1

Hitler and Boxing

Though a fan of boxing, Hitler never tied on a pair of gloves, never entered a ring. To imagine otherwise is to envision a comedic scene: the skinny arms flailing about, the eyes flashing anger and frustration, the voice gutturally screaming at his opponent. Yet the man thought boxing a necessary ingredient for becoming a successful Nazi warrior.

There have been many satirical depictions of Hitler in movies such as The Great Dictator and The Producers, but there is a silent 1915 movie titled The Champion in which Charlie Chaplin looks like a young ragamuffin Hitler. In fact, they were born the same year: 1889. Full of his own self-importance, the Chaplin character can only win his boxing match by hitting his opponent with a horseshoe hidden in his boxing glove. Hitler too was a man who imagined himself unbeatable but only if he could resort to lies and overwhelming force to achieve his ends.

While never engaging in fisticuffs, Hitler vicariously thrilled at the sight of German pugilists outboxing non-Aryan opponents, as when Max Schmeling beat Joe Louis in their first match. Schmeling had been invited to show Hitler the film of that bout with Louis. In his autobiography Schmeling wrote,

At the start, the camera swept over the massive arena and the crowds of people streaming in. Hitler was captivated. This was the kind of atmosphere that he knew from his own experiences and that he clearly enjoyed. Even the first couple of fight sequences seemed to put him in a state of feverish excitement. He gave a running commentary and every time I landed a punch he slapped his thigh with delight. “Schmeling,” he suddenly directed at me, “have you read what I wrote in Mein Kampf about the educational value of boxing? Boxing is a manly sport. That’s why I tell everyone, Schirach and Tschammer, that boxing should be introduced into the public school curriculum.”¹

Indeed, Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf,

Seeing that its members must undergo a good physical training, the place of chief importance must not be given to military drill but rather to the practice of sports. I have always considered boxing and ju-jitsu more important than some kind of bad, because mediocre, training in rifle-shooting. If the German nation were presented with a body of young men who had been perfectly trained in athletic sports, who were imbued with an ardent love for their country and a readiness to take the initiative in a fight, then the national State could make an army out of that body within less than two years if it were necessary, provided the cadres already existed. In the actual state of affairs only the Reichswehr could furnish the cadres and not a defence organization that was neither one thing nor the other. Bodily efficiency would develop in the individual a conviction of his superiority and would give him that confidence which is always based only on the consciousness of one’s own powers. They must also develop that athletic agility which can be employed as a defensive weapon in the service of the Movement.²

And one only need look at YouTube to see scenes of hundreds of skinny young boys, all members of the Hitler Youth, wearing identical white shorts and happily flailing away at one another with their small boxing gloves. Their innocence and joy in sports hardly portend the devastation they would inflict as adult soldiers on countries and populations in conquered lands.

Hitler foresaw that the Hitler Youth League, with its emphasis on fitness and boxing, would be his training institution for a strong Nazi army. At its height, the Hitler Youth had several million members, all of whom were indoctrinated from a young age to be tough, self-sacrificing, and devoted to the fatherland. Their motto could have been “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.” While organizations such as the Boy Scouts were very popular in Germany and not faux military-training organizations, all those organizations were dissolved and replaced by the Hitler Youth in 1935. In addition to training its members in boxing, it also trained them in the use of military weapons as well as military tactics. The combination of athleticism and militarism was far more important than academic studies. In addition, the youthful members were indoctrinated to hate Jews and other “subhuman” enemies of the fatherland. By December 1936, membership in the Hitler Youth had become mandatory under the Hitler Youth Law, which was reaffirmed in March 1939 under the Youth Service Duty. Parents who objected to their sons being conscripted into the Hitler Youth were visited by Gestapo agents who threatened them with fines, imprisonment, and loss of employment. Young men who dropped out of the league were denied admission to universities and could not be employed. So effective was the government’s coercion that by 1940, the Hitler Youth had 8 million members. According to David Williamson, “effectively, the Hitler Youth constituted the single most successful of all the mass movements in the Third Reich.”³

In fact, historian Gerhard Rempel wrote that Nazi Germany could not have achieved its level of success without the Hitler Youth League for its members represented the “social, political, and military resiliency of the Third Reich” and were thus “the incubator that maintained the political system by replenishing the ranks of the dominant party and preventing the growth of mass opposition.”⁴

Following Germany’s surrender at the end of World War II, the Allies did not think it necessary for the Hitler Youth members to undergo denazification, which meant that they carried their ideology with them for the remainder of their lives. Unlike its members, the leaders of the Hitler Youth were found guilty and sent to prison for varying terms.

While the Hitler Youth trained numerous men who aspired to be professional boxers, very few of them emerged as professionals either during the war or after. Max Schmeling, the country’s most famous boxer and world heavyweight champion from 1930 to 1932, was neither a graduate of the Hitler Youth nor a member of the Nazi Party. (His refusal to join the party was a particular irritant to both Hitler and Goebbels.) Yet his popularity in Germany seemed to have been pervasive, especially after he married a beautiful blonde Czech film star, Anny Ondra, in 1933. They were regularly photographed and written about not only in German magazines and newspapers, but also in Austrian, French, Italian, English, and—of course—Czechoslovakian ones. They were considered one of the glittering couples on the boulevards and in the cafes and nightclubs of Berlin and beyond.

While the Nazis hoped to use Schmeling’s celebrity to their advantage, they faced several obstacles that could not be overcome. For the Nazis, Schmeling’s most controversial and galling relationship was with his Jewish manager in America, Joe Jacobs. Hitler demanded that Schmeling fire Jacobs. But as diplomatically as possible, Schmeling refused. Schmeling wrote,

Hitler’s face showed displeasure, Instead of giving an answer, he lifted his teacup and loudly slurped his tea. “I really need Joe Jacobs,” I continued. “I owe all my success in America to him.” But Hitler said nothing. In the pause that followed, I added, “Mr. Jacobs is competent, he is respectable and correct. And beyond that, you can’t get anywhere in New York without a local manager.” Unsettled by the still mute Hitler, I persisted somewhat senselessly with: “Besides loyalty is a German virtue.”

Hitler made an angry gesture, then he again stared absently into space.⁵

Who was Joe Jacobs and why did Schmeling depend on him? According to the Jewish Virtual Library,

he was the quintessential boxing manager of the 1920s and 1930s, a cigar-chomping, fedora-wearing, streetwise, brash, combative, argumentative, and fast-talking schmoozer who “knew nothing about boxing, but he knew how to negotiate and get his man the best deal possible,” in the words of his most famous fighter, Max Schmeling. Jacobs [who was nicknamed “Yussel the Muscle”] became Schmeling’s manager in 1928.⁶

Matters went from bad to dangerously bad following one of Schmeling’s victories. In 1935, Jacobs went to Germany to see Schmeling fight Steve Hamas in Hamburg. Following Schmeling’s victory, the crowd of more than 25,000 spectators enthusiastically rose to their feet and sang the Nazi anthem, “Deutschlandlied,” with its infamous opening line “Deutschland Deutschland uber alles.” While singing, the spectators gave the stiff-armed Nazi salute. Overcome with enthusiasm, Jacobs rushed to the center of the ring to congratulate his fighter. Jacobs looked around at the crowd, not knowing how to react, and he then smiled and winked at Schmeling. Much to Schmeling’s surprise, Jacobs raised his right arm in the Nazi salute. But rather than flatly stretching out his fingers, Jacob held a cigar between his folded index and middle fingers. The cigar was a prosthetic substitute for his middle finger. In the photographs that appeared in German newspapers, Jacob appears to be giving the finger to the entire audience. The Nazis were furious. Anti-Semitic epithets poured with a volcanic rush out of radios throughout the country. Newspapers editorialized against Jacobs. The Reich minister of sports, Hans von Tschammer, called Schmeling into his office and demanded that he fire Jacobs. It wouldn’t happen. In America, news of the event inspired the Three Stooges to change the title of a popular song titled “I’ll Never Fall in Love Again” to “I’ll Never Heil Again.” For their irreverence, not only were the Stooges banned from Germany by Goebbels, they were put on a list of subversives to be exterminated after the Reich conquered the United States. It is doubtful that the Stooges feared the clatter of Nazi jackboots on the pavements of U.S. cities.

Schmeling was a courageous man who endangered himself by his loyalty to the irrepressible Jacobs. Schmeling appreciated that he owed much of his success to his inventive and publicity-savvy manager. For the rest of his life, Schmeling remained grateful to Jacobs and often spoke appreciatively of all that Jacobs had done for him. When war broke out, the two were separated. During the war, when Schmeling learned that Jacobs had died, he felt that he had lost a vital friend. Jacobs was only forty-one when he keeled over from a fatal heart attack. In 1954, Schmeling came to New York and his first stop was the grave of Yosef Jacobs. At the cemetery, he was greeted by an ancient caretaker, shriveled and bent over, who wore a black yarmulke. When the caretaker learned that Schmeling was there to visit the grave of Jacobs, he acted as if he were a privileged tour guide. Upon reaching the grave, the caretaker announced to Jacobs’s spirit that Schmeling hadn’t forgotten him and this visit was Schmeling’s first stop in America. As Schmeling touched Jacobs’s gravestone, tears filled his eyes. He silently stood there for several minutes then bent over, picked up a pebble, and placed it on the gravestone of his friend. He nodded at his cemetery guide then departed in silence as he wiped a tear from his eye.

While not firing Jacobs was one act of rebellion that antagonized the Nazis, there were other instances of Schmeling not doing what the Nazis expected of him. Just prior to the outbreak of war, he was asked by a reporter if he thought Germany would go to war against the United States. Rather than stating that the Nazis would smash the Americans, Schmeling responded that such a war would be a terrible tragedy not just for the world but for him personally because he regarded America as his second home. His comments were printed in newspapers not only in Germany but also in much of Europe and the United States. Goebbels flew into a rage and demanded that Schmeling be tried as a traitor and shot. Nothing came of the demand.

In 1939, Schmeling achieved his goal of becoming European heavyweight champion, which should have made the Nazis proud. But before they could start crowing about their unbeatable Aryan pugilist, newspaper headlines undercut their arrogance. Headlines across the country announced that Schmeling had indeed become the heavyweight champion but not by knocking out his opponent, Adolf Heuser. While the headlines correctly stated Schmeling’s victory and possession of the heavyweight title, they got an important aspect of the story wrong: the original headline writer led other headline writers astray by declaring, “Max Schmeling KO’s Adolf Hitler in Adolf Heuser Stadium.” Once again, the aggrieved Goebbels flew into a sustained fury, calling newspaper editors and threatening to shut down their papers and toss them into prison or worse. Editors turned on their typesetters, who believing that their own lives could be in danger quickly corrected their error before the Gestapo could round them up and crack their skulls with truncheons. Corrected headlines appeared in a few hours but not before Hitler had seen the misinformation and raged against subversive elements in the press. Poor Schmeling. He was becoming an embarrassment to the Nazi hierarchy. First he lost a fight to partially Jewish Max Baer, then to the Brown Bomber Joe Louis. Yet he managed to knock out Adolf Hitler to win the heavyweight championship? Impossible!

On another occasion, Schmeling was asked to be an emissary to the Vatican and help repair a relationship that had been fractured with the Church by the SS. At the Vatican, Schmeling was welcomed by Pope Pius XII, who expressed his admiration for Schmeling’s athletic abilities. They drank tea together and discussed boxing. When the subject of war arose, the pope told Schmeling that he thought war was terrible and was deeply saddened by the destruction and deaths that war was causing throughout Europe. He said he would pray for peace. Before departing, Schmeling was invited to return to the Vatican whenever he was in Italy.

Following his return to Germany, Schmeling was met by a group of reporters who asked him if the pope had prayed for a German victory. No. He said the pope prays for peace. Again, Goebbels flew into a rage. For Goebbels, Schmeling was rapidly becoming insufferable and unreliable, a thorn in his side that had to be removed. He determined never again to use Schmeling to advance Nazi propaganda aims.

To no one’s surprise, Goebbels cancelled production of a laudatory documentary about Schmeling. Had Goebbels known about Schmeling’s opinion of Nazism and its racial credo from the time the Nazis rose to power, he would never have ventured into using Schmeling for propaganda purposes in the first place.

From the time that Schmeling learned of Hitler’s racial policies, he had nothing but contempt for those policies. And Schmeling’s contempt for Nazi anti-Semitism led him to take heroic action that, if discovered, would have led—at the very least—to his incarceration, but more likely to a death sentence. Schmeling selflessly acted to protect Jews. It was Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass. On the nights of November 9 and 10, 1938, Nazi Sturmabteilung (SA) and mobs of violent civilians participated in a pogrom against Jews. During that organized rampage, Jewish businesses were destroyed and looted, synagogues burned, and Jews beaten and killed. Schmeling called down to the front desk from his suite in the Excelsior Hotel and said that he was ill and should not be disturbed. He didn’t want anyone to know that he was hiding two Jewish boys—Henry and Werner—in his suite. The boys were the sons of Schmeling’s good friend David Lewin. Following the pogrom, Schmeling helped the boys escape Germany and gain entry to the United States. The boys grew to be successful businessmen. They said that they owed their lives to Schmeling, who they believed had put his own life in danger by protecting them and then smuggling them out of Germany. In 1989, Henry Lewin wanted the world to know of Schmeling’s humanitarian act and invited him and the public to toast Schmeling’s act of courage and generosity at a celebration in Las Vegas. It was the beginning of Americans learning that Schmeling had never been a Nazi sympathizer or stooge.

Two years before Kristallnacht, just prior to the start of the Berlin Olympics, Schmeling urged Hitler not to harm Jewish athletes who might compete in various sports events. Schmeling need not have worried, for Jews were banned from participating. And that included the excellent German-Jewish boxing champion Eric Seelig, who had held both the middleweight and the light heavyweight titles in Germany: the middleweight title in 1931 and the light-heavyweight title in 1933. The Nazis stripped him of his titles and warned him that if he fought to regain his titles he would be killed. So Seelig and his family immigrated to France, where he fought for two years. In 1935 he immigrated to the United States and boxed until 1940. The Nazis were glad to be rid of him for they did not want a Jew to be a German boxing champion. Such an event would have made a mockery of the Nazi belief in the Aryan superman. Seelig’s wife, Greta, was another athlete denied the opportunity to participate in the Berlin Olympics. She was an admired track star who could have run the hurdles and possibly won a medal. The Nazis only wanted her to run out of the country, not in its athletic competitions.

There was, however, one symbolic exception to the banning of Jewish athletes. She was Helene Mayer, a championship fencer, who had won a gold medal at the 1928 Olympics when she was seventeen years old. She was acclaimed as the greatest female fencer in the world and became a celebrity throughout Europe. Her athletic skills were not her only attraction for she was tall, elegant, beautiful, and blonde. Knowing that her path to additional athletic success had been barred in Nazi Germany, she left the country and settled in California in 1935. The Nazis, however, decided to invite her to compete in the 1936 Olympics; they did so to prevent a threatened boycott of the games. Many organizations, Jewish and non-Jewish, had urged countries not to compete in the Olympics unless the ban on Jews were lifted. By including Mayer in the games, Goebbels could declare that a Jew would participate. Yet he instructed the media not to mention that Mayer was a Jew. How does one note a single Jewish inclusion on a Nazi Olympic team while refusing to identify the Jew as a Jew? Goebbels never untangled that knot of a paradox.

Though surprised by the invitation to participate in the games, Helene decided that her competition in fencing might help relatives who were convicts in Nazi labor camps, especially if she could win a medal. And indeed she won a silver one. Following the presentation of her medal, Mayer gave the Nazi salute as a mandatory part of the awards ceremony. Though it caused consternation and anger among Jews, especially in the United States, France, and England, Mayer insisted that she did so to protect relatives. She returned to the United States, where many Jews criticized her not only for the salute but also for participating in the games. Many of those critics said that Mayer should have boycotted the games and used her boycott to further expose the Nazi treatment of Jews. Mayer did not offer further responses to the criticism other than to repeat what she had earlier stated. She went on to have a successful fencing career in the United States, winning the U.S. women’s foil championship eight times from 1934 to 1946. In 1952, Mayer surprised many when she returned to Germany, where she married Erwin Falkner von Sonnenburg, whom she had known for years. They were married without fanfare in a quiet ceremony in Munich. Shortly thereafter, the couple moved to the hills above Stuttgart. From there, they moved to Heidelberg. Only a year after her return to Germany, Mayer died of breast cancer; her death occurred just two months before her forty-third birthday. Sports Illustrated declared her one of the 100 greatest female athletes of the twentieth century. West Germany finally honored her achievements in 1968 by issuing a stamp with an image of her handsome profile.

While never mentioning Mayer’s Jewish heritage, Hitler was pleased that his athletes were proving to be examples of Aryan superiority. He was particularly pleased that German boxers won a total of five medals at the 1936 Olympics, which was more than those won by boxers representing any other country. Altogether there was a total of 179 boxers from thirty-one countries who participated in the 1936 Olympic games. From Germany there was Willy Kaiser, who won a gold medal in the flyweight division; Michael Murach, who won a silver medal in the welterweight division; Richard Vogt, who won a silver medal in the light-heavyweight division; Herbert Runge, who won a gold medal in the heavyweight division; and Josef Milner, who won a bronze in the featherweight division. Of the five, only Vogt and Runge went on to become professional boxers. Runge’s career, however, was short-lived and disappointing: from 1946 to 1949, he fought in twenty-five bouts and won only five of those. Vogt had a somewhat illustrious professional career: three times he won the German light heavyweight championship, and in 1948, he beat an over-the-hill, forty-three-year-old Max Schmeling before twenty thousand disappointed fans who still honored Schmeling as the greatest German boxer of the twentieth century. Josef Miner was killed in World War II as was Michael Murach. Willy Kaiser retired from boxing and died in 1986.

The winning boxers who fought for their lives in Auschwitz and other concentration camps for the entertainment of their guards had not been invited to exhibit their skills to the cheers of boxing fans at the 1936 Olympics. Instead, they had to endure the jeers of guards and watch helplessly as their defeated victims were led off to be worked to death or to be quickly gassed. If the winners were fortunate enough to survive their imprisonment in the camps, their lives were fraught with searing memories of brutality and guilt.