Beyond Glory

by David Margolick

  Once again, Schmeling was a contender. But he’d have to fight Steve Hamas, and maybe Carnera a second time for another shot at Baer, who’d beaten Carnera for the crown a couple of months earlier. (In Dresden, the German-Jewish diarist Victor Klemperer had expressed satisfaction with that result, noting how the Nazi press had previously disparaged Baer, whom they considered Jewish, and given him little chance of beating the Italian.) That, Parker wrote, was a rematch to savor. “Every member of the Goldfarb, Epstein, Rosenbaum and Levy families would cancel all pressing engagements to watch Max Baer pin a Swastika on the eye of Hitler’s envoys,” he wrote. In the meantime, New York and Germany vied for the right to host Schmeling’s rematch with Hamas. Given German currency restrictions, no big fight against a foreigner could ever be staged in the Reich without approval from Hitler or some other high official. But with Nazi Germany intent upon becoming a boxing powerhouse, this proved no problem. By the end of 1934, the deal was struck. The fight would be held indoors the following March; Hamas would collect $25,000, to be deposited beforehand in a Parisian bank. The fervor with which the Nazis had gone after the fight was something the Americans simply could not match. The head of Madison Square Garden complained that he could not fight a promoter who was backed up by a state government. But a bigger loser was Joe Jacobs, who was spotted nearly swallowing his cigar when he learned the news; Schmeling had told him he was too busy making a movie to fight again so soon, let alone in a place where Jacobs would not earn a red cent. Box-Sport saw the deal as yet another stinging rebuke to the Americans. They just could not concede that “God’s own country”—it used the English phrase—had lost so much influence in world boxing. “The Götterdämmerung has started,” another German paper crowed. Having landed one fight, Germany was ready to bid for another: a championship defense by Baer, for which it would put up $300,000. Hitler “wants to have good fights and great champions in Germany,” one German fight promoter explained. “Besides, Baer is a Jew. It would be one way of showing the world that a Jew can have fair play and a real welcome in Germany.” Baer’s manager had already written to Hitler, asking him if he’d approve such a match.

  So Germany finally had itself a big international fight. But where would it be held? Germany’s largest indoor arena, in Frankfurt, held only fifteen thousand people. So the Nazis resolved to build, or adapt, something especially for the occasion, something commensurate with the match’s importance to the Reich. They fastened on refurbishing a former timber warehouse in Hamburg, one that could be used afterward for mass political rallies. The building, to be called the Hanseatenhalle, would seat 25,240, making it—how could it be anything but?—the largest indoor facility in the world. It would have to be ready almost instantaneously, presenting a challenge to German will, industry, and efficiency. Soon a thousand workers were on the job, day and night, determined to prove to the world that Nazi Germany was up to the task. One day, Schmeling himself stopped by to drive in a few ceremonial rivets.

  Once again, fight frenzy enveloped the country. By early March 1935, so many people were descending on Schmeling’s training camp in Sachsenwald that the police had to be summoned periodically to maintain order. Young people, including the Hitler Youth and their female counterpart, the Bund deutscher Mädel, were everywhere. When Schmeling sparred indoors, people hung from the rafters; outside, uniformed young men and women shouted, “We want to see Max Schmeling!” in much the way they chanted “We want to see our Führer!” in Ober-salzberg. Genuine Schmeling autographs were available, but only to those making donations to the Winterhilfswerk. Not since the heyday of the French champion Georges Carpentier in the 1920s was Europe so worked up over a fight, wrote William L. Shirer, who was covering the story for an American wire service.

  The Nazis were pleased with Schmeling, and said so. “We would hardly know our youth, who in schools all over Germany swing their boxing gloves according to the will of the Führer, if a majority of them weren’t inspired by the silent desire to become a Schmeling,” the Angriff wrote. The paper predicted that Schmeling would win, and that seemed like a safe guess; shocking his hosts, Hamas drank beer and smoked cigarettes during training, and went to the opera and the theater. Then, a week before the fight he tore a ligament in his left arm. Normally he would have sought a postponement, but with $25,000 on the line he couldn’t afford to. Schmeling, on the other hand, was motivated as never before. He could take a punch, Gallico wrote, but not the humiliation Hamas had inflicted on him in Philadelphia. He would be more dangerous than ever before.

  Against all odds, the Hanseatenhalle was ready in time, though only after a fashion: it remained unheated, and fans were urged to bring blankets and overshoes. Once again, cars and extra trains from all over Germany converged on Hamburg. For wealthier fight fans, Deutsche Lufthansa offered a special round-trip flight from Berlin to Hamburg. Shirer reported that after requests from “television enthusiasts” in London, New York, Paris, and Rome, the Germans had decided to put “parts of the fight on the air in pictures and sound.” He went on to say that Schmeling, whom he described as Germany’s sole “non-political hero,” was disappointed that Hitler was not coming to the fight; the Führer, it seemed, had a cold. To the great offense of the Germans, who thought of themselves as consummate sportsmen, Hamas insisted that one of the ring judges be an American. The job went to Sparrow Robertson, the veteran sportswriter and boulevardier of the Paris Herald Tribune. Wearing his reportorial hat, Robertson described Jacobs arriving at Le Havre with “a bodyguard of four very husky-appearing fellows,” then making an incongruous appearance at an official dinner in Hamburg on the eve of the fight. Jacobs again went unmentioned in the German press, though one paper noted the presence at that dinner of “some of the people whom we as National Socialists easily could have done without.”

  March 10, 1935, was a beautiful, sunny Sunday in Hamburg, and the hall filled quickly—with fans from England, France, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Holland, and Poland as well as from all over Germany—once the doors were opened. The Nazi government ordered seventy tickets for the fight. Goebbels, Heinrich Himmler, and the interior minister, Wilhelm Frick, had planned to attend, but for reasons that were never made clear, canceled at the last moment. Various other dignitaries and officials were on hand, though, including some of Germany’s top film and stage stars, like Emil Jannings. Sausage vendors in chef’s garb hawked their victuals. Every surface was festooned with swastikas, as were lapels and what one starry-eyed British reporter called the “gay” armlets of the storm troopers. Over the loudspeaker, people were urged to take their seats—or, to be more precise, their spots on the crowded wooden benches. Inside and outside the building were thousands of uniformed men—fifteen thousand, someone said, though to Trevor Wignall of the London Daily Express the number seemed higher, and all quite unnecessary. “Any barked order finds the German of today very ready to obey,” he wrote. “The attendance may not have been wholly hand-picked, but it was so definitely and blusteringly Nazi that it could easily have served as the background and chorus for one of Hitler’s screaming speeches.”

  Jacobs, naturally, was barred from Schmeling’s corner. One report placed him in a neutral corner, another sitting way back in the crowd, while Jacobs himself said he sat in the press seats. He was chewing his cigar, because that’s all he could do with it: smoking had been banned in the hall when it looked as if the Führer, who was notoriously opposed to tobacco, might come. Various officials took the ring microphone to give the usual hosannas to Hitler. The eyes of the sports world were on Hamburg, said Erich Rüdiger, the new head of the German boxing federation; at long last, German boxing was assuming its rightful place in the world. “Sieg Heil!” he shouted three times. In each instance the throng responded mightily, all but rattling the windows in the giant shed. A kind of Nazi tide washed over even the wary Wignall. “Nearest the ring are gaunt-faced, fit-as-a-fiddle Storm Troopers,” he wrote. “It is a marvelous spectacle now. The best-disciplined attendance the
world has ever known are ready to give their countryman, Schmeling, the reception of his life.” Schmeling then climbed into the ring and gave the Nazi salute. “What happens now is not a mere welcome,” Wignall continued. “It is a hope, a prayer, a heartfelt command from the nation. I hear sighs from women such as are usually heard in cathedrals, and muttered comments from men who in the years ago were associated with battle grounds.” Hamas, meantime, received only polite applause.

  Once the fight began Schmeling’s fists quickly found their range; Hamas’s arm injury and lax training left him defenseless. Returning to his corner at the end of the fourth round, Schmeling told Machon that Hamas had had it; his only fear now was hurting him. The man doing the German play-by-play, Arno Hellmis of the Völkischer Beobachter, could not contain his enthusiasm: Schmeling was “like a tiger,” “merciless,” “controlled,” and “imperturbably calm,” he told the German radio audience. Three times in the sixth round, Hamas went down for a nine count. By the end of the seventh, he was barely standing, and the crowd was calling for a halt. But the referee, a Belgian, was hamstrung by his instructions: believing that the world would pounce on any sign of unfairness, fearing that such perceptions could jeopardize the forthcoming Berlin Olympics, the Germans had decreed that the fight must end unequivocally, with absolutely no room for argument. That meant a knockout. Between the seventh and eighth rounds, the referee begged Hamas’s seconds to quit, but they refused.

  Thus, what began as a rout became a slaughter. Even hardened fight fans were sickened by the grisly spectacle. By the eighth round, Hamas actually looked near death. Hellmis later said that Schmeling was merciful, throwing body punches rather than yet more blows to Hamas’s head. Others insisted Schmeling kept tattooing Hamas with his right, laughing as he did. By the ninth round, the rigid discipline inside the Hanseatenhalle had broken down: even some of the storm troopers were begging the referee to intercede. Finally he called the fight. A deafening roar filled the hall. There was a frenzy in the ring; photographers climbed through the ropes, and the storm troopers threw them out. But perhaps because they didn’t know who he was, or because he was standing at Schmeling’s side, they left Jacobs alone, whom Schmeling had lifted up into the ring.

  Eyewitness accounts of what ensued vary, though perhaps they were merely successive snapshots in a great and swiftly flowing drama. According to the Angriff, the celebration swelled “into a hurricane,” with the loudspeaker unintelligible even with the volume turned all the way up. Wignall, on the other hand, was struck by a “silence that could almost be felt.” As Hamas’s seconds dragged him to his corner, the crowd froze, as if waiting for some command or signal telling them what to do. Then, Wignall recalled, something thin and fairylike, “the most beautiful tenor voice I thought I had ever heard,” sounded in the distance, breaking up the stillness. It was a recording of Lauritz Melchior, singing the “Prize Song” from Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. Wignall asked Arthur Bülow, Schmeling’s deposed manager, who was seated at his side, why it was playing now. Bülow looked around, making sure that no storm troopers were nearby. “Hitler’s favorite,” he whispered.

  An official from the German boxing federation draped a laurel wreath with Germany’s colors around Schmeling’s neck, and the fading strains of Wagner were overtaken by “Deutschland über Alles,” starting somewhere in the back rows, picking up ferocity as it rolled forward. Only two times had Box-Sport’s editor ever heard the German anthem arise spontaneously at a boxing event; each time, Schmeling had provided the spark. As the words wafted across the cavernous hall, Schmeling and those around him stiffened. Up went Schmeling’s arm, his hand still encased in his bloodied glove, and he began to sing along. Twenty-five thousand onlookers also raised their arms. Even the barely conscious Hamas, his left cheek puffed up like some grotesque Zephyr, managed to extend his arm. Jacobs was momentarily at a loss. But everyone else was saluting, he thought, and he was in plain sight; what else was he to do? So up went his right arm, too, though with a cigar nestled between his fingers. The photographers captured the scene: Schmeling’s arm was stiff and resolute, while Jacobs’s was more limp, as if halfheartedly hailing a cab. If he lived to be one hundred years old, Wignall later wrote, he would never forget the scene in the Hanseatenhalle that day: “German men with their eyes tight closed and singing their hearts out,” he wrote. “German women with their hands to their breasts as though at devotion. Thousands of men in uniform, stiff as ramrods, but with their right palms upraised…. This was the soul of a nation breathing out its aspirations. ‘Germany over all.’” Not even in August 1914, he went on, had they sung that song so fervently. “A strident voice, that must have belonged to a one-time sergeant-major, bellowed something in German,” he went on. “Instantly 25,000 men and women echoed the command. ‘Sieg heil!’ It swept the oblong building as a wind sweeps a street. ‘Sieg heil!’ Never have I believed such a chorus possible.” Up went the arms, along with thirteen more jubilant chants— Germany’s statement to the world “that it is not only free again, but ready to march at a signal.” It was only a boxing match, but unfolding before Wignall was, to him, the future of a continent: Germany was shouting itself into another war. “I have had all I want of war,” Wignall wrote once he’d returned to England. “Never again do I want to climb into a uniform. But if the screaming and cheering continue in Germany I may have to, and so may you.”

  The crowd then moved on to the “Horst Wessel Song,” sung, as one foreign observer put it, “in all crudeness” by everyone there. Some of those nearest the ring, who’d witnessed the butchery most closely, stood in silence, put off by what they considered the poor sportsmanship. “They knew that Hamas, for all his poor showing, had given the hysterical crowd a demonstration of that courage about which Nazi leaders continually are talking,” wrote Albion Ross of The New York Times. Schmeling, too, Ross sensed, was offended, and had sneaked out of the ring before all the raised arms had descended. And that was somehow fitting, because the celebrations, in the hall, then in the streets, then all night in the bars and breweries—“locals with sausages covered in mustard in one hand, and mugs of beer in the other climbed tables, singing old songs, celebrating in their way the victory of their compatriot,” a reporter for a French paper wrote— were less for him than for his country. “Germany has outstripped the seemingly undefeatable America,” Box-Sport later declared. But with its extraordinary pageantry, the Schmeling-Hamas fight had proved that the two entities, boxer and country, had become virtually interchangeable. Dogged, written off, disrespected, determined to confound the critics and establish supremacy, Schmeling, and Germany itself, had come roaring back. Soon he would stand astride the world, and his country would, too.

  Untouched except for a small red mark on one eyelid, Schmeling returned to his hotel. The first person to congratulate his wife, he told reporters, had been Hitler, who had been listening at Berchtesgaden. “That’s a real fine thing for a politician to do,” he said. Schmeling got his own telegram from Hitler, which left him beaming. There was more to come in the morning papers. “The superiority of the ex-world champion is difficult to describe,” the Angriff enthused. “One doesn’t know what one should praise more, his strategic achievement, his unforgettable fighting morale, or his left, which we have never seen so perfect before in German rings.” The Americans would have loved to see Schmeling lose, the 8 Uhr-Blatt declared, but they’d underestimated him, and all Germans, for that matter. They didn’t fully grasp German tenacity and endurance, German energy, German vigor and discipline.

  Everyone began looking forward. “Now we get Baer,” Schmeling yelled jubilantly after the fight, embracing Joe Jacobs as he did. Schmeling could not be denied a fight with Baer now, notwithstanding the intrigues and profiteering so popular with the Yankees, the 8 Uhr-Blatt predicted. One official in Berlin said that the city would be the ideal site for such a fight. All this required some fancy ideological footwork. “Among the amusing sidelights of Germany today is
the denial that Baer is a Jew,” Wignall wrote. It was hard to square this euphoria with the Nazis’ previous antipathy toward professional athletics. But the Angriff now maintained that even a professional contest had value: two fighters at so lofty a level were “altars to manliness,” prime recruiters for the worthiest and most important sport. For this reason Hamas was propped up in defeat as assiduously as Schmeling was in victory. All talk that he was “second-rate” suddenly ceased. That was scant solace for Hamas himself, who suffered from a host of infirmities following the fight: a spinal injury, numbness in his leg, slurred speech, double vision. Wignall, who visited him five days later, said he’d never felt sorrier for anyone; it looked as if Hamas would never lift his fists again. And he never did, at least for another prizefight. His career was over.

  Schmeling had no such problems, and made his way back to Ober-salzberg for another meeting with Hitler. Pictures soon appeared of the Führer there reading a newspaper account of the fight, with a smiling Schmeling peering over his shoulder. In all likelihood, whatever newspaper the two men were reading did not include a photograph of Jacobs giving the Nazi salute. But C. W. Gilfert of the Fränkische Tageszeitung had seen the photo, and to him it meant that the process of cleansing German boxing of its Jews remained infuriatingly, inexcusably incomplete; Schmeling would be well advised, he said, to make sure his stables were judenrein. According to Schmeling’s memoirs, the picture also brought him a dressing-down from the German sports commissar, Hans von Tschammer und Osten, along with demands from both him and Goebbels that he fire Jacobs.

  Jacobs was now getting it from every direction. The day he returned to America, the infamous picture appeared in several New York newspapers. “When Schmeling Won … And Yussel ‘Heiled,’” blared the Daily News. All over town, Jacobs found himself ridiculed and excoriated. One paper noted that when he got off the boat, he was wearing a brown suit, shirt, shoes, and socks—“just to carry out the Nazi motif.” “In the Broadway delicatessens and nighteries where Playboy Jacobs is a familiar figure the waiters were conspiring to put Mickey Finns in his herring,” wrote Jack Miley in the Daily News. “In the sports world, it is being considered a big joke, but in every Jew’s heart it calls forth disgust,” said the Yiddish Morgn-zhurnal. Jacobs swatted off his critics. As he saw it, he’d had no choice in the matter. “What the ’ell would you do?” he asked one reporter. “When a band plays the ‘Star-Spangled Banner’ you stand up and take your hat off. And you expect everyone else to.” “When in Rome, eat pasta fazoole,” he told another reporter. To anyone challenging his religious credentials, he insisted he was “500 percent Jewish” and that he wore tsitsis, the fringed undergarments of the Orthodox. He did have his defenders. “What did these birds expect Yussel to do—stand up in Germany and sing the Internationale’?” wrote a News reader from the Bronx. Gallico considered it much ado about very little: to him the gesture was no more than what children do when they want to leave the room. People had better get used to this saluting business anyway, he said; there’d be plenty of it at the Berlin Olympics. The Jewish athletes who would be participating—and who would be “well and courteously treated” while there, he predicted— might do some of it themselves.