On June 22, 1938 thousands of boxing fans poured through the turnstiles at Yankee Stadium. Most couldn’t wait to to boo Max Schmeling, the German fighter they viewed as Hitler’s white hope against African-American heavyweight champion Joe Louis.
Fist-shaking protestors against Hitler’s regime had greeted Schmeling’s ship when it arrived in New York Harbor. Pickets marched in front of his hotel. Schmeling tried to point out that, if he were a Nazi, he would not have an American Jew as his manager. But people didn’t seem interested in explanations.
Almost everyone sensed that, sooner or later, the United States must go to war against Adolf Hitler. No surprise then that the heavyweight title fight between Schmeling and Louis was shaping up to be one of the most politicized sporting events in history.
Adding to the drama was that two years earlier Schmeling had handed Louis his only professional defeat. Few had given 10-1 underdog Schmeling a chance in that 1936 fight. After all, he was ten years older than Louis and long past the days when he had become the first European world heavyweight champion. Hitler himself encouraged him to cancel the fight since Schmeling’s sure defeat against an African-American would discredit Nazi theories of racial superiority. However, like most great athletes, Schmeling remained confident.
At the 1936 fight, Schmeling, who said later that he had exploited a tell discovered when viewing some film of Louis’s prior bouts, surprised Louis, Hitler and the rest of the world with an overhand right that dropped the American favorite. Two more rights finished Louis off in the 12th round after which Schmeling helped carry the wobbly Louis back to his corner.
Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels wired Schmeling: “I know you fought for Germany; that it was a German victory. Heil Hitler!” After Schmeling’s return to Germany, Hitler invited him to lunch and to watch a movie of the fight. Hitler slapped his knee gleefully whenever Schmeling landed a punch.
Come time for the 1938 rematch, the Yankee Stadium boo birds didn’t seem to care that Schmeling had steadfastly resisted personal appeals from Hitler and Goebbels to join the Nazi party. Forgotten to the throng that pelted him with garbage as he walked to the ring was how Schmeling had extracted promises from Hitler to treat American athletes fairly and respectfully at the 1936 Berlin Olympics.
At the opening bell, Louis jumped out of his corner with a barrage of punches that knocked Schmeling down three times in the first round. The fight barely lasted two minutes. Joe Louis had avenged his one defeat and, so millions of Americans believed, struck a blow for democracy.
In November after Schmeling had returned to Berlin, Nazi pogroms against Jews reached new heights of brutality during what became known as Kristallnacht, or “the night of broken glass.” As mobs attacked Jews in the streets, Schmeling hid Henry and Werner Lewin, teenage sons of a Jewish friend, in his hotel room. Later, he helped the two boys escape to the United States.
The truth of that night didn’t come out until 50 years later when the two boys, by then older men themselves, publicly revealed Schmeling’s help. Likewise, for years rumors have floated about how Schmeling used his influence to save Jewish friends from Nazi death camps. Schmeling never confirmed those rumors but he did recall how one Nazi official upbraided him about his attempts to intervene on behalf of politically persecuted friends. “Whenever anyone hears from you, it’s always about Jews! As if there weren’t more important matters at the moment.”
To punish Schmeling for his continued refusal to cooperate with the Nazi propaganda machine, the German army conscripted him though, at 35, he was supposedly past draft age. After Schmeling was wounded in Greece, Goebbels ordered that Schmeling’s name never again appear in a German newspaper.
Following the war, Schmeling scraped together enough money to buy a Coca-Cola franchise in Germany. American soda pop made him rich. He and his wife gave generously to charities throughout their lives. He once said, “I don’t want anyone to say that I was a good athlete, but worth nothing as a human being — I couldn’t bear that.”
Just as he never revealed how he helped hide the Lewin boys, Schmeling never bragged about how he quietly helped when drug addiction and financial problems beset Joe Louis after his boxing career. Time and again, Schmeling slipped his old opponent money to get by. After Louis died in 1981, Schmeling paid for the funeral.
This quiet generous man was no war criminal. He was a hidden hero who rejected the idea of racial purity while promoting the ideals of sports. Late in life, he recalled how in a personal meeting with Adolf Hitler he once tried to explain that in boxing, “We are not conscious of Protestants, Catholics, Jews or Negroes… We are interested only in boxing.”
He remembered that Hitler replied only with stony silence.
BILL RIENKA ADDS: “The Joe Louis/ Max Schmeling relationship is a fascinating story — hard to squeeze into a few hundred words. Among the things I left out was that, although Max Schmeling was once champ, he was still a 10-1 underdog in the first Joe Louis fight where he surprised everyone. One of the reasons that was a surprise was that Schmeling had already lost to Max Baer (Jethro on Beverly Hillbillies’ dad). Already there was a groundswell in the US against the once-popular Schmeling because of his alleged ties with Hitler. Baer wore a Star of David on his trunks and KO’d Schmeling. So when Schmeling agreed to fight Louis the first time, Hitler and his gang were really concerned — Schmeling had already lost to a Jew and after Louis beat him (considered a sure thing) the Aryan race would not be looking like Super Men. Schmeling was also ostracized when he dared to wed a movie actress who was (as I recall) Czech. The Nazis didn’t appreciate the possible tainting of the bloodline. Turned out they had a long marriage but no kids.
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