By the Sword

by Richard Cohen

  His plans for competitive glory frustrated, Heydrich turned to the sport’s administration. He announced that it was his aim “to raise [saber fencing] to that high level to which, on account of the stature and power of the Reich, it was entitled even in the international arena.” His ambition focused on the post of president of the International Fencing Federation (FIE). In pursuit of this new sinecure he would combine intimidation and intrigue to a remarkable degree.

  At the outbreak of war the FIE was based in Brussels because its president, the Belgian fencer Paul Anspach, lived there. Anspach had been elected in September 1939; his presidency was set to run until December 31, 1940. His successor would in due course have been chosen at a congress in the spring—but it never took place because of the German invasion. In the days before Brussels fell, a number of Germans and suspected Nazi sympathizers had been deported, and some murdered en route. At a hearing organized by the Occupation authorities it was established that Anspach, although under suspicion, had played no part in the murders; but the interrogation revealed his place in the fencing hierarchy. This was duly reported to Heydrich, who at once sent a detachment to seize the FIE archives and take them to the Nazi Party headquarters in Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse in Berlin. Heydrich, meanwhile, was busy consolidating his power over fencing in the Reich, a goal he duly achieved in December 1940, when he was elected head of the German Fencing Association. This gave him quite a different authority for dealing with Anspach, whom in February 1941 he now summoned to Berlin. Anspach’s family warned him not to touch any cigarette Heydrich offered him, as it could well be poisoned. When the two men met, the S.S. leader explained that, as part of the new order in Europe, the German federation, together with those of Italy and Hungary, would found a new European alliance to replace the FIE. The archives would thus remain in Berlin. Heydrich reminded Anspach that his term of office had already expired and that he was entitled to carry on FIE business only because a new election was impossible. Anspach was “invited” to transfer his powers to Heydrich until a new congress could be convened.

  Anspach replied that he was the elected president of world fencing, and so he would remain. Despite this defiance, he was allowed to return to Brussels unharmed, but a letter from Heydrich soon followed, demanding his resignation. Again Anspach refused. He did not write back directly to Heydrich but instead sent a furious letter to the president of the International Olympic Committee. For Heydrich, however, as one historian puts it, “watching suspiciously and parrying an opponent’s intentions, reacting with lightning speed to unforeseen situations” were second nature. He simply tried another move, enlisting the help of the chairman of the Italian Fencing Federation, Dr. Basletta, who was a friend of Anspach. This time Anspach yielded. Heydrich thus added yet another office to his burgeoning portfolio; but for several weeks Anspach had resisted with almost suicidal courage. Maybe Heydrich respected a brave man when he met one.

  The fencing world did not have its new leader for long. On May 27, 1942, while serving as an all-too-active deputy “protector” of Bohemia and Moravia, Heydrich was wounded when three Czech parachutists, acting in concert with the British Special Operations Executive, ambushed his official car. That morning “his dark-green, open Mercedes was unescorted and still unarmored as his driver slowed and changed down for the sharp bend where Benes’ agents waited,” reported the British historian Peter Padfield (Edvard Benes had been president of Czechoslovakia until shortly before Hitler’s invasion). “One gave the signal of his approach. Another at the bend stepped forward, raised a sub-machine gun from beneath his raincoat, aimed and squeezed the trigger. The gun jammed. The third man, waiting in reserve with a specially designed bomb, lobbed it at the car. It exploded under the rear wheel, driving fragments of metal, leather seat-cover, stuffing and pieces of Heydrich’s own uniform into his internal organs. Despite this he leaped from the car with pistol raised, giving chase and firing at one of his attackers before collapsing.”15 Afterward he was rushed to hospital and operated on by Czech doctors, but the damage was too great, and on June 4 he died. In retaliation, Hitler razed the entire Czech village of Lidice, massacring its adult male population and enslaving the women and children.

  Anspach survived the war, but the FIE records were accidentally burned by American troops after the fall of Berlin, when disinfecting the sports stadium to which they had been moved. After the war, another kind of disinfection, a “commission for purging,” was set up by the FIE, and by 1947 eighteen fencers were expelled by their federations for “acts against the FIE”: three Czechs, four Austrians, five Norwegians, a Pole, two Dutchmen, and three Belgians. Not one German.

  IT IS TEMPTING TO CONFINE THE STORY OF FASCISM AND FENCING TO the major “villains”—to Mussolini, Mosley, and Heydrich. But other stories from the period paint a more complex picture of honor and betrayal in the world of fascist fencing.

  In 1936, four days before the saber event at the Berlin Olympics, the Polish team’s coach, Leon Koza-Kozarski, was giving a lesson to his country’s number one sabreur, Antoni Sobik, when his blade broke and pierced Sobik’s right hand. The two men went at once to the first-aid post, where the German doctor on duty examined Sobik carefully, took him for X rays, and over the next two days dressed the wound twice daily. The blade had gone deep but had missed vital muscle and tendons, and Sobik was able to fence after all, reaching the final and coming seventh.

  At the outbreak of war in 1939, Koza-Kozarski was commanding a regiment on the southwestern border in Silesia. “We fought in a forest, and I had so few soldiers that I had to place them every 50 meters,” he later recalled. When the German infantry got too close, he would shout, “Fix bayonets!” The Germans learned to recognize the characteristic sound of the rings being slapped into place and held back, not wanting to risk hand-to-hand combat. By September 20, after holding out for several days, the Polish troops were finally encircled and cut down by German machine guns. Koza-Kozarski feigned death among the corpses of his men, but when a young soldier kicked his back hard he cried out. He was taken prisoner and sent to a camp in Hohenstein Fort in the Owly Mountains, where “unwanted” Polish officers were confined to be physically and mentally broken. “The living conditions were quite unbearable. Because of my knowledge of German I was appointed an interpreter.” Despite this slightly privileged position, his health deteriorated and he was convinced that he had not long to live.

  One day the officers were mustered in the main courtyard. The camp was being visited by an important military commission. Because of his duties as an interpreter, Koza-Kozarski was in the front rank during the inspection. One of the colonels brought himself up short and asked tersely, “What are you doing here?” Koza-Kozarski shivered in fear: if he were recognized as coming from Poznán, where he had participated in the 1918 Polish Uprising, he would be shot.

  “Don’t you recognize me?” the German officer went on. It was the doctor who had treated Antoni Sobik in 1936. “I can’t speak to you now. I will do my best to see if I can get you transferred.” That was the last time the two men met, but a few weeks later Koza-Kozarski was removed to a camp in Murnau, where living conditions were much better. “I owe my life to that German doctor,” he said.

  After the war he had returned to his home town of Katowice, where he met Antoni Sobik. “Do you remember how you cut my fencing hand in Berlin?” Sobik asked him. “We were both lucky it was nothing serious.” “Yes,” said Koza-Kozarski, “it was a lucky wound all right.”16

  THE POLISH COACH WAS NOT THE ONLY FORTUNATE ONE. NICOLO Perno was born in Naples in 1910, graduated from the famous masters’ school in Rome, and was regularly his country’s saber and épée professional champion. By 1936 he was one of Italy’s top épée coaches. After their successes at the Berlin Games the Italians were approached by the German federation, who asked if a senior coach could help rebuild German fencing. Nedo Nadi, a great admirer of Perno’s, asked if he would accept the post. Perno was soon coaching the German épée team.


  In 1943, when the Italians changed sides, Perno became overnight an enemy alien in his adopted country. He was stationed at the Italian consulate in Frankfurt, and it was there that two Gestapo agents arrested him. He was allowed one last visit to his eight-months-pregnant wife. As he was saying good-bye, the telephone rang. One of the agents answered and made terse replies to the caller, whose name Perno never learned; but he came to believe that a pupil had ensured that he was not taken to a camp but placed under house arrest instead.

  A few days later, as the city suffered a massive air raid, Perno and his wife were spirited away by his young fencers to a castle in the south of Germany, a thousand meters above sea level. This was the home of Siegfried Lerdon, one-time épée champion of Germany and a member of its team at the 1936 Games, whose wife had studied in Milan and spoke perfect Italian. Perno and his family stayed there for several months, in which time Perno built a special hideaway in the estate’s forest, where, when the Gestapo returned, he hid for a year, surviving on what he could catch or eat. Then in 1945 the Americans came.

  By 1948 he was back training the German épéeists, but in 1954 he returned to Italy where he became accepted as one of the leading masters of his time. Over the years he trained the Italian Pentathlon team, the Mexicans, the Puerto Ricans, and the Taiwan Chinese. For twenty years he taught fencing at the National Academy of Dramatic Art, and was president of the Italian Masters’ Academy. The Germans gave him their most prestigious medal. In his ninety-second year, he wrote to me: “The fencing strip has always seemed to me a metaphor for life itself: he who knows how to move on it, how to overcome a rival by honest means, has really discovered how life itself must be.”

  * General De Gaulle was a notable exception—at military school he had to practice every day from 7 to 9 A.M. at swordplay (as well as gymnastics and horsemanship), but despite being nicknamed “Cyrano,” knowing Rostand’s play by heart, and being six feet, five inches tall, he came close to the bottom of his class in fencing. His only other connection with the sport came when he was courting his future wife, Yvonne Vendroux; they went to watch her brother compete in a fencing tournament in Paris, and later that same day De Gaulle proposed.

  † The original adage dates back to 1839, when Edward Bulwer-Lytton wrote Richelieu. In Act II, Scene 2, we hear:

  Beneath the rule of men entirely great,

  The pen is mightier than the sword.

  ‡ Losert (1908–93) also represented Austria in foil and épée, winning all three national titles in 1951. He taught both his children to fence. His son, Roland, won the world senior épée title in 1963. His daughter, Ingrid, elected to fence for Germany and was ranked in the top six in the world.

  Athletes, by and large, are people who are happy to let their actions speak for them, happy to be what they do. As a result, when you talk to an athlete … he’s never likely to feel the least bit divided, or alienated, or one ounce of existential dread.… His is a rare selfishness.

  —RICHARD FORD, The Sportswriter

  I had an old acquaintance, Otto Kahn, who walked down Fifth Avenue with a deformed friend. “You know,” said Kahn, “I used to be a Jew.” His friend responded, “Really? I used to be a hunchback.”

  —STORY TOLD BY GROUCHO MARX

  IN 1928 A YOUNG FENCER, NOT YET EIGHTEEN, REPRESENTED GERMANY at the ninth modern Olympics, in Amsterdam. Forty-six teams took part, the largest number ever, for a festival that stretched from May 17 to August 12. She was already a phenomenon, having won her country’s national title at the age of fourteen. She sensed how hungry her defeated nation was for success, since in the first Games after the war, in 1920, the Belgians had pointedly not invited their invaders of 1914; and four years later the French, while allowing the other former Central Powers, Hungary, Turkey, Bulgaria, and Austria, back into the Games, again excluded Germany. Now at last German sportsmen had a chance to reassert their country’s athletic reputation. The girl was Helene Mayer, and she won the gold medal—Germany’s first Olympic fencing title.

  Mayer was born on December 10, 1910, the second of three children of Ludwig and Ida, a happily married middle-class couple. Her brother Eugen had been born the previous year, and Ludwig Junior followed in 1915. Helene had taken up fencing as a child, encouraged by her father and taught by a coach of the old school, Cavaliere Arturo Gazzera, one of several Italian masters then in Germany. But she was more than a prodigiously talented fencer. She was strikingly beautiful, with fine open features, the body of a model, blue eyes, and long corn-blond hair. When fencing she would wind her tresses around her ears and keep them in place with a wide white headband; sometimes, in the heat of competition, they would escape in an unruly cascade. Back in Germany she quickly became a national celebrity and was given the nickname “Blond Hee,” a shortening of her name that caught the public’s imagination.

  Helene was a celebrity, a Höherer Tochter, Germany’s privileged daughter. President Paul von Hindenburg invited her to tea. In Offenbach, her hometown, a torchlight parade was held in her honor. Plaster of paris statuettes showing her in white figure-hugging fencing kit sold by the thousands. “Helene,” which means “shining” in Greek, seemed the perfect name for the country’s first postwar heroine, uniting national success with the favored influence of Greek culture and sports.

  There was, however, one detail in Golden Hee’s history of which the public was ignorant: her father was Jewish. At that moment, it seemed a good time to be a Jew. In 1871, Jews had been conclusively granted civil rights when the German states united to form the empire. Over the next half century, German Jews assimilated into society, so that by 1910 they had a profound sense of belonging to the Fatherland. It was no secret that Helene was the daughter of Dr. Ludwig Karl Mayer, a prominent Jewish physician, chief of sanitation in Offenbach, where his father had been honorary mayor. Ludwig Mayer was not a practicing Jew, and Helene was not brought up as such, but he was president of the local chapter of the influential Central Organization of German Citizens of Jewish Faith, founded in 1893 to combat anti-Semitism. Helene’s mother Ida was Christian, in a time when intermarriage between Christians and Jews was increasing: by 1910, 13 percent of Jewish men and 10 percent of Jewish women had married a Gentile. Not that Jews were ever more than a small minority: 0.83 percent of the population, 500,000 out of well over 60 million people. There were about 2,000 Jews in Offenbach.

  By 1928 Mein Kampf had been published and Hitler was already using the slogan “The Jews are our misfortune,” but his party was still a minor force: in the elections held that year the National Socialists won 810,000 of 31 million votes cast and only 12 of 491 seats in the Reichstag. Helene felt untouched by it all. In the district where she was brought up, she was called “the Jewish Mayer,” to distinguish her from “the Christian Mayer”—a girl of the same name who lived next door. Why was she not called “the sporting Mayer” or something less loaded, especially as she looked the perfect specimen of Aryan girlhood? Anti-Semitism was there, lurking, but Helene had little connection to or interest in her Jewish background: forced expulsions, murderous prejudice, pogroms seemed to belong to another world.

  In her childhood and teens, Helene excelled at riding, swimming, skiing, and dancing. She was good enough at ballet to have appeared at the age of seven as a soloist, and she continued her ballet training until 1923, when, at thirteen, she performed an evening of dance in her hometown. But her father had been a fencer, and her elder brother, Eugen, had also enthusiastically taken up the sport. Now above all she wanted to fence. She would practice in the family backyard each morning at 6 A.M. before going off to school, using Eugen almost literally as her foil. She first entered the German senior championships in 1924, coming second to an Offenbach teammate; in 1925 she won the title and proceeded to win it again an unprecedented six years in a row.

  Helene was still a schoolgirl and every day would take the Strassenbahn (street railway) from Offenbach to Frankfurt, where from 1921 to 1930 she attended the Schi
llerschule, named after the celebrated poet. On her first entering the school her father wrote to its principal, asking “to excuse my daughter, Helene Mayer, from participation in Israelitischen religious instruction.” His wish, based on his own liberal atheism, was granted, so his daughter grew up without ever exploring her Jewish inheritance. She was a good student, though, bright and lively and intent on going to university.

  When Helene captured the gold medal in 1928, her classmates were delighted. The school noticeboard boasted, “Our Unsere Unterprimanerin [twelfth-grade student] Helene Mayer has won first prize at the Olympic Games in Amsterdam. Heil Hee!” The school commissioned a life-size portrait of its new heroine, which was hung in pride of place in the entrance hall.

  Helene was soon traveling all over Europe, and in 1929 won the European title—effectively the world championship—repeating this victory in Vienna two years later, comprehensively defeating the local champion, Ellen Preis, 5–2 in the final. She also fell in love for the first time, with a naval cadet, Alexander Gaihardt. In April that same year her father died, severing her last tenuous connection with Judaism. By then she was enrolled at Frankfurt University, where she chose to study law and modern languages, planning to join the diplomatic service. But by 1930, spurred by an economic depression that left millions out of work, the Nazis had become the second largest party in the country, and in April 1932 a failing Hindenburg only narrowly managed to keep Hitler out of the presidency. While Helene fenced, her fatherland was in turmoil.