Right: Champion of Youth, February 1937. As his relations with the Nazi regime deepened and he seemed increasingly likely to regain the heavyweight crown, Schmeling became ever more demonized, particularly in the radical press.
Athletes greet Schmeling at the 1936 Berlin Olympics. “In rank and importance he did not seem to be much below Hitler and Göring,” a British journalist wrote.
The anti-Nazi boycott in January 1937 created a great opportunity for Jim Braddock’s manager, Joe Gould, to extricate his fighter from the contract to fight Schmeling and take on a far more lucrative fight with Louis, as Willard Mullin of the New York World-Telegram suggested.
With comic dutifulness, Schmeling trained for a fight that would clearly never happen.
Louis and his entourage—including Blackburn (to Louis’s right) and Louis’s co-managers, Julian Black, (to his left), and John Roxborough (behind Blackburn)—celebrate after Louis knocked out Braddock, June 22, 1937.
The Baltimore Afro-American announces the news.
Jimmy Braddock, eleven stitches in his lips and eye, files out after losing the title.
Above: Shortly after Louis won the crown, his father, Monroe Barrow, surfaced. Long thought dead, he was a patient at the Searcy State Hospital for the Negro Insane in Alabama.
Ring recognized what Louis repeatedly said: he wouldn’t really be champion until he’d beaten Schmeling.
Forty thousand readers tackled the all-important question the Chicago Defender posed in early 1937.
Protestors outside the Hippodrome urge fans to boycott Schmeling’s fight against Harry Thomas, December 1937.
The yellow star makes an early appearance: Schmeling reaches over Harry Thomas, whom he has just knocked out, to punch Samuel Untermyer of the Non-Sectarian Anti-Nazi League on his outsized Jewish nose after the League’s boycott of the fight sputtered. 8 Uhr-Blatt (Nuremberg), December 31, 1937
Though he always insisted he was a sportsman rather than a politician, Schmeling loaned his name and image to pet Nazi causes. Here, along with 48,799,268 other Germans, he votes to ratify the annexation of Austria, April 1938.
Schmeling and Joe Jacobs arrive at Newark Airport from Speculator, New York, site of his training camp for the second Louis fight, June 21, 1938. To Schmeling, flying was not only faster; it was an act of insubordination, a declaration of independence.
The world watches as the rematch looms: Burris Jenkins, New York Journal-American, June 22, 1938.
The Communists leafleted outside Yankee Stadium, but they were too keen on watching Louis smash Schmeling to support a boycott.
The program for the second Louis-Schmeling fight.
Walking to the weigh-in for the rematch, Madison Square Garden, June 22, 1938
J. Edgar Hoover and Walter Winchell, fight night, at Yankee Stadium.
Louis pummels Schmeling along the ropes. A cry—“half human, half animal”—filled the night air.
Schmeling goes down for the first time.
As the cornermen mobilized and Louis—his night’s work done 124 seconds after it had begun—begins to walk off, Donovan cradles the vanquished Schmeling.
In Harlem, residents gathered once more around the radio. Silence reigned.
A Harlem street scene after the second fight. “Take a dozen Harlem Christmases, a score of New Year’s Eves, a bushel of July 4ths and maybe-– yes, maybe—you get a faint glimpse of the idea.”
Schmeling quickly retracted any claim that Louis had beaten him unfairly and later blamed others for raising it. But one newspaper recorded the truth for posterity.
Louis reads all about his victory.
Schmeling, flanked by Joe Jacobs and Max Machon, at the Polyclinic Hospital following the second fight. Louis never came by.
“It’s over.” 8 Uhr-Blatt (Nuremberg), June 23, 1938
New Masses, July 5, 1938
Louis celebrates his victory over Schmeling with two more of his victims, Jimmy Braddock (left) and Tommy Farr, at Braddock’s bar near Madison Square Garden, June 23, 1938.
“The Nazi fistic hero Max Schmeling is returning to Germany with such a pathetic face.” Drawing by William Gropper in Freiheit, June 23, 1938.
The reunions of the two old antagonists were well documented. Here, they bond over some of Schmeling’s Coca-Cola.
White commentators suggested Louis was too simpleminded to bring any passions of his own to the fight. But black writers knew better. They knew Louis hated Schmeling, less for his politics than for accusing Louis of fouling him intentionally, and for that late hit after the fifth round. He’d also learned that that punch had been cut from the German fight film, and that Hellmis had roused German audiences against him. “His burning desire for revenge is so deeply imbued within his heart that I believe it will overshadow any other emotion that Joe might have,” Chester Washington wrote. As if that were not enough, Blackburn went to work on Louis. Hating an adversary was good strategy, he knew, but with the sweet-natured Louis, this was not easy. So he outdid himself by heaping scorn on the Nazis and telling Louis what Hitler thought of blacks. “I don’t like Schmeling because his people don’t like my people,” Louis told one writer. “The old drowsiness is gone and in its place has come an alert anger,” Jimmy Cannon reported.
Louis watched films of his first fight with Schmeling again and again. And he astonished everyone with a prediction: two rounds. “I know how to fight Max, now,” he explained. “I won’t waste any time going to work. Of course, if he dogs it a while, it will take me at least four or five rounds. If he fights, it won’t go three.” To Cannon, he cut it down to one. The predictions astonished fight writers. “Sheer youthful exuberance and should be disregarded,” the World-Telegram counseled. Blacks, too, squirmed at such hubris. One called Louis “a fit subject for the psychiatric ward, releasing smart talk like that in the face of so grave a crisis.” But Louis had told Blackburn the same thing. “My rheumatics will give me the miseries, climbin’ up that mountain every round,” Blackburn had complained before the fight. “Don’t you worry about that mountain climbing,” Louis replied. “You’ll only have to climb it twice.” Louis’s fervor impressed the bookies, who lengthened the odds favoring him from eight to five to better than two to one. “They’ve finally got that boy mad,” one handicapper observed. “That’s the one thing he needed.”
Hellmis stopped by Pompton Lakes, and his impressions of Louis remained the same: light, elegant, incredibly powerful, quite sympathetic, honest, sincere, compliant, dumb. “All of his work leaves the impression of a nature boy who doesn’t quite understand why he should do [this or] that, but who has learned from past experience that he will receive many lovely dollars for doing so,” he wrote. Since everyone associated the heavyweight championship with a good mind, Hellmis felt Louis was most unworthy of the crown. While his “racial brothers” (Rassengenossen) still idolized him, Louis’s drawing power was nil, Hellmis told Germany; the enormous interest in the fight stemmed from Schmeling. Even in tranquil times, Hellmis would have been delusional, but in fact, tensions were growing: at a birthday rally for Hitler in Yorkville on April 20, uniformed American Nazis beat back Jewish War Veterans with blackjacks, belts, and chairs. A few weeks later, two thousand people in Yorkville heard the German consul praise Hitler, then watched Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will. Shortly thereafter, six leaders of the German-American Bund on Long Island were arrested for spying.
Perhaps because of the tempests around him, Schmeling came to appreciate Speculator all the more. He liked its coolness and low humidity, along with its tranquillity and remoteness: 250 miles from New York, 60 miles from the closest train station. The view from his cottage, of the mountains looming beyond a crystalline alpine lake, reminded him of his estate in Pomerania. Only Mike Jacobs was unhappy with the arrangement: it was too far from New York and from the New York reporters who would publicize the fight. To Hellmis, training in such a spot was more important to Schmeling “than the dollar assets of Herr Mike Jacobs,
who obviously showed little concern last year for Maxie’s dollar worries as he booted him out of the world championship.”
Schmeling quickly fell into his usual routine. First came a few days of running and walking. Then came the sparring matches, in an outdoor ring, with Joe Jacobs introducing the various opponents. They were generally inferior to Louis’s sparring partners, but the thrifty Schmeling wasn’t paying them as much; Max had nothing to learn from them anyway, Hellmis maintained. Between rounds Schmeling posed for the cameras. Afterward, he punched the bag, shadowboxed, skipped rope, and performed tricks; one sure crowd-pleaser was a precision punch that knocked the ash off the cigar in Jacobs’s mouth. One Sunday, five thousand people showed up. On another occasion, the mayors of Syracuse, Utica, Albany, and Rochester came by. Mike Jacobs was there to announce that the two men would fight yet again if the forthcoming bout went the distance.
The overarching question at Speculator was whether Schmeling had slipped in the last two years, and if so, by how much. Rice thought Schmeling was “as close to perfection as imperfect humanity can hope to reach”; he could be whipped, he wrote, but only by someone far better than Louis had been two years earlier. Braddock thought Schmeling had indeed faded, and would never be able to move against a younger fighter like Louis in the way he needed to. To Hellmis, of course, Schmeling was mounting the latest in a series of apexes.
Surely the most conspicuous—and courageous—visitors in Schmeling’s camp were the representatives of the black weeklies. Al Monroe of the Defender spent five days there, tripling as a reporter, spy, and cheerleader for Louis. Schmeling was in fine shape, he wrote, but Louis should not fall for fish stories that he had suddenly sprouted some new punches. “He is planning to right-cross you out of the title, Joe,” Monroe advised. “Go out there and knock his block off, Joe, and the fight is yours. That is your only chance.” St. Clair Bourne of the Amsterdam News saw some slight sagging in Schmeling’s face and “the merest shadow of embonpoint”—that is, fat—around his waist. One of Bourne’s colleagues, Bill Chase, spotted varicose veins. “We were the center of attraction at this Nazi-sympathetic community,” observed Chase, who’d already covered the Berlin Olympics. “Of course, at this stage of the game, we’re all pretty used to people of the opposite race staring at us when we get out of the bounds of Harlem, so that didn’t bother us in the least.” But all was amicable as they posed for pictures with Schmeling. “It was too bad that such a personable and swell guy as this had to be a Nazi,” Chase wrote.
Schmeling rarely confronted racial issues head-on, and when he did, he was usually conciliatory. But in early June he spoke with unusual bluntness to one reporter. “The black dynasty of pugilism must come to an end,” he told the Chicago American. He was doing his part in the heavyweight division, he said; whites in other divisions should follow suit. No one in the mainstream press picked up on Schmeling’s comments; the white papers hid Schmeling’s racism, one irate black columnist wrote, because its racial ideas and Hitler’s were the same. (He urged that Schmeling be deported.) Schmeling’s politics also came up during the visit with the Chicago Times. “Make no mistake, Max Schmeling is Fuehrer Hitler’s greatest booster,” the reporter later wrote. “Ve haff no strikes in Germany,” Schmeling told him. “Most everybody has job. Times are goot. Ve have only one union. Ve haff only one party. Everybody agreeable. Everybody happy.” “Both he and Machon sincerely believe Hitler is Germany’s man of destiny,” the reporter noted. (In a bit of revisionism, Schmeling told the same reporter that Anny Ondra had listened to the first Louis fight in Detroit rather than at Goebbels’s side.)
When the Hamburg left Cuxhaven for New York in early June, it was crowded with Schmeling fans, a “floating sports hotel.” But officially, the Nazis were hedging their bets. “Only the sporting side of the contest is to be taken into account,” the propaganda ministry instructed the press on June 10. “The odds can be noted, but not in the headlines.” In other words, with Louis the favorite, the symbolic importance of the fight should not be stressed. In a front-page editorial, the Frankfurter Volksblatt ridiculed the tendency to view sporting events as “preludes and omens” for political struggles, claiming that only New York Jews and “Haarlem Negroes” went for such balderdash. But it was a little late to back off Schmeling. Craving athletic glory, international respect, and validation of its culture of merciless machismo, Nazi Germany had fallen in love with Max, and that love had blinded it to the vagaries of the ring.
Schmeling and Machon insisted that anti-Nazi feeling in the United States had abated and that they felt completely at home there. But reporters found Speculator far more regimented, paranoid, and Nazified than Schmeling’s camp at Napanoch had been. Going there from free and easy Pompton Lakes, Parker wrote, was “like stepping from this enlightened republic into one of the totalitarian states.” “The flavor of Nazi Germany permeates Schmeling’s camp,” Parker continued. “One expects to see brown shirted soldiers popping out from behind every telegraph pole with a ‘Heil Hitler!’ challenge.” Schmeling’s house, he went on, was an island of Nazi Germany, encircled by barbed wire and state troopers. And Schmeling himself was encircled by Germans: Machon, Hellmis, and other reporters, friends like Heinz Ditgens, owner of the Roxy-Bar in Berlin, and Willi Lehmann, a Berlin restaurateur who was always quick to stress that he—unlike his namesake the governor of New York—wasn’t Jewish. The topics, too, were German; one visitor recalled Schmeling and his guests spending an hour poring over photographs of Hitler’s glorious new autobahn. Hellmis in particular discomfited some American reporters, who quickly concluded that he wasn’t reporting only to his editors. “Nasty Adolph’s oaf-ficial observer,” one called him. Not only New York journalists attuned to Jewish sensibilities picked up something chilling in the air. One southern reporter talked of “the spirit of Horst Wessel in trunks and boxing gloves” permeating the place. “The diabolically patient manner of preparing for this fight makes strong men shudder,” he wrote. “No wonder the Germans came back after the World War and built a new nation out of the debris.”
As one Hungarian paper, Est, noted, everyone in Schmeling’s circle around Speculator met the requirements of the Nuremberg Laws except one. That one, of course, was Joe Jacobs, and he was an outcast. “Little wonder,” Parker wrote, “that he dashes back to kosher New York at every opportunity.” Jacobs was not allowed to stay in the large house with Schmeling, Machon, and his German cronies, and he cut a pathetic figure around the camp, reduced to asking reporters what Schmeling was telling them. His suspension made him even more expendable, especially since it appeared Schmeling hadn’t strained himself to get him reinstated. “He made Max what he is today and is treated like a necessary pariah by the ingrate,” wrote a Times reader.
Jacobs still insisted, though, that Schmeling treated him right. Depriving Schmeling of his wise counsel, he said, was part of a plot to deny Schmeling a fair shot at the title. Once again, Jacobs found little sympathy in his own community. The Forverts acknowledged Schmeling’s ingratitude, comparing Jacobs to the hapless stepfather who’d paid for his stepson’s wedding, only to learn that more important relatives would walk the boy to the chuppah. But it wasted no pity on him. “Jews will not forget that he did business with one of Hitler’s favorites during a time when not a day goes by without articles in the newspapers that tell about the suffering, about the terrible troubles and insults that Jews are going through in Hitler’s Germany,” it declared. Nor, to the Forverts, was Mike Jacobs much better, whatever he had pledged to the refugees; both were worms that could not be washed clean. Undeterred, Joe Jacobs touted Schmeling with his usual indefatigability. After ostentatiously making sure that no one else was listening, he offered an Atlanta columnist “the absolute low-down” on the fight; it was, he said, the least he could do after those good Georgians had rescued him from the Klan. “Max will knock Joe out in the ninth round, positively, and you can take that from me absolutely guaranteed,” he whispered. “I say the ni
nth round. Why? Because I like to give myself a chance for a slight mistake. I think it might come sooner, but you know Max. He never rushes things. You can quote me further as saying that Max will knock him out with a left hook. Yes, sir, a left hook.”
The state trooper guarding Schmeling’s house had more trouble with drunken American reporters than with anti-Nazi saboteurs. But Hell-mis was vigilant nonetheless. Schmeling had blamed the heat for his loss to Max Baer five years earlier. But Hellmis had other notions, and, apparently, duties. “In Germany, we still believe there were other reasons why Max Baer whipped Schmeling than the punches he received in the ring,” he told one reporter, suggesting that someone had tampered with Schmeling’s food. “There will be no chances for anything to happen this time.” No one—not even Machon—would be allowed in Schmeling’s kitchen; the trusted chef from Germany bought and prepared all the fare.
The old debate over Schmeling’s character raged anew. On one side were those who considered him dignified and decent, courageous and gentlemanly, while others demonized him as Hitler’s pet. “This fellow isn’t a sportsman,” wrote Lester Rodney of the Daily Worker, which was, predictably, harder on Schmeling than was any other paper. “He is an outspoken representative of the perverted, bestial nationalism and race hatred fanned by the oppressors of the real German people to hide their bloody war against all progressive humanity.” The American Communist press speculated that if Schmeling lost, perhaps some sexual crime of his would be discovered, as had happened to von Cramm, or that Hitler would decide that excessive exposure to weak democracies had sapped him of his Teutonic strength. Either way, a concentration camp was the best he could expect.*
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