Before the game, the German crowd cheered heartily when the Americans lined up on the basepaths and greeted the fans with a Hitler salute, an awkward moment for Herman Goldberg of Brooklyn, a catcher and the only Jewish member of either baseball team. It was just one of many such moments for Goldberg. He cringed at the sight of a magazine left in his dormitory featuring photos of Hitler and Goebbels. And one day he and the Jewish-American track star Marty Glickman had been hitchhiking to Berlin when they were picked up by a pair of German soldiers. Halfway through the trip, one of the Germans asked Glickman and Goldberg to produce their passports; they had heard Goldberg slip up and use a Yiddish word when trying to communicate in broken German. As the soldiers examined the Americans’ documents on the side of the highway, Goldberg listened nervously as the Nazis discussed the fact that the two Unites States athletes were Jewish. But then relief. The soldiers asked for autographs.

And now here was Goldberg, crouching behind the plate for the biggest baseball spectacle the world had ever seen, under the lights of the Olympic Stadium.

That was noteworthy for two reasons. First, night games were a rarity in the United States, with the Cincinnati Reds having played the first major-league night game just a year earlier. Second, the lights themselves weren’t positioned properly for a baseball game, illuminating the action to a height of just 50 feet. Fly balls disappeared into the darkness.

As far as the German fans were concerned, the baseballs and the game itself might as well have vanished into the night and never come back. The spectators were, in the words of one American sportswriter, “unbearably bored” by the game.

Thousands of fans hadn’t realized the game had started and thought the players were still warming up. There were more cheers for pop-ups than base hits. Fans debated whether the catcher was “neutral” or playing for one team or the other.