The fight was on everyone’s lips. When British reporters besieged Felix Frankfurter, then a key Roosevelt adviser, for his comments on the Republican platform, he feinted. “Was not that a surprise about the way Schmeling beat Louis?” he asked. Frank Nugent of The New York Times—who rechristened Louis the “Brown Bouncer”—pitied any movie unlucky enough to appear with the fight film. “Herr Schmeling’s was… the most devastating right we’ve observed in a theater, more compelling even than the right to live, the right to love and the other rights which the film industry has defended at one time or another,” he wrote. A British reporter fed up with Yankee contempt for European boxers thought America had gotten a well-earned comeuppance. “If a German, with the best of his fighting years behind him, can beat a young coloured boy who had the whole of the United States hypnotized, then the fist-swinging business here cannot be all that is claimed for it,” he wrote.
The press kept Schmeling company in his hotel suite on June 23 as he packed for Germany. If he beat Braddock in September, he pledged, he’d defend his title the following June against anyone, Louis included. He was still wearing his sunglasses, removing them only to go over his receipts and to get a shave. Schmeling left New York late in the afternoon, ate steamed clams and lobster at Mike Jacobs’s house in Red Bank, New Jersey, then headed for the Naval Air Station in Lakehurst, where the dirigible was docked. There, a thousand people had gathered in the pouring rain to see what one local reporter called “two marvels of the Twentieth Century”: the world’s largest airship, and the man who had just knocked out Joe Louis. And of the two, Schmeling proved the greater attraction. A mob of photographers, plus many of his fifty-six fellow passengers, took his picture, sunglasses and all. He was presented with a cake shaped like a boxing ring, in which a marshmallow fighter stood erect over his prostrate, chocolate-covered opponent. “I just want to touch him! I just want to touch him!” a young woman shouted as she lunged toward him.
Schmeling pushed his way through the crowd and boarded a bus that ferried him to the enormous aircraft, moored half a mile away. As he stood on the gangplank, the last hand he shook was Mike Jacobs’s. “Get Braddock ready!” Schmeling told him. Having paid his American taxes and settled some old debts, he was leaving with only $12,000. He still faced German taxes, the money the boycotters had warned would land in Hitler’s coffers: another $40,000, by one estimate. Yet the balance sheet didn’t include the most precious item in his luggage: a film of the fight, for which Schmeling had bought the German rights, and for a song. Some speculated it would make as much as $800,000, with Schmeling pocketing a quarter of that.
The zeppelin, a swastika on its tail, lifted up and out of Lakehurst at 11:25 p.m., fighting its way skyward through the raindrops. It quickly flew over Lakewood, over the Stanley Hotel, over some of the golf courses Louis had so loved. Within an hour it was over the Statue of Liberty. It moved uptown along the Hudson, its searchlights trained on the skyscrapers below. It floated over the Garment center, over the Hippodrome, over the pier where he’d disembarked, over Madison Square Garden and Jack Dempsey’s and Jacobs Beach. Before reaching Yankee Stadium, as the Upper West Side blended into Harlem, it took a sharp right, grazing the tip of Central Park, then disappeared into the clouds as it headed northeast toward the Atlantic. Its journey to Germany would take fifty hours, enough time for Max Schmeling to imagine many things. But no one could have conjured up the stupendous reception awaiting him there.
* To some British reporters, the violence in Harlem only proved the wisdom of the color line. “Schmeling has done boxing a service,” wrote Geoffrey Simpson of the Daily Mail. “He has post-dated to the distant future the prospect of a coloured heavyweight ruling the ring.” Given the “outrageous” scenes in Harlem, Boxing agreed. No sport, it said, “should be made the means of national uprising and revolt.”
* The two, a reporter for the Rand Daily Mail complained, “talked at a rate at which only American broadcast commentators can talk, and in Johannesburg it sounded just as if an auction sale were being held in the ring…. No amount of dial manipulation could make the description intelligible.”
Climbing Back
TO SCHMELING, riding aboard the Hindenburg was as thrilling as beating Louis. He couldn’t sleep, so busy was he staring out the window. When the dirigible passed over Doorn, the residence of the former kaiser, Wilhelm II, it dipped several times, and Schmeling could see him waving his hat. Around four on the afternoon of June 26, it flew over Cologne. And when it approached Frankfurt, five fighter planes formed an escort. Below were ten thousand people, many of whom had waited for hours in the heat, humidity, and tumult as vendors sold Max Schmeling Almonds and Anny Ondra Fruit Drops. Among those in the crowd were Schmeling’s mother and wife, who had arrived that morning from Berlin on a plane Goebbels had supplied—Ondra’s first flight ever.
Around ten minutes past five, the giant silver-gray zeppelin floated silently into view over Frankfurt. Someone stood at the cockpit window and waved. It had to be Max! After doing a “lap of honor” around the city, the dirigible landed. Schmeling, fittingly, was let out first, before the zeppelin was even moved to its hangar, where the mere mortals would disembark. “It seemed as if a hurricane were let loose,” one paper reported. “The crowd waved, rejoiced, and cried out their congratulations to him from afar and wanted to rush to him.” A band of Brown Shirts played, but the music was drowned out by the exuberant fans. Schmeling greeted his wife and his mother. He and Ondra received flowers galore, including an enormous bouquet of carnations from a blond girl representing the Bund deutscher Mädel. Another bouquet came from the City of Frankfurt, presented to “the greatest spokesman for Germany.”
There were speeches from Nazi and municipal officials, which were broadcast throughout the country. Schmeling, too, said a few words. Then, as the crowd surged toward him, chanting his name, and hundreds reached out to shake his hand, he walked arm in arm with his mother and his wife to the parking lot. There, they hopped into an open car and headed through the teeming streets to the old city hall, where tens of thousands more had gathered, and where throngs surrounded his limousine. Three small girls brought him additional bouquets before he went inside to inscribe his name into the “Golden Book of the City of Frankfurt.” Outside, people chanted “We want to see our Schmeling! Where is Max?” He then went out to the balcony to greet them, and gave them a Hitler salute. “Frankfurt couldn’t have been more excited had Goethe come down from Mount Olympus,” a French newspaper reported.
Then it was back to the airport, and the next leg of his triumphant tour: Berlin. En route, as Hitler’s personal photographer, Heinrich Hoffman, recorded the scene, Schmeling recounted his recent exploits to his admirers. He also talked to two of Nazi Germany’s most important sports editors, Herbert Obscherningkat of the 12 Uhr-Blatt and Heinz Siska of the Angriff. Shortly after the fight, Walter Winchell had expressed the hope that Schmeling would bring a positive message about America back to Germany. “Even those of us who bet against Schmeling admire his courage and realize that the best man won,” Winchell told his radio audience. “And some of us hope that when he arrives in Germany Thursday by way of the Zep that he will tell them all of the great sportsmanship displayed by Americans, who love a fair fight.” Instead, with a candor and venom he had rarely revealed in the United States, Schmeling unloaded on the American press.* They had made him seem contemptible, like a criminal, he complained, referring to the comparisons to the Lindbergh kidnapper. All the talk of Louis’s superiority hurt the gate, he went on; whites didn’t want to see one of their own “clobbered by a mulatto.” But the Americans were pleased by the outcome, he said; Louis’s success had made blacks brazen, leading them to ambush and throw rocks at cars, and his loss had subdued them. He described the enthusiastic letters he’d received from the South, and criticized the “loudmouthed manner” of Americans who considered a Louis victory inevitable. By putting uppity American blacks in their place, Siska wrote, Schmeling ha
d bestowed a great gift on unappreciative white America. “And [Schmeling] says that he alone would never have had the power, had he not known how much support he had in his homeland,” Siska continued. “He was allowed to speak with the Führer and his ministers, and from that moment on his will to victory was without limit.”
Streetcar service to Berlin’s Tempelhof Airport was increased to accommodate the anticipated crowds. Many people were already in place by two in the afternoon, even though Schmeling wasn’t due before nine. Between musical selections, an announcer updated Schmeling’s progress above the Reich: Frankfurt, then Erfurt, Dessau, Beelitz. Hundreds of people streamed across the field when Schmeling finally landed. Greeting him were an honor guard of two hundred amateur boxers in blue tights, along with state secretary Walter Funk; someone representing sports minister Tschammer und Osten; one of Hitler’s adjutants; and other assorted Nazi functionaries. Luft Hansa had brought a special “lighting car” with huge spotlights so that people could see more clearly what was unfolding. Schmeling and Ondra were presented with a long cake, plus free passes to the Olympics. There were more speeches and several thunderous “Heil!”s. A ladder truck, normally used to board planes, was brought out so that everyone could see the happy couple, and Schmeling was lifted and carried off the field.
When he reached his home, he discovered a triumphal arch outside, reading “Welcome, Max.” Storm Troopers (the Sturm Abteilung, or SA) had decorated the house with a swastika and a Reich eagle, and had hung a banner containing a poem:
Lieber Max, sei Willkommen,
Louis haste Mass genommen.
Glücklich biste wieder da,
Heil und Sieg Dir, die SA
Dear Max, welcome home,
You really gave Louis a thrashing.
Happily, you’re back again,
Hail and victory to you, the SA
Inside, the house looked like a flower store and gift shop, stacked with everything from marzipan boxing gloves to letters from children. Ondra had had to buy extra laundry baskets to accommodate all of the communiqués. Schmeling dined with Goebbels that night. The next afternoon, accompanied by his mother and his wife, he met with Hitler in the Reich’s chancellory. In formal fashion, Hitler thanked Schmeling on behalf of the German people and, over cake, pressed for details about the fight. He lamented that he could not see the film, and when he was told that it was in customs, he arranged to have it fetched. When it arrived, they sat down and watched: Hitler “gave a running commentary and every time I landed a punch he slapped his thigh with delight,” Schmeling later wrote. “Goebbels, listen—this isn’t going to be used as part of the Wochenschau [weekly newsreel]!” Hitler decreed. “This film is going to be shown as a main feature. Throughout the entire Reich!” “Dramatic and thrilling,” Goebbels wrote in his diary. “The last round is quite wonderful. He really knocks out the Negro.” The gloves Schmeling wore in the Louis fight would soon hang at the Roxy-Bar, Schmeling’s favorite hangout in Berlin, alongside the pair he’d used against Young Stribling in 1931 and Jack Sharkey the following year. (The right glove in the newest pair was softer because of the great workout it had endured.)
Four days after his return, Schmeling’s festive homecoming was rudely interrupted when lightning struck the thatched roof of his country home in Bad-Saarow, forcing the Schmelings to flee outside. The fire spread quickly, and Schmeling went back in to salvage whatever he could. Most of his boxing mementos were lost, but, as the German papers duly noted, Schmeling managed to save a bust of Hitler given him by the Führer himself. Schmeling told one reporter that it was the first object he retrieved. (In a postwar interview Schmeling dismissed the bust as “the most worthless kitsch” and insisted it had been saved mistakenly by the son of the sculptor who’d made it.) Out of sadness for the Schmelings, Goebbels canceled a garden party scheduled for that day.
Schmeling’s victory had broadened the potential market for the fight films. In countries where, as the Los Angeles Times put it, “a white man must not be beaten”—India, Australia, much of colonial Africa—“the pictures would have been barred instantly” had Louis won. Now they could be shown there. Of course by far the biggest newly opened market was Germany itself. But what Germans would view was not the straight, unadulterated footage shown elsewhere, including in Vienna, where local Nazis disrupted screenings with cries of “Heil Hitler!” “Heil Germany!” and “Heil Schmeling!” Instead, they would view it as Goebbels wanted them to, cut and pasted and repackaged. Max Schmelings Sieg—ein deutscher Sieg, it was to be called. “Max Schmeling’s Victory: A German Victory.”
In early July, ads for the film began appearing in mass-circulation newspapers and magazines. “A Film That Concerns All Germans,” read one. A record number of prints were produced, and theater owners were promised a historic document as well as one of the biggest hits ever to hit the screens. Striking yellow posters for it popped up all over Berlin. The hype proved quite unnecessary; demand was enormous, and besides, with clips omitted from the weekly newsreels, it was the only way to see the fight. The premiere was set for Dresden on July 8. The next day it would open at forty-seven theaters in Berlin alone, and soon it would play throughout Germany.
The film began with a cultural oddity, as various Jewish names—Mike Jacobs among them—appeared in the credits. Nor was there any way to hide Joe Jacobs. (To assure themselves that there were no more Jews involved than was strictly necessary, the Nazis made Hellmis prove that he and his wife were pure Aryans before letting him narrate. This Hellmis did with birth and baptismal certificates dating back to his great-grandparents.) The earliest scenes were from Louis’s training camp. Elevating Louis, at least as a boxer, would make his fall all the more dramatic, and this the film set out to do. “Long before the fight he was in excellent form,” Hellmis declared. “In the last year alone he clobbered the world’s five best in a few rounds.” Then the scene switched to Napanoch, and a shot of Schmeling exercising. “In every one of his movements there speaks a concentrated energy,” said Hellmis, “a will that shall be heard in the following weeks.” Hellmis himself then appeared, at his microphone, and Germans could see the man so many had merely heard: roundish, fair-haired, utterly serious. “Max Schmeling’s fight against Joe Louis became the most difficult of his long, successful career,” he declared. “His victory was more than merely the success of a German athlete. It became a German victory.” Really, he suggested, it was a victory for whites worldwide, who greeted the outcome “with genuine joy and admiration.”
“Everything, but everything, spoke for [Louis]: his unusual, racially-conditioned gift for boxing, his youth, his unheard-of punching power, and his super-human toughness,” Hellmis went on. “He [Max] alone never lost courage. He believed in his ability and his power. And when, finally, in the twelfth round the opponent lay annihilated on the canvas, then Schmeling won the warm and honest sympathy of the Americans. This German had accomplished what no one believed possible! The most dramatic fight in the history of the sport of boxing, which you will now see, is… a wonderful document attesting to the ability of a will as hard as Krupp steel to accomplish everything.”
Then came the fight, beginning with Louis’s stumbling entrance into the ring. From Schmeling’s first blow, Hellmis said, Louis could tell that this was no ordinary adversary. This man was tough, and needed to be, for the black man was incredibly strong, incredibly dangerous. “Fighting is rough in American rings,” Hellmis explained. “The rules aren’t as strict as in Europe. Holding is allowed, as are punches to the kidney.” By the fourth round, Schmeling’s strategy—taking all those left jabs in order to get over his right—had emerged. Schmeling fired one at “the wooly head of the Negro.” “There, a smash! And again! He’s wobbling, he’s wobbling, he’s wobbling! The page has turned!” The moment was repeated in slow motion. Louis was down. Already, Schmeling was master of the ring.
Not surprisingly, the film made no mention of Schmeling’s late punch after the fifth round. T
he demoralized Louis began fouling Schmeling, and Schmeling retaliated with a mighty punch. “That was for the low blow, Joe!” Hellmis exclaimed. By the twelfth, the incredibly tough “nature boy from Alabama” was tottering, staggering, completely shattered. Then, in slow motion, came his final, fateful low blow. “A boxer has to be able to control his punches,” Hellmis scolded. “That won’t turn out well, Joe Louis! You’ll pay for that!” The masses in Yankee Stadium stood on their seats as Schmeling put Louis away. “Max! More, more, more still! More Max! The right! Once again! There he lies! Out! Out! Out! Out! Out!” The film ended with Balogh’s announcement and the German national anthem.
Schmelings Sieg was a crude effort, with none of the gorgeous images or production values of more sophisticated Nazi productions like Leni Riefenstahl’s. But it swept the country, giving Germans everywhere a chance to celebrate all over again. In Dresden, every show in two theaters sold out, in part because Schmeling himself appeared at each. At the dénouement, the local newspaper related, audience members clapped and screamed “as if they hadn’t known about the outcome of the fight before”; when Schmeling appeared, the “applause wouldn’t end.” “Maxe! Maxe! Maxe!” the crowd outside, using the familiar form of “Max,” chanted whenever Schmeling emerged. Late into the night, mobs lingered outside Schmeling’s hotel, hoping for a glimpse of him. One fan made it into Schmeling’s bathroom.
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