Beyond Glory

by David Margolick

  Schmeling returned to New York and began his training. One day Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt, about to embark on an epic campaign of his own, stopped by Schmeling’s camp in Kingston, New York; along with everyone else, Schmeling was amazed when Roosevelt spoke to him in German. Seventy thousand fans showed up for the fight on June 21, at the Madison Square Garden Bowl in Long Island City. They saw a dull contest, in which Schmeling appeared to dominate. But Jacobs had sensed trouble from the outset; it was, he feared, payback time for the fiasco of the first fight. When it was over, Schmeling had lost a split decision. As soon as the announcement was made, a sepulchral Jacobs grabbed the microphone of the radio announcer and began shouting imprecations into it. The next day’s newspapers rendered it variously: “He was robbed.” “He was jobbed.” “We were robbed.” But another version prevailed, and quickly entered the English language: “We wuz robbed!” “The great Sharkey-Schmeling controversy now stands at one steal apiece,” Gallico wrote.

  In fact, opinions were divided, depending, among other things, on where one was sitting, or if one had seen only the films of the fight or had heard it on the radio. (Edward Zeltner of the Mirror studied the fight film and counted 634 punches for Sharkey to Schmeling’s 539.) But if Schmeling’s win over Sharkey had really been a loss, this loss would become a colossal win. Americans could only pull so hard for a foreigner whose claim to the title had been tainted, who’d reneged on his promises, who’d fought the rematch, as the columnist Westbrook Pegler put it, like “someone closing a deal, with a lawyer ever at his elbow.” But in Germany, fans once again took Schmeling to their bosom. Fleischer pushed for a rubber match between the two, but Schmeling bridled at having to take the far smaller challenger’s share, and in early January 1933 he signed to fight Max Baer instead. In the five years that were to pass before Schmeling got another shot at the title, he would come to realize how right Fleischer was. But three weeks later, Fleischer, Schmeling, and everyone else had something far more serious to ponder. Adolf Hitler now ruled Germany.

  For the ever-pragmatic Schmeling, the new political situation must have seemed both disturbing and promising. On the one hand, many of Schmeling’s artist and intellectual friends were enemies of the new Reich, or Jews, or both. On the other hand, Hitler, unlike prior German leaders, loved boxing. If, as he later declared during a party rally in Nuremberg, “the German boy of the future must be lithe and slender, swift as greyhounds, tough as leather, and hard as Krupp steel,” boxing promised to become almost an official state sport. “There is no sport that cultivates a spirit of aggressiveness, that demands lightning-quick decisiveness, that develops the body to such steely smoothness,” Hitler had written in Mein Kampf. Had German intellectuals studied boxing instead of etiquette, he wrote, then “a German revolution of pimps, deserters and similar rabble [presumably the persons responsible for the Weimar democracy] never would have been possible.”

  But just where Schmeling would fit into the new order wasn’t clear. No one embodied Nazi conceptions of steely physicality and iron discipline more than he, which is surely why Hitler commissioned a statue of him for the Reichssportfeld in Berlin, where the 1936 Summer Olympics would be staged. But with what the sportswriter Bob Considine described as “the high cheek bones of an Indian” and an “almost Neanderthal slope to his brow,” his looks hardly matched the Nazi ideal, and his status as a professional didn’t match, either; in collectivist Nazi culture, there was little room for self-interested mercenaries. In time, the propaganda value of professional athletes, and their usefulness as a source of scarce foreign capital, came to trump Nazi paeans to amateurism. But none of that was immediately apparent.

  Then there was the Jewish question. Even before they came to power, in line with the more general contempt they expressed for Jewish influence in Germany, the Nazis assailed the degree to which Jewish managers, promoters, and bureaucrats dominated German boxing. They depicted these Jews as aliens (usually highlighting their eastern European origins), fat-cat exploiters of German youth who, while “incapable of performing even a single knee-bend on their flat feet,” were still plenty able to pay young Aryan men a pittance for having their brains beaten out. More than two years before Hitler took power, the Angriff complained that Jews controlled the whole business, regulating only their corrupt, exploitative selves. Jacobs, though not German, was attacked as “a man from whom even his own kind turn away, a man at home in the most dangerous criminal circles in New York,” a “dirty,” “mean,” “impertinent,” “incompetent” Jew. He was blamed for making bad business deals for Schmeling, then for leaving him inactive for far too long. Always unmentioned, of course, was how he had talked Schmeling into the title.

  The Angriff was far more outraged over Schmeling’s relationship with Jacobs than anything Schmeling had ever done, but it viewed him warily, too. Incensed by what it considered Schmeling’s democratic leanings—during an exhibition in 1929 Schmeling, along with Jacobs and his trainer Max Machon, had worn the black, red, and gold of the Weimar Republic—it attacked him for his disloyalty and his choice of associates: not just the “grubby” Jacobs, but also Machon, whom it described as a “spruced-up numbskull and toady.” “The German people will accuse you, Herr Schmeling, of breaking your word, and the German people disapprove of you and this dirty Jacobs going around hawking the German name,” it declared. This image of Schmeling as a poor sport and ingrate seemed to be the one thing upon which a Nazi newspaper and Schmeling’s Jewish biographer, Nürnberg, could agree. But in the Angriff as in other German papers, the antipathy toward Schmeling eased following the second Sharkey fight.

  Now, as Schmeling prepared to take on Baer, the Nazis were in control, and no longer had to carp from the sidelines. Box-Sport did not instantly absorb the new order: in early March 1933 it ran a picture of the newly crowned German light heavyweight champion, a Jew named Erich Seelig (who also held the middleweight title), on its cover. But after that, change came swiftly. Indeed, it was a sign of the importance the Nazis assigned sports in general, and boxing in particular, that they campaigned to make boxing judenrein—free of Jews—before similar purges in all other sectors of German society. At a meeting on March 30, the deputy chairman of the Deutscher Reichsverband für Amateurboxen, the organization of German amateur boxers, declared that henceforth all Jews would be barred from the group. The next night, as Seelig prepared to defend one of his two titles, Nazi officials entered his dressing room to say that unless he left the country immediately, his family would be murdered. (He fled, and was promptly stripped of both his titles.) Around the same time, the organization of professional boxers, the Verband Deutscher Faustkämpfer, issued a sweeping order removing Jews entirely from its realm. “Finally, Finally! The VDF Purged of Jews,” the Angriff exulted on April 4. Box-Sport printed the actual order, which made clear how extraordinarily all-encompassing it was. All Jews, even those who’d been baptized, were stricken from the group’s membership rolls and forbidden to enter all association facilities; professional boxers were freed from all contracts with their Jewish managers; all licensed technical personnel were barred from working at any boxing events put on by “Jewish capital or Jewish persons.” And, as if to demonstrate the gulf that was now to separate the German boxing establishment from anything Jewish, all German boxers were prohibited from using Jewish doctors, lawyers, and dentists.

  The previously apolitical and tempered Box-Sport quickly adapted to the new era, suddenly enumerating all of the long-festering problems in its realm that it had somehow previously overlooked. The new measures were “a defensive action against the countless Jewish profiteers” in German professional boxing, it declared: German boxers trained, fought, and ruined their health, while Jewish promoters, managers, and “whatever else these blood-suckers call themselves” hovered in the background. Though certain boxers had done well under the old regime—Schmeling was mentioned—most couldn’t even pay for their training, it asserted, while their Jewish backers always managed
to enrich themselves. Respectable Germans who had done great service for German boxing had been marginalized, while “a clique of corrupt and unscrupulous profiteers” took care of one another. Instead of being regulated by trained, expert, independent, and honorable ethnic Germans, the brave young fighters of the Fatherland were dragged before “Jewish big-wigs and corrupt exploiters who know as much about boxing as a donkey knows about jumping rope.” With the Jews gone, however, German boxing had lost its economic underpinnings, and Box-Sport called on the sport’s brightest lights, Schmeling included, to stop “giving the cold shoulder to their homeland” and start fighting in Germany.

  Under the new rules, Schmeling’s fight against the purportedly Jewish Max Baer (he was not) on June 8 in New York could never have been held in Germany. But as was often to be the case, the Nazis could be pragmatic when they needed to be. They knew that to stay in the heavyweight picture, Schmeling had to take the best fights, and fighters, he could find. Prior to Schmeling’s departure for the United States, Hitler summoned him to the Reich’s chancellory. For Schmeling the encounter was a first— and an impressive, heartening one at that. To meet President Hindenburg, as he had tried to do, you had to be from nobility, and now here was Hitler, coming to him. “If anyone over there asks how it’s going in Germany, you can reassure the doomsayers that everything is moving along quite peacefully,” the Führer told him. Hitler was not at all the overwrought, comical character Schmeling had expected, but charming, calm, quietly confident. Goebbels and Göring were friendly, too. As Schmeling departed, Hitler told him to let him know if he ever needed anything. Schmeling turned out to be a faithful emissary, though it wasn’t easy. The world had already changed too much for that.

  Because sports and politics were considered strictly separate, or because no editors much cared, or because there were too many other horror stories coming out of Germany, or because it all seemed so far away, the purge of Jews from German boxing went unnoted in the sports pages of most American newspapers. Three weeks went by before The New York Times even mentioned it in a short, inconspicuous wire dispatch at the back of its sports section, beneath a banner headline about a horse show. The story got better play in papers such as the Ironwood (Michigan) Daily Globe than in the most important paper in the city with the largest population of Jews in the country. In Britain, too, the German edict excited little comment.* Only the French sports newspaper L’Auto gave it the attention it deserved, noting how it countered every effort to banish prejudice from sports. “It would be paradoxical to see Jews evicted from the ‘Noble Art’ exactly at the same time as Negroes are having their natural rights recognized all the way to the top, including in world title fights,” it said. It expressed regret over such a political incursion into sports, particularly one aimed at a group that had produced so many champion boxers. But events in Germany inevitably seeped into American sports coverage. On March 27, the New York Mirror printed an extraordinary half-page notice in Yiddish—with no English translation—on its back page (the front page of the tabloid’s sports section), urging people to rally that night in Madison Square Garden against “the decrepit medievalism that has darkened the skies of the Jewish people in the land of Goethe and Mendelssohn.”

  Pushing for boycotts of anything connected to the Nazis, some members of the Jewish War Veterans asked American immigration authorities to bar Schmeling. The day before Schmeling arrived, Congressman Emmanuel Celler, who represented the Flatbush section of Brooklyn, urged a boycott of the exhibition tour Schmeling was to take prior to the Baer fight. “We all know what would happen if the situation were reversed and a Jewish prize fighter like Maxie Rosenbloom or Max Baer were scheduled to enter the prize ring in Germany against Max Schmeling,” he said.* So poisoned had the atmosphere in New York grown against Schmeling that Jacobs considered having him train in Montreal instead. Jacobs now served as Schmeling’s Jewish shield: the Daily News reported that the “Delancey Street dandy” had neutralized anti-Schmeling sentiment by procuring letters from several rabbis. “There are many Hebrews here and they are bitter against Hitler and confuse every German with the Nazis, which is tough for Schmeling,” Jacobs told a Montreal newspaper. “He is not a Nazi by any means, and not at all in sympathy with their propaganda.” Schmeling, he insisted, was willing to box free for any Jewish charity, and had even accompanied him to synagogue.

  When Schmeling arrived aboard the Bremen on that April day in 1933, with the horde of boxing writers awaiting him, he stepped into precisely the kind of atmosphere Jacobs feared. Though he spoke little English when he’d first come to New York, Schmeling had picked it up quite well and even understood the dialect favored by fast-talking New York newspapermen, at least most of the time; whenever anyone asked him something sensitive, he liked to play dumb, requesting that the question be repeated more slowly, or asking Jacobs to recast it for him in some combination of Yiddish and German. Then he wouldn’t answer it anyway. “He dodges embarrassing questions even more adroitly than he dodges punches,” the Sun reporter wrote. But this time the newspapermen who greeted him were a bit more insistent, especially on the state of Germany’s Jews. Jacobs had warned him of this in advance, radioing him instructions aboard the Bremen to disparage the reports of Nazi anti-Semitism. This Schmeling promptly did, even though the roster of Jews in his life was long. Most of his friends in the ateliers, salons, and cabarets of Berlin had been Jewish. A Jew named Paul Damski may have discovered him, had promoted many of his fights, and had purchased in his own name a country house for Schmeling, no doubt to save the Uhlan some money. Since Schmeling had come to New York, Nat Fleischer, Harry Sperber, and Jacobs himself had all assisted him. Moreover, the Hitler regime was still young, and Schmeling—a former world champion and Germany’s most famous athlete, as well as someone who made his living abroad—presumably was freer to speak his mind than just about any German citizen. But when asked about what Hitler was up to, Schmeling had little to offer but praise.

  “What do you think of conditions in Germany?” one reporter asked.

  “What conditions?”

  “The political situation.”

  “I don’t know anything about politics,” Schmeling replied. “Why don’t you ask Dr. Luther?” He was referring to Germany’s new ambassador to the United States, who had been on the same voyage. When pressed, Schmeling answered in essence that he’d seen nothing, but that what he’d seen was good. “I haff never seen Yermany so quiet,” he told the reporters. “Yermany has never been unify as it is now under Hitler.” True, there’d been that one-day boycott of Jewish businesses, but the Jews had brought that upon themselves with their anti-Nazi protests and propaganda in places like New York, and he’d seen no one actually physically molested. So confident was he that the dire reports from Germany had been exaggerated that he proposed taking Jacobs—“my friend Joe”—over as a test: Yussel, he predicted cheerily, would find himself “the most popular person in Germany.” Just to show how he felt about the Jews, Schmeling said he had accepted an invitation to attend Passover services at Jacobs’s synagogue. No one asked Schmeling about the purge of Jews from German boxing, and he did not bring it up himself. “I tell you this— Germany is improving,” Schmeling continued. “More people are going to work. Employers seem to have more confidence. Conditions are brighter. My people are much more hopeful.” Besides, he added, “prices on the Boerse [sic] are going up.” Schmeling lied to the reporters that he had not met Hitler. He also urged his interlocutors not to be “silly” about the man. “Were I to meet Baer in Germany instead of here, Hitler most assuredly would occupy a ringside seat,” he said.

  One could hardly fault Schmeling for failing to understand the full significance of what was happening; most Jews didn’t, either. Schmeling himself later insisted that he’d simply not been paying any attention, caught up as he was in his own career. But that day on the Brooklyn pier, he had done more than protect his interests or betray his ignorance. He’d participated in a cover-up-becomin
g, as a result, a propagandist for the Nazi regime. The next morning, a headline in a small Pennsylvania daily encapsulated his message better than any New York newspaper: MAX SCHMELING SAYS GERMANY IS NOT CRUEL TO JEWISH FOLKS.

  Afterward, the Warsaw Yiddish paper Moment said Schmeling had proved himself “100 percent Hitlerist” with his answers. The German press agreed, congratulating Schmeling on his fine performance. “Schmeling pulled himself through the affair brilliantly, admired all around for the quick-wittedness with which he met the questions,” Box-Sport reported. Schmeling wrote many years later that following his interrogation, he went off to see his New York friends, many of them Jews. “When I told them about the reception at the Reich’s chancellory, they kidded me and asked what Hitler had said when I told him that I would be boxing a Jewish Max Baer,” he recalled. “‘Wouldn’t that be forbidden in the new Reich as a form of athletic “race crime”?’ We just laughed.”

  One more reliable contemporary press report had him going back to the Commodore Hotel, where he was staying, and then out by himself for a show. He was last spotted that night at the Majestic Theater, where Jimmy Durante was appearing. He was rolling in the aisles.

  * Fleischer wrote years later that Schmeling never repaid the $250.

  * The British magazine Boxing initially said nothing about the ban, and when it finally did, its Berlin correspondent, H. V. Gunnell, blamed foreign Jews, and their “exaggerated and untruthful stories” about Nazi persecutions, for what had happened. Three weeks later he praised the anti-Jewish measures. In a guest column for Box-Sport in October 1933, he wrote: “The fact that the new, great leader of the German people, Adolf Hitler, has spoken out precisely in support of boxing means not a little for this sport in Germany. Since the reorganized boxing authorities in Germany have weeded out the undesired elements that until recently have so hindered the development of boxing and so damaged the reputation of it, the prospects of German boxing are now on the best imaginable course of further development.”