury items, and focussed instead on producing the various elements of war. In December of 1943 Hitler officially ordered all civilian business operations to cease and converted them to military manufacturing. The Dassler brothers were no longer creating sports shoes, but instead began to make boots for Nazi soldiers and Panzerschreck bazookas in their Herzogenaurach factory. The weaponry that the Dasslers were producing for the German military were intended as anti-tank strategy, desperately needed on the front lines at the time.
Adi and Rudolf were a valuable asset to Germany’s manufacturing, but even so, the war eventually raged on so long and so hard that even they were called to duty. The brothers were both over the age of 40 at the time. Adi was allowed to return to the factory within a year, so that he could ensure production would continue smoothly. Rudolf wasn’t so lucky, he had to remain an active part of the German military regime. It is said that he went on to join the infamous Gestapo, the Nazi secret police, a claim that he would both give credence to, and refute, after the war.
The stories surrounding why the Dassler brothers had a parting of ways vary greatly and there are a lot of urban legends surrounding the circumstances. The only thing that we know for certain is that the two would part ways in 1948, never to reconcile again. The complications of being in business together, and differences in politics, would drive a wedge between the brothers.
Allied troops began to close in on Germany and eventually, in 1945, the war came to Herzogenaurach. Rudolf wasn’t there when Allied bombers targeted their town, but his family was. The sirens began to blare and the bombs were falling, destroying much of the town in the process. The Nazis had subjected England to the same fate, but the tide had begun to turn against them. The Nazis were about to fall and the Dassler family began to fracture and split under the stress and strain of war. The story goes that Adi and his family hid in the basement along with Rudolf’s wife and children. One particular time, Adi, Käthe, and their son were the last to find refuge in the shelter. Adi was pacing with a nervous anger, grumbling the phrase, ‘back again…the swine’. Friedl was convinced that Adi was referring to her and her children, rather than the Allied forces. It had to be stressful to be without Rudolf during those trying times, so it’s not surprising that her mood was heightened. This incident is said to have further soured the already tense relationship between the two families.
Due to their complementing personalities as brothers, Adi had always left a lot of the business up to Rudolf. When Adi married Käthe he found someone with a strong personality, similar to his beloved brother. Unfortunately, Rudolf and Käthe did not get along. Rudolf was often a tyrant to Käthe and the two would constantly experience conflict within the family business.
It was during the aftermath of the fall of Nazi Germany that some of the risky decisions made by the Dassler brothers during the 1936 Olympics would come back to help them. The Second World War was coming to a close and Rudolf could finally return home to Herzogenaurach. The Allied troops were making their way through Germany and the surrounding areas, destroying all of the factories that had been producing instruments of war for the Nazis. The Americans set their sights on Herzogenaurach in April of 1945. The story goes that the troops rolled into town and it was Adi’s wife Käthe, whose ingenuity and quick thinking, saved the family business from certain destruction. The story goes that the Americans had pulled their tanks right up to the front of the Dassler Brothers factory and were preparing to destroy the building. Käthe Dassler was a woman with a gentle and kind face. She could also be quite charming and persuasive when the situation called for it and the tense moments that she encountered that fateful day outside of the factory were probably the most urgent of her life. Käthe was somehow able to charm the American soldiers into leaving their factory standing, convincing them that they only produced footwear and weren’t a part of the Nazi war machine, which couldn’t have been further from the truth.