Meet the Tree: Why Jesse Owens Really Brought Hitler's Olympic Gift Home

At the 1936 Berlin Olympics, Adolf Hitler gave the legendary runner a mysterious gift: four potted oak tree saplings — one for each of the four gold medals that Owens won, while surrounded by Nazis, in one of the greatest performances in the history of sports. Almost a century later, correspondent David Fleming examines what Owens decided to do with his so-called Hitler Oaks... and why that decision remains an enduring act of American defiance. Plus: tree people, myth-busting, redlining and witch-doctor science. This episode originally aired August 6th, 2024. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Pablo Torre?

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• 0:42Pablo Torre?

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• 2:56Pablo Torre?

  Welcome to Pablo Torre Finds Out. I am Pablo Torre, and today we're going to find out what this sound is.

• 3:03Speaker 02

  When I first met the tree in probably 2016, I thought it was a perfect treat.

• 3:08Pablo Torre?

  Right after this ad.

• 3:11Speaker 03

  You're listening to Giraffe Kings Network.

• 3:27Pablo Torre?

  Flem, I'm a plant guy. I'm a tree guy. If you look behind you over your shoulder in our studio, that is an homage to an interest that I have long held. I don't know if you have a property full of greenery, but I don't. I live in the city, here in New York. Thank you for being here, by the way.

• 3:46Speaker 02

  You're welcome. Actually, I thought that's why I was here, to help you with your Limelight hydrangeas, which mine are really world-class. I'm just gonna go ahead and say that.

• 3:56Pablo Torre?

  I'm jealous. I have like two dozen houseplants.

• 4:00Speaker 02

  Well, that's pretty good.

• 4:02Pablo Torre?

  But in a simulation of the real thing. And so as the lawn owner, as a guy with his own set of shrubbery, I just expressed jealousy at the outset here.

• 4:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, I get it. But you know, come down, we'll get you into nature. It's called forest bathing. We'll do that. We'll have like a retreat, a retreat. We'll do a little gardening, some lawn work.

• 4:28Pablo Torre?

  It's real, though. Like forest bathing.

• 4:30Speaker 02

  Oh, it's definitely real. Forest bathing, 100%.

• 4:33Pablo Torre?

  Restorative, psychologically beneficial. So all of this brings us to the Olympics.

• 4:41Speaker 02

  Of course. I mean, I'm sure that's where we're going.

• 4:43Pablo Torre?

  As is our want.

• 4:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 4:45Pablo Torre?

  Because there's this photograph, Lam, as we approach the closing ceremonies of the Olympics in Paris. There's a photograph that I think about whenever it's near the end of an Olympic Games. And it's a famous photo that you have done some research into for us that revealed that I had no idea what the [bleep] I was even looking at. So explain when and where and what this photo is.

• 5:10Speaker 02

  We're sort of nearing the end of the Olympics. You start to think about iconic moments. You think about incredible, iconic performances. And always in my mind, associated with that is this picture from the 1936 Games.

• 5:27Speaker 02

  From the medal stand of the Games, which were in Berlin at the time. What your eye sticks on with this photo are all the Nazi salutes.

• 5:37Pablo Torre?

  At the top of the medal stand?

• 5:39Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 5:39Pablo Torre?

  Not doing the Nazi salute is who?

• 5:43Speaker 02

  Is Jesse Owens.

• 5:45Speaker 04

  After the fan fairs of the Olympic opening comes the most amazing performance by America's black streak Jesse Owens in the 100 meters. The world's most superb runner makes the others look as if they're walking as he wins the final and equals the world's record time. This and his later victory in the long jump may well be the athletic performances of the century.

• 6:03Speaker 02

  One of the greatest Olympic performances of all time, really to this day. Bar none, Jesse Owens in 1936.

• 6:14Speaker 02

  He's receiving one of his four gold medals, but it's in a stadium full of people doing the Nazi salute. And he's next to a row of athletes and other people doing-

• 6:29Pablo Torre?

  Officials.

• 6:29Speaker 02

  Right. And your eye is just stuck on that. And you don't really notice the secret little thing that we discovered that sent us down this rabbit hole.

• 6:40Pablo Torre?

  At the actual center of the photograph, I did not notice this until you told me to like zoom in on it. And when you zoom in on it, you see that he's carrying something that I'd never noticed before, Klev.

• 6:54Speaker 02

  He's holding a tiny little oak sapling.

• 6:59Pablo Torre?

  Why?

• 7:21Pablo Torre?

  All right. So in case you slept through every history class you may have ever taken, I do want to clarify that this is going to be a story that starts with Jesse Owens, who's one of the greatest black athletes of all time, and also Adolf Hitler, who became the chancellor of Germany when the Nazi party came to power in 1933 in the aftermath of Germany losing World War I, which is why the 1936 Berlin Olympics wound up being this festival of swastikas and Aryan supremacy and anti-Semitic propaganda, as evidenced by that famous picture we just discussed.

• 8:02Pablo Torre?

  But that only begins to explain why Jesse Owens was standing atop that medal stand, surrounded by Nazi salutes, and cradling this mysterious and tiny potted plant.

• 8:19Speaker 02

  So to do that, we have to go all the way back and talk about the Olympic Games and how in 1936 they were allowed to be in Berlin.

• 8:34Speaker 02

  The Games were given to Germany years earlier, actually as a gesture to try and help bring Germany back into the world community.

• 8:44Pablo Torre?

  Spoiler alert, this effort did not pay off.

• 8:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, that was not a great idea. By 1936, of course, Hitler has come into power in Germany.

• 8:56Speaker 04

  Berlin's great day dawns with the arrival of the Olympic flame at the end of its 2,000-mile journey from Greece. And meanwhile, a packed stadium and flag-draped cheering streets greet Chancellor Hitler on his way to perform the opening ceremony. Like a modern Caesar, he stands on the balcony to receive the salutes of the athletes of 50 nations.

• 9:18Speaker 02

  The Games go on in Berlin, and part of the ritual of the Games in Germany was the idea that every gold medal winner would receive an oak sapling because of its historic connection to Germany and Germany's history.

• 9:34Pablo Torre?

  And I didn't know this either, but to the German culture, an oak symbolizes, you know, the king of the forest.

• 9:44Speaker 02

  Right, because the oak is usually the biggest, tallest tree. And in German folklore, Germania represents the German people. She's wearing a crown of oak leaves.

• 9:57Pablo Torre?

  Right.

• 9:57Speaker 02

  So the oaks are very important, and as a gesture, each person that won a gold medal, along with their gold medal, were given this tiny oak sapling and told to go back to where you're from around the globe and keep these trees, plant these trees, and watch them grow as a symbol of these Games, which on its face is kind of a good idea.

• 10:20Pablo Torre?

  Now, the flip side of this good idea is that these were Hitler's Oaks.

• 10:27Speaker 02

  Correct.

• 10:28Pablo Torre?

  And were called as such.

• 10:29Speaker 02

  They were known immediately as Hitler Oaks.

• 10:32Pablo Torre?

  And so the Hitler Oaks, right, that came back with the US gold medalists. What do we know about those oaks and what happened to them?

• 10:44Speaker 02

  So there were 24 American gold medals, which means there were 24 oak saplings. And almost all of them were lost or discarded or just gotten rid of.

• 10:55Pablo Torre?

  Right, for the obvious reason of not wanting to have a Hitler oak in your yard.

• 11:00Speaker 02

  Right. Cannot blame anybody for that.

• 11:04Pablo Torre?

  Yeah, a gift bag from history's greatest monster. Not necessarily what I would have put on, you know, in my own front yard.

• 11:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. Thanks Hitler for the merch, but I'll pass.

• 11:16Pablo Torre?

  And so the obvious question then is why the [bleep] would Jesse Owens of all people, Flem, be the one to become the caretaker of a Hitler oak?

• 11:26Speaker 02

  That's what we're gonna find out. But it's not just Jesse Owens. In the last 100 years, an entire community has come together to, they have fallen in love with this tree and they have come together to save this tree.

• 11:52Pablo Torre?

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• 15:27Pablo Torre?

  So, at the risk of just stating the obvious, it is important that we recall what it would have been like to be Jesse Owens in the 1930s, in a segregated United States.

• 15:41Pablo Torre?

  Because Jesse Owens was black, he was not legally eligible to receive a college scholarship, for instance, let alone get on-campus housing. And then, when he finally worked hard enough to make the US Olympic team, despite all of that and more, Jesse Owens discovered that the Games were being held in Nazi Germany. An event that the NAACP, alongside many, many others, were all saying that Jesse Owens should not attend.

• 16:16Speaker 02

  He was being torn in both directions, whether to go, whether to stay home, whether to take on Hitler, whether to just boycott the whole thing. You have to remember, Jesse Owens, he grew up in Cleveland, he went to Ohio State. Jesse Owens was a world-renowned athlete after the 1935 Big Ten Championship, which some people refer to as the greatest 45 minutes in sports. In the span of 45 minutes in 1935, Jesse Owens set or tied four world records in track and field. He's setting or tying a world record every 11 minutes?

• 16:55Pablo Torre?

  Yes. This is the milieu unto which he has to make a decision of, am I the greatest track star in America?

• 17:04Pablo Torre?

  Going to go overseas and essentially enable potentially a propaganda operation for Adolf Hitler.

• 17:11Speaker 02

  He is the single greatest track and field athlete in the world. But there was a serious and strong campaign to try and encourage him not to go, to just sit it out, to not let his abilities bring attention to Hitler's theories about Aryan supremacy. And so I reached out to Dr. Damian Thomas, who is the sports curator at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture.

• 17:39Pablo Torre?

  Yes.

• 17:39Speaker 02

  And he helped explain what Jesse Owens had to deal with even before the games.

• 17:47Speaker 06

  At the time, I think people, people were trying to figure out how to best deal with the threat that Hitler posed. Do you appease him? Do you play along? Certainly, there were discussions and people, people asked him not to participate. But a boycott would have largely been unprecedented. And it's a lot to ask Jesse Owens. And we see that there was widespread support of African American athletes to ultimately participate because there were 18 African Americans who participated. And that was by far the largest contingent of African Americans who had participated in the Olympics up to that time.

• 18:33Speaker 02

  So there were all these athletes who were going to the games. The ones who didn't want them to go, they were being branded by the US Olympic Committee as un-American agitators.

• 18:46Pablo Torre?

  Right. So this is an enormous news story. And once he gets there, again, another spoiler alert, Jesse Owens [bleep] destroys everybody. He wins gold in the 100 meter dash, in the 200 meter, in the 4x100.

• 19:00Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 19:00Pablo Torre?

  And then the long jump.

• 19:02Speaker 02

  The long jump is one of those, if you see the film of it, it's one of those things where you and I, we've watched athletics, we've covered athletics, we've interviewed athletes. It's one of those moments where even almost 100 years later, your jaw drops. It's almost like he's detached from the gravity of the earth. And when you think he's supposed to start coming down, he keeps going. And you're like, This is 100 years ago.

• 19:28Pablo Torre?

  A hard thing for Adolf Hitler to see and feel great about.

• 19:34Speaker 02

  Right. I'm a human being watching this 100 years later in awe. And then I think, oh my God, Hitler had to watch Jesse Owens do this right in front of his face.

• 19:43Pablo Torre?

  Yes, the entire point was that here was gonna be the proof that Germany was supreme, that white supremacy was was real. And Jesse Owens explodes that for different times. And so this brings us to the thing that I, the most famous image that has been passed down through history, which is the story of what happens when Jesse Owens finally confronts Adolf Hitler face to face. Because Adolf Hitler, as again, the leader of Germany, is the guy who's also greeting all of the athletes at the end. And the story is that Adolf Hitler refuses to shake the hand,

• 20:26Pablo Torre?

  the black hand of the American Jesse Owens.

• 20:30Speaker 02

  And that is part of the mythology that's grown out of what Jesse Owens did. But it's not actually the whole, full, true story.

• 20:41Speaker 06

  So Hitler attended the first day of the Olympics. And what he did is he went and greeted the German athletes who had won medals and had performed triumphantly. The International Olympic Committee went to him and said that you just can't shake the hands of the Germans. You have to shake the hands of all of the winners if you're going to shake hands. And so Hitler decided that he was no longer going to shake anyone else's hand. So then when Jesse Owens wins and there's no handshake, people began to speculate, well, has Hitler snuck Jesse Owens? Is this a racial moment?

• 21:24Speaker 06

  Is this somehow demeaning to Jesse Owens?

• 21:32Pablo Torre?

  And so I'm just gonna jump in here to say that I did not plan on exonerating Adolf Hitler in any way when producing today's episode. But, yes, Damian Thomas is correct. Hitler's refusal to shake the hand of Jesse Owens in Berlin was not actually specific to Jesse Owens at all. After day one, Hitler did not publicly congratulate any of the gold medalists. But the big reason that so many of us Americans have heard that story and have assumed it to be true for so long is relevant here as well.

• 22:11Speaker 02

  So it turns out that this was a part of the myth that Jesse Owens himself perpetuated for years for a whole nother set of reasons that sort of just takes us further down this story.

• 22:28Speaker 06

  The story became really important for Jesse Owens later on because in his post-running career, he would often make money on the banquet circuit. And this became one of the most popular stories that he would tell about this missed opportunity with Hitler and how he was snubbed. And it was a way of sort of denouncing Germany and their racist policies. And he was celebrated because people wanted to feel good about America vis a vis Germany and vis a vis America's own racial history.

• 23:09Speaker 06

  And so it was a key story that sat at the heart of his ability to make money in his post-racing career.

• 23:20Pablo Torre?

  So the banquet circuit that Dr. Thomas referenced, I did not know that Jesse Owens was making appearances like as a speaker, making money doing that.

• 23:30Speaker 02

  Right, because your assumption is this guy is a worldwide hero.

• 23:36Pablo Torre?

  Yes.

• 23:36Speaker 02

  He's an American Olympic icon.

• 23:40Pablo Torre?

  He just beat Hitler.

• 23:41Speaker 02

  Surely he comes home to an America where it's ticker tape parades and endorsements and never has to lift a finger the rest of his life. It's the exact opposite.

• 23:53Pablo Torre?

  No, of course, it's a reminder that, again, we're in the 30s. Jesse Owens is a second-class citizen in the United States.

• 24:02Speaker 02

  I mean, Owens, Owens himself even said, "Hitler refused to shake my hand, but so did the President of the United States."

• 24:10Pablo Torre?

  Right. By the way, this was FDR.

• 24:12Speaker 02

  FDR, that's the America that he came back to. It's a place where he has to work as a janitor. It's a place where he has to work as a custodian.

• 24:22Pablo Torre?

  He's also a gas station attendant.

• 24:24Speaker 02

  It's a place where, when he does get invited to a celebration of the Olympic heroes at the Waldorf Astoria, he's got to go in through the freight elevator.

• 24:35Speaker 06

  Jesse Owens struggled financially. You know, he had some failed business ventures. He had some tax problems. And he was often forced to engage in some things which he would later, later feel a bit embarrassed by in his later life. One of these such examples was when he engaged in a racing exhibition in Cuba. And he raced a horse in an exhibition race.

• 25:10Speaker 04

  Cuba. Jesse Owens, the ebony streak of Olympic Games, celebrates turning professional by racing against a horse. Jesse had a start of 40 yards and 100, and he won by inches.

• 25:23Speaker 06

  There was also a moment where he had a race with Joe Louis. It was a race that he also found to be demeaning because he was crawling and Joe Louis was running backwards. Also during his time, he worked with the Harlem Globetrotters. As a middle-aged man, would run around the court during halftime, jumping over hurries as part of the entertainment for the Harlem Globetrotters game. So he had to do a number of things like that in order to survive financially.

• 26:01Pablo Torre?

  I did not realize the degree to which Jesse Owens was a circus performer after having accomplished some of the greatest things in the history of sports.

• 26:09Speaker 02

  So Damian mentioned that Owens did find some of those things that he had to do to make a living degrading. And there's a great quote from Owens that said, "People say it was degrading for an Olympic champion to run against a horse, but what was I supposed to do? I had four gold medals, but you can't eat four gold medals."

• 26:33Pablo Torre?

  By the way, that isn't just some clever rhetoric from Jesse Owens. Jesse Owens actually wound up giving one of his four gold medals from Berlin to a friend to thank him for helping him find work in the entertainment industry. And by the 1950s, Jesse Owens was reportedly so broke that he used the other three medals to pay for a hotel stay and his expenses in Pittsburgh. But that's not all that awaited Jesse Owens upon his return to America. Because not only did the guy work as a gas station attendant, as well as a janitor

• 27:12Pablo Torre?

  and a circus performer, his home, his neighborhood, entire urban sections of Cleveland, in fact, had been financially and ecologically degraded on the basis of race. This was thanks to a legal policy instituted by the aforementioned president Franklin Delano Roosevelt. And that policy, which is now illegal today, was known as redlining.

• 27:37Speaker 04

  As part of the 1930s-era New Deal, the government insured mortgages for homeowners to prevent foreclosures during the Depression. Color-coded maps ranked loanworthiness of neighborhoods in more than 200 cities and towns across the United States.

• 27:51Speaker 03

  Green was super good in terms of the risk of loaning in that area, and then red was hazardous.

• 27:57Speaker 04

  Those redlined areas were deemed credit risk because of the residents' racial demographics. Today, those so-called hazardous neighborhoods consist of lower-income minority residents.

• 28:08Speaker 03

  The goal of redlining at the time was to make it subtle.

• 28:12Speaker 02

  Federal government representatives would literally take a red line and mark out areas of cities, hundreds of cities, that they deemed unworthy of investment and risky for things like mortgages and businesses.

• 28:31Pablo Torre?

  It was racism codified. It was discrimination literally mapped onto America itself.

• 28:39Speaker 02

  It created huge sections of cities where if you can't invest, if you can't buy a home there, then over the next decades, over the next 90 years, people wouldn't bother to build parks and grow grass and plant trees. And so these sections, besides being sort of like lacking investment or homeownership, these areas of cities now are 5 to 20 degrees hotter during summers, which lead to exponentially more heat and health-related issues.

• 29:19Speaker 04

  Many redlined districts are now the warmest areas in the United States. Research completed by the Museum of Science found redlined neighborhoods like Roxbury and East Boston to be, on average, 2 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than non-redlined neighborhoods in Boston. These warmer areas tend to have fewer trees and parks to help cool the air. As a result, residents have higher energy bills, limited access to green space, and disproportionate risk of heat-related death.

• 29:54Pablo Torre?

  So what I am also finding out because of this episode is the degree of scientific research into which health outcomes and life expectancies are tied to trees.

• 30:06Pablo Torre?

  To the way in which we need these things, these living things, to help create the life that America had promised its people. And this is not just like one random hippie saying this. There is a whole body of research that shows that redlining connects to environmental injustice. And this is a study by Case Western Reserve University, FLAM, which evaluated the map of Jesse Owens's Cleveland and showed that these same neighborhoods, a century later, as you were alluding to, remain the areas most plagued by poverty and crime. All of this being directly connected.

• 30:46Speaker 02

  There was also a study in 2022 by Maryland that pointed out older, larger trees with more canopy can impact variables like heat islands, air quality, soil health, and stormwater management. Higher tree diversity also leads to more resiliency against invasive pests and disease outbreaks. Differences in tree communities and size may help explain why redlined spaces have become more associated with poorer health outcomes and shorter life expectancies for people living inside of them. And the connection back to Jesse Owens is they came back to a place where he lived in Cleveland

• 31:30Speaker 02

  that was purposefully left devoid of trees.

• 31:35Pablo Torre?

  So the full accounting of everything that Jesse Owens was facing, the snubbing of his own president in FDR, the redlining of his of his country, and specifically his own home, his own home neighborhood in Cleveland, that just the degradation of being this circus performer character. All of this infuses the Four Hitler Oaks that he takes back home with. A far more profound meaning.

• 31:58Speaker 02

  I think what happened next is one of the most heroic things that Jesse Owens ever did. Right? Despite all the things that you just mentioned, all the things we talked about, the kind of country that he returned to as an Olympic hero and was still a second-class citizen. Despite all of that, Jesse Owens still has enough hope to take those oaks and not throw them in Lake Erie, not discard them, not give them away. He gets down on his hands and knees, and he digs, and he plants these trees. He doesn't forget them. He plants them. He plants them. He brings them home to a place devoid of trees, and he plants them in the ground.

• 32:50Pablo Torre?

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• 33:32Pablo Torre?

  Cozy has everything you need to make your home feel like it has a plan, because Cozy makes every part of the process easy. So, visit Cozy today. That's C-O-Z-E-Y dot com, and make yourself at home.

• 33:47Pablo Torre?

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• 34:31Pablo Torre?

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• 35:17Pablo Torre?

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• 36:03Pablo Torre?

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• 36:11Pablo Torre?

  So Flem, it's time to do a thing that I've been waiting to do on this show for a year now, which is some tree forensics. So Jesse Owens comes back home, he has four gold medals, he has four trees. What happens to the Hitler Oaks? Where does he plant the saplings?

• 36:29Speaker 02

  I've been looking into it for you. All right. I know you like the papers. I know you like the notes.

• 36:33Pablo Torre?

  You have your research.

• 36:33Speaker 02

  I've got my research. Okay, so here's what we know about the four oak saplings. Some sources say that he planted one at East Tech High School, which is where he actually went to school, but hasn't been verified. There are other stories that he planted one at his mother's home in Cleveland. Again, that may have been torn down, can't be verified. There are also stories that he planted one on the campus at Ohio State, where he went to school. Again, not verifiable. The only oak sapling that we know for sure that's been authenticated was at James Ford Rhodes High School, where Owens didn't go to school, but he practiced track there because they had a decent track and the conditions at his own school were no good.

• 37:18Pablo Torre?

  So we have the one. We have one Hitler oak still standing at James Ford Rhodes High School.

• 37:24Speaker 02

  Well, not technically. So we've got one tree authenticated, and what happens is around 2017, this oak tree, which is big and beautiful and right, and has been on this campus for decades, it begins to reach the end of its natural life, and it's dying. And this incredible symbol is about to go away forever. And you remember that beautiful community that we mentioned earlier?

• 37:58Pablo Torre?

  Right.

• 37:58Speaker 02

  That's where this whole community rallies to save a Hitler oak.

• 38:04Pablo Torre?

  And so who are the people who are leading the movement to save a Hitler oak?

• 38:09Speaker 07

  My name is Jeffrey T. Varesbi. I am the Chief Operating Officer at Cleveland Neighborhood Progress. I'm a community development leader. My name is Beck Swab, and I-

• 38:19Speaker 03

  And my title is Director of Conservation and Community Forestry at Holden Forest and Gardens. And so a simpler way to say that is, yeah, like I'm a tree nerd, a tree scientist. Love talking about trees.

• 38:32Speaker 02

  These are some of my favorite people that we met on this journey just because, again, they're so passionate and they're so just all in on this project. What happens is this great guy, one of the great guys that we met, Jeff Raspie, he learns of the Hitler oak right around 2017, right at the exact time when the tree is beginning to die.

• 38:53Speaker 07

  When I first met the tree in probably 2016, I thought it was a perfect treat.

• 38:59Pablo Torre?

  I just want to pause the tape here. That's just one of the great declarations in the history of Palatory, finds out. When I first met the tree.

• 39:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, I haven't met the tree, but I'm proposing a PTFO field trip so that we can all go meet the tree.

• 39:18Pablo Torre?

  We'll have our people call the trees people.

• 39:20Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 39:21Speaker 07

  It was 40 feet tall. It had big branches. It had leaves everywhere. And I was like, this is a gorgeous, amazing tree. And the tree partners at Holden immediately looked at me like I had three heads and they're like, no, that thing's clearly dying.

• 39:36Speaker 03

  A lot of times they'll actually like produce a lot more acorns or whatever their seed is because at the end of the life, they want to make sure they can put as much effort into reproduction as possible to pass on their genes. I've even heard people call it like the glory of a tree under stress because then sometimes they're just covered with flowers and you're like, this tree is doing great. It's producing so many flowers and so many seeds, but it's because it's under stress and it knows it's going out. And so it just spends that last burst of energy to try to make sure it sends its genetics forwards.

• 40:06Speaker 02

  You know, I just want to join in with the, with the, with the tree nerds and point out the, the, the sort of, the, the beautiful moment that, that they're describing, which is when a tree reaches the end of its natural life, it's, it puts all of its final energy into trying to ensure that its life will continue.

• 40:26Pablo Torre?

  The glory of a tree under stress is truly a beautiful.

• 40:32Pablo Torre?

  Scientific concept.

• 40:34Speaker 02

  It's the second best line ever on your show besides I Met the Tree.

• 40:39Pablo Torre?

  Wait, so hold on. The tree that is beautifully dying, the Hitler oak. How do they make sure that it does live on? What do you do with the acorns as it's gloriously perishing?

• 40:51Speaker 02

  Well, that's exactly what I thought. I'm like, oh, so you just collect the acorns, right? And, and put them in some potting soil and bam, you got another Hitler oak. But it's way more interesting and way more complicated than, than just planting an acorn.

• 41:06Speaker 05

  So if you want a genetically identical individual, what you can do is you get like a young twig essentially off of it. And I've done this process before and I feel kind of like a witch when I'm doing it. Because basically we'll take a tree that's in a pot and we'll get a twig from another tree. And we cut the tree that's in the pot. And then we cut the twig off the tree and you have to like use a little knife to get it to line up exactly. And then you put them together and you just like wrap it with like a rubber band essentially. And you dip it in wax. You try to do this in the winter when it's completely dormant. And then you put the spot where you put those two together. You put that against a little heating bar and you heat it up. So it thinks it's the growing season and it's ready to grow.

• 41:48Speaker 05

  And then those two merge together and they become one tree.

• 41:54Pablo Torre?

  So why don't you point out that none of that, it sounds like it should work.

• 41:56Speaker 02

  Right.

• 41:57Speaker 05

  And then when the spring comes, it'll leaf out with, you know, the roots from the other tree and the twig from the old tree. So basically what you've done, you've taken a piece of this tree. You've given it new roots and a new life. And it's basically a new individual that's only, instead of the 80 something years old that that whole tree is, that twig is only a couple of years old.

• 42:15Pablo Torre?

  That sounds crazy. That's how you reproduce a tree?

• 42:19Speaker 02

  Yeah. You, you, you, you create some kind of secondary zombie tree limb.

• 42:24Pablo Torre?

  You tie it together.

• 42:25Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 42:26Pablo Torre?

  You make the tree think that it's growing season and it grows.

• 42:30Speaker 02

  I mean, they treated it, it was like a child. I got the idea that they were talking to it. They were checking in every day, waiting to see if it would produce buds or leaves.

• 42:40Pablo Torre?

  Like an actual living thing.

• 42:42Speaker 02

  They were all rooting for this Hitler oak to live.

• 42:46Pablo Torre?

  I don't know if you intended to make that pun, but I salute you nonetheless. They were rooting for it to live.

• 42:52Speaker 02

  And it does. It works. I mean, all this sorcery, you know, it works and they they've managed to replicate and propagate these Hitler Oaks. And now they've grown over years into saplings that can be transplanted into the ground. And so now they've got four new genetically identical Hitler Oaks to stand for the four gold medals and the four original oak saplings. And they plant them in different areas around Cleveland.

• 43:23Pablo Torre?

  All of this continuing to be an even greater act of defiance than the one that had been mythologized in Berlin.

• 43:32Speaker 02

  And it goes on because now in Cleveland, these Hitler Oaks, they're helping to educate people about the importance of trees, about how to combat redlining. And that's one of the environmental injustices that the community, forestry community is trying to really face and address right now, to say that we need to get more trees into these areas. Because as a tree person, now I see all the benefits of trees. It helps mental health. It helps stress. It makes it cooler when it's hot days. You know, it creates space for community, for people to hang out. I'd like to think that, like, you know, Jesse Owens wants to see these trees grow and survive and thrive.

• 44:12Speaker 02

  But then it's also an opportunity for us to bring awareness to that issue and try to engage community members with it. So the trees themselves and the act of regenerating them and replanting them are now fighting a whole nother fight in Cleveland.

• 44:44Pablo Torre?

  And so the obvious question near the end here, Flem, is whether anybody feels any discomfort, residual lingering discomfort, from the fact that these are Hitler Oaks, that these are gifted again from one of history's greatest monsters?

• 45:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, and I think that's one of the best parts of this whole story. They mean so much more to the people in that community that they don't really see them that way.

• 45:13Speaker 03

  And today, with the eyes of a new generation of African-American track stars looking on, the rebirth of Owens' old dying tree was planted in new ground next to the Rockefeller Park Lagoon. The new tree was propagated from the Jesse Owens Olympic Oak and planted right next to the site of the original.

• 45:32Pablo Torre?

  So Flem, what I'm finding out at the very end here is that we have been mislabeling the subject of today's episode. These are not actually the Hitler Oaks at all.

• 45:44Speaker 02

  No, they have, over time, they have become, they've changed, and they mean something totally different now. They've become the Jesse Owens Oaks.

• 45:55Speaker 07

  These are the Jesse Owens Olympic Oaks. They are nothing but that, the Jesse Owens Olympic Oaks. His story is one of resilience. There was pressure to not participate in the 1936 Olympics. There was pressure to boycott because being Black in America in 1936 was also one in a community in which you were not afforded freedoms. You were not afforded full liberty. And he was denied that all the way. And so I actually think that that makes it even more powerful.

• 46:25Speaker 06

  I think it's important that we tell a well-grounded story about Jesse Owens, both about his triumphs and his challenges. He is someone who is reflective of a very important moment in African-American history. And so, to that extent, I'm really glad that people are keeping these Oaks alive and keeping the story of Jesse Owens at the forefront of our national memory.

• 46:56Speaker 02

  Hitler kind of outsmarted himself by gifting to Jesse Owens the very thing that he could use to fight racism and redlining in Cleveland. I mean, how about that for a transformation from Hitler to the Jesse Owens Oaks?

• 47:15Pablo Torre?

  Dave Fleming, thank you for reporting a story that continues to grow.

• 47:21Speaker 02

  Now you're gonna pull out the puns?

• 47:33Pablo Torre?

  This has been Pablo Torre Finds Out, a Meadowlark Media production. And I'll talk to you next time.

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