Helene Mayer, Nazi Germany's Jewish Olympic Star, 1936 Berlin Fencing Champion & Mystery

[appalachiablue]

Last edited Fri Apr 2, 2021, 10:35 AM - Edit history (3)

- 'Nazi Germany's Jewish champion: the mystery of Helene Mayer endures.' Almost 80 years after her silver medal in women’s fencing at the Berlin Games, Helene Mayer remains one of the Olympics’ enduring mysteries. The Guardian, *July 28, 2016. - Ed.

The photograph is at once both beautiful and revolting. Snapped in the fading sun of an August afternoon during the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, this picture is of a German woman standing regal on the medal stand, dressed in white, her posture perfect, her face locked in the stoic gaze of determination. Her arm is outstretched in a strong, certain Nazi salute. Almost 80 years to the day the photo was taken the woman, Helene Mayer, remains one of the Olympics’ great mysteries. She was, by definition of German law at the time, part-Jewish, which had cost her most of her citizenship rights. Her country’s press was forbidden to mention her name. Once she had been one of Germany’s most beloved athletes, but by that afternoon she had been living a 4-year exile in the US, unwanted by her homeland. So why did she throw out her arm in tacit acceptance of so much hate? The simplest answer is that she had no choice but to give the Nazi salute that day. For a German athlete, the thrusting of her arm on the medal stand was a non-negotiable requirement of the state. Failure to do so would have led to serious repercussions.



- Mayer, far right, Olympic Games, Berlin, 1936.

But the bigger question, the one that has vexed historians, biographers and holocaust experts for eight decades, is why she was there. Was she naive? Was she oblivious to the atrocities Hitler was already committing? Did she know how the world would view her participation on what would become known as the Nazi Games? Was she protecting her family? The reality is complicated Mayer, who died young at 42 did not leave an endless trail of correspondence.. Her intentions have been pieced together by a handful of researchers parsing the few letters of hers that exist and pulling answers from a small group of people who knew her.. “I think she still is a mystery,” says Susan Bachrach who as curator for special exhibitions at the U.S. Memorial Holocaust Museum..

In the end, a selfish person,” says NY filmmaker Semyon Pinkhasov who made a documentary about Mayer in 2008, 'What if? The Helene Mayer Story.' There is no way to see her participation for Germany in 1936 as anything but a sham, manipulated by International Olympic Committee officials who ignored the horrors of Hitler’s regime and American Olympic Committee head Avery Brundage who was fending off a surging American movement to boycott the Games. She was the “token Jew” placed on Germany’s team as a public relations facade to fool the world into thinking Jewish people still had rights in Hitler’s Germany.

Most historians have rejected the idea she was protecting her mother and brothers in Germany by participating. The general conclusion is that she was no more than an athlete trapped in the single-minded pursuit of her sport who wanted desperately to compete in the Olympics even if she had to do it for Adolf Hitler.. Pinkhasov met Mayer’s sister-in-law Erika Mayer in Germany who told him that Helene, who had already fenced in two Olympics, yearned to be in a third. “She wanted to compete, she wanted to be famous again.” She was so driven to be a star once more she never realized how much her country had changed, that it would never allow her to be beloved once more. Part of the complexity for Mayer is that she does not seem to have considered herself Jewish. Her father, Ludwig, a respected physician in the Frankfurt suburb Offenbach, was Jewish and active in Jewish organizations, but her mother was not Jewish.. As she rose to prominence in a pre-Hilter 1920s Germany religion was almost never discussed...

More, https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2016/jul/28/helene-mayer-nazi-germanys-jewish-champion-fencer
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- Mayer, 1928. Mayer was named one of the top 100 female athletes of the 20th century by Sports Illustrated. She was inducted into the USFA Hall of Fame in 1963.

https://www.ushmm.org/exhibition/olympics/?content=jewish_athletes_mayer&lang=en
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helene_Mayer

- What If? The Helene Mayer story.

[catrose]

1. By Jewish law, she was not Jewish because her mother was not.

And many secular Jews considered themselves first as Germans. So she had company in not identifying as Jewish.

Hitler didn't care about such distinctions.

[appalachiablue]

2. That's right, thanks for adding.

Some Jews were 'Aryanized' by the Reich if connected although it must have been rare.

It seems Helene was conned by officials and/or she didn't grasp the scope of racist oppression underway in Germany by the mid 1930s. Tragic.