In any case, both German boxing officials and Hitler himself opposed a third Louis fight; their examination of the fight film—Nazi officials at least were allowed to see it—proved that Schmeling had been crushed fair and square rather than by some fluky foul. The word from Hitler came to Schmeling in March 1939 via Metzner. Though it was not an official ban, Metzner explained to him, it was “self-evident” that for the organization of German professional boxers, “a wish of the Führer is an order,” and he should break off any negotiations. Schmeling was crushed—as much, it seems, by the suggestion that he was “supposedly no longer good enough” to fight Louis as by the dashing of his hopes for a rubber match. “You can imagine that this has affected me in a peculiar way,” he wrote Metzner plaintively. When he tried to learn from Hitler’s office the basis for the decision, he was assured it was entirely political; Metzner told him the same thing, insisting that Hitler’s opposition did not reflect any “lack of trust in your abilities.” The white lies told to soothe Schmeling’s feelings were yet another indication of his continued high stature. Nazi Germany wasn’t angry at Schmeling; it just didn’t want another humiliating international loss. Schmeling would have to be content fighting Germans in Germany. He did, and he won, raising hopes for yet another comeback. But when war broke out in September 1939, the thirty-five-year-old Schmeling was soon drafted—punitively, he later insisted, either by Goebbels or by the sports minister, Tschammer und Osten. He ended up as a paratrooper—assured, he later asserted bitterly, that he’d be used for propaganda purposes and to spur enlistment, and not for combat.
Of course, all of Germany was being mobilized. That included Schmeling’s friend Arno Hellmis, who had long since moved from delivering ringside eulogies to the far happier task of reporting smashing German victories in Poland, Belgium, and France. Soon, Hellmis predicted, he would be broadcasting from the Eiffel Tower. But on June 6,1940, he was killed in an ambush in France. Then, after glowing tributes to him appeared in the Nazi press, he all but vanished from the annals. While Hellmis was surely the most universally known sports broadcaster in German history, and the man who covered the single most epochal moment in German athletics, no German scholar or journalist in the past seventy years has ever written anything about him. He was someone whom everyone would just as soon forget.
It was not Schmeling’s only loss that spring: six weeks earlier, Joe Jacobs had died of a heart attack. He was forty-two years old. For a short time afterward, Jacobs Beach moved to the Riverside Memorial Chapel on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. “Y’know, he looked so natural lying there that I felt like popping that old cigar in his mouth,” Harry Balogh said after paying his respects. Schmeling had to hear the news from the Associated Press reporter in Berlin, for Jacobs’s death went unmentioned in Nazi newspapers. “It is too bad, for boxing loses a man who has done a lot for it,” Schmeling commented from Berlin. “Joe and I always got along well together.” American boxing writers knew better, as had Jacobs himself. “Why, I made Max rich, gave him fame, worked my tonsils raw advertising him and then—well, he was a good fighter, but you can have him,” he had said a year earlier. “I don’t hold no hard feelin’s toward him, though I gotta confess he didn’t have the loyalty that makes a real man … and a true friend. I like Max personally. But they musta put a poison into him over there.” Had Jacobs Beach had its own marquees, they would have dimmed for a minute—perhaps at three in the morning—to honor the fiery manager. The boxing writers mourned him, knowing they would never meet anyone like him again. A woman claiming to be Jacobs’s secret wife fought with his family over his meager estate.
In April 1940, only weeks before the Nazis began bombing London and invaded France, Schmeling was still trying to float above politics, still talking to American correspondents in Berlin about fighting Louis again, sending Franklin Roosevelt stamps for his collection. But his career as a German paratrooper was beginning. The Nazis happily chronicled his progress, and Schmeling, to all appearances, happily played the part. “Max Schmeling, Germany’s most popular boxer and former world champion, has enlisted with the paratroopers,” a Nazi newsreel from February 1941 declared. Schmeling, the Angriff said, was a soldier first, and only then a boxer. “As an athlete, he is a role model for ambitious youth, even more so today than earlier, because now he wears the gray coat [of the Wehrmacht],” it declared. In May 1941 he appeared on the cover of the paratroopers’ magazine.
When the Nazis invaded Crete later that month, German radio announced that Schmeling was the first paratrooper on the first plane, and among the first to jump. Quickly, he also became among the first reported fatalities—killed, Western news reports stated, while fleeing his British captors. His death was front-page news everywhere outside Germany. Dempsey eulogized him as “a great fighter and a great fellow” as well as a secret anti-Nazi. But once Schmeling was declared alive—he’d merely been incapacitated, either by aggravating an old boxing injury or by an extreme case of diarrhea—Runyon depicted him as a cheapskate and an ingrate, “not at all the fellow the premature obituaries would have you believe.”
While in a German military hospital in Athens, Schmeling gave conflicting accounts of what he had witnessed. To the German press he accused the British of flagrantly violating the rules of war, conduct that had justified harsh German retaliation. They, too, he essentially said, had committed a foul. But to an American correspondent, he insisted the British had not mistreated German soldiers, contrary to what Goebbels had claimed. Goebbels attempted, unsuccessfully, to have him court-martialed. Instead, Schmeling earned an Iron Cross, and a promotion, for his service. But his combat career had ended, and his mind turned back to boxing. Barely three months later he said that as soon as the war was over he would rush to America to “fetch Joe Louis’ scalp.” He talked of parachuting into Mike Jacobs’s office as he had into Crete, though with boxing gloves rather than a machine gun. It sounded like a joke, but according to Pierre Huss, a Hearst correspondent close to Schmeling, it was for real; before Germany had declared war on America, the Nazis had hoped such a gesture would cool off anti-German sentiment and, incidentally, hint at German omnipotence in any air war. Schmeling was for it, too, convinced by Louis’s trouble beating Billy Conn that he could take him. That Schmeling was ready to return to New York didn’t impress Uncle Mike. “Right now he wouldn’t be any more welcome here than I would be over there,” he said.
For the rest of the war, Schmeling, still referred to in the Nazi press as the “German Champion in All Classes,” was an emissary with an uncertain, ambiguous portfolio, participating in the German effort but always attempting to maintain a sportsman’s aloofness from it. In Germany as well as in occupied Belgium and France, he appeared at Truppenbetreuungen, or USO-style gatherings for Nazi troops, usually boxing exhibitions. They were organized by Machon, under the supervision of Hinkel; always, German soldiers greeted him rhapsodically. In Berlin in late 1941, for instance, the crowd clapped rhythmically and chanted “Maxe! Maxe!” when he arrived. The same was true in Warsaw in January 1942. While Schmeling was there, Hans Frank, the Nazi governor general of Poland, later hanged at Nuremberg for his war crimes, held a reception for him. The Italian writer Curzio Malaparte claimed to have witnessed Schmeling’s encounter with Frank, during which, Malaparte maintained, Schmeling endorsed the nobility of war and witnessed atrocities against the Jews. Malaparte is a notoriously unreliable source, and what he wrote probably never happened. But it is hard to say for sure, in part because Schmeling was never asked about it afterward.
Schmeling was officially discharged from the German army in mid-1943, but on several occasions he was either reported killed in action or captured by the Russians. Given his enormous notoriety, this led to a macabre ritual: whenever such rumors popped up, curious GIs and reporters would go to inspect Schmeling’s purported remains. “We are thinking of putting up a sign at the [cemetery] gate saying ‘Max Schmeling positively isn’t buried here,’ ” the captain of an American un
it charged with registering the German war dead declared in 1944.
In January of that year, Schmeling was back in occupied Paris—again, presumably, to entertain German troops. Simply for being photographed with him, the French boxer Georges Carpentier was later accused of collaboration. In March, Schmeling was in occupied Rome for another boxing exhibition, and, on behalf of Goebbels, who hoped to get him to speak out in favor of the Third Reich, had an audience with Pope Pius XII. Such a high-level mission is hard to square with Schmeling’s later claim that Goebbels so loathed him that he could easily have been murdered in the reprisals following the attempt on Hitler’s life on July 20, 1944. Clearly, the regime still had its uses for him. So did the Allies, who turned Schmeling into a symbol of the enemy. Even Liberty magazine, for which Schmeling had occasionally written, now called him a liar and a coward. “An aroused American, like an aroused Joe Louis, can be a fearful thing to a hated enemy,” it declared in 1943. “A lot of other Max Schmelings in Berlin—and their yellow counterparts in Tokyo—are learning what one Max Schmeling learned in a New York ring nearly five years ago.” When GI Joe Louis arrived in England, he was asked what he would do if he encountered Schmeling on the battlefield. “I’d kill him …” he said, “… with a gun.”
Oddly, though, Schmeling also maintained that the attempt on the Führer prompted the Nazis to reverse themselves and allow him to visit American prisoners of war in camps throughout Germany and Italy. Schmeling later said he visited the GIs to build up their morale. Others claimed that people in the Resistance had actually asked Schmeling to undertake such missions, to improve camp conditions and arrange clemency for the condemned among them. But to the Germans, too, such visits were useful, promising to pacify or at least distract embittered and potentially mutinous soldiers and, as the Third Reich sank into defeat, to curry favor with the eventual victors. The same was said about Schmeling himself: the visits, the Daily Worker charged, marked his “desperate attempt to save his skin from the avenging Allies.”
Schmeling’s tours apparently began in the spring of 1944 in southern Italy, where he and Ondra journeyed from camp to camp in a shiny black Mercedes. At Cisterna, a camp near Anzio, he told people he was the head of all sports in the prison camps. At Laterina, near Florence, he handed out German cigarettes and pledged to take the winner of a boxing tournament staged for his visit to a beefsteak dinner with him and his wife. Six emaciated soldiers reluctantly agreed to take part; when Schmeling reneged on his promise, a near riot broke out, and the Schmelings hastily fled the camp.*
On Christmas Day 1944, Schmeling, still on crutches, invited some POWs working on a farm to visit his estate, where he served them pretzels and weak beer. Then, in the spring of 1945, as the war neared its end, Schmeling toured American POW camps in Germany—particularly Stalag Luft I, a camp for downed airmen near the Baltic Sea, and Stalag 3A in Luckenwalde, thirty miles outside Berlin. At least on some occasions, he was accompanied by high-ranking German officers, like Field Marshall Albert Kesselring, who commanded German forces in Italy. What struck the Americans was how well dressed and well fed he looked, in contrast to their own anemic, ragged state. He was also smiling and cordial, blithely or willfully ignorant of any resentment he generated. He again avoided all politically charged subjects, chatting instead about how the war would soon end and, he hoped, both they and he would be back in the United States. Some soldiers, particularly younger ones who had been captured recently, greeted him like a celebrity, pressed him for autographs, joked and reminisced with him. Once, as a tall, athletic black POW approached one group to whom he was speaking, someone shouted “Here comes Joe!” and Schmeling joined in the laughter. Others were too cold, hungry, or demoralized to pay him much mind. And still more considered him a Nazi, or a Nazi stooge, and turned away contemptuously as he approached. In some instances, higher-ranking American officers ordered their subordinates to steer clear of him rather than fraternize with the enemy. Some prisoners took the photographs of himself that Schmeling sometimes handed out and threw them in the communal troughs, taking special care to place them faceup so that dozens of GIs could urinate on him at once.
In early 1945, as the Red Army approached his home in Pomerania, Schmeling fled west, first to Berlin and then to northern Germany, where British troops arrested him in May. They took him to Hamburg, where he found much of the city in ruins, including his own home and the Hanseatenhalle, destroyed by British planes during an air raid in 1943. (His estate in eastern Prussia was subsequently seized by the Russians.) Schmeling reportedly ingratiated himself with the British by telling them where Ribbentrop, the Nazi foreign minister, was hiding. But he had harsh words for the Americans, supposedly telling one officer that America had never given him a fair break. “He’s a Nazi through and through, no better than Hitler, Göring, and the rest,” the officer told The Stars and Stripes. “I’d like to see him dangling from a rope on Broadway and 42nd Street.” To Shirley Povich of The Washington Post, that simply didn’t sound like Schmeling. “He may, indeed, be no better than the rest of the Nazi scoundrels, but he wouldn’t be the brazen one,” he wrote. Fred Kirsch, who had come to the United States with Schmeling and Bülow in 1928 and was now a boxing promotor in Washington, agreed. “Schmeling wouldn’t act tough after the Americans captured him,” he told Povich. “He was always thinking of Max Schmeling first and he would try to make friends with anybody in a position to help him.”
Schmeling promptly tried to strike a deal with the British, in which he and some associates would begin publishing books to reeducate German youth weaned on Nazi values. “As a patriotic German I naturally hoped Germany would win the war but nevertheless realized we had to lose it to get rid of Nazism,” he explained. But when word of the negotiations broke, the British quickly backed out. In fact, they jailed Schmeling for three months for attempting to build a home with improperly procured materials. But showing the same doggedness with which he had pursued all his comebacks, Schmeling labored to clear his name and resume his career. For a British de-Nazification court he collected affidavits from various friends and colleagues who testified that he had frequently—and, to their minds, foolishly—criticized the Nazis in their presence, refused to give the Hitler salute, and interceded on behalf of persons the Nazis persecuted. In 1947 he was declared free of Nazi taint. That allowed him to resume his boxing career, and put on exhibitions for GIs in Germany.
Schmeling labored for rehabilitation in the United States, too, through two key surrogates. Anny Ondra stressed to Paul Gallico how her husband had refused to join the Nazi Party, or to give speeches to the Hitler Youth, or to invite Hitler, Goebbels, or Göring to their home.* Machon, too, spoke out, declaring that what had really beaten Schmeling in the second fight was a broken heart. “It was all psychological,” said Schmeling’s loyal trainer, who spent his last days running a bar in Berlin. “Max actually had an inferiority complex because almost everyone in the United States thought he came to fight for Hitler. Before the fight we received hundreds of threatening letters every day and the newspapers called Max a Nazi. When came the night of the fight, Max was all tied up—petrified.”
But Schmeling, whose frequent trips to the United States were once a joke, now could not get back in, partly because sportswriters like John Lardner, Dan Parker, and Jimmy Cannon did their best to block him. “The people who used to know and talk with Schmeling over here are prepared to believe that he is not a Nazi now,” Lardner wrote in 1946. “In fact, it goes without saying, for Maxie is one of the world’s keenest students of trends. Before the war, however, he made no particular secret of his views, and they were such as to make his leader’s bosom swell with pride and satisfaction.” “Ever since the American Army crossed the Rhine and found Max in a fair state of health and preservation, there has been a campaign in progress to prove that the world has done him wrong,” he went on. “It may be so, but bear in mind that if you bought the biggest piece of Max’s broken heart you would still need a microscope to
see it, and that runs into real money.”
Around the same time, Parker reported that Machon had recently contacted Mike Jacobs. Machon related that both he and Schmeling had survived the Nazi terror—“Time out for those who feel nauseated,” Parker interjected—but that having lost half his fortune, Schmeling wanted to return to the American ring. “The guy must be hard up when he, a member of the Master Race, appeals thus to a Jewish fight promoter to take him out of hock,” Parker wrote. “All those in favor of running a benefit for Maxie, please say ‘No,’ but loud.” In November 1946, Cannon argued that America had no place for Schmeling, even as a tourist. By now Schmeling’s every prior accomplishment was viewed through the prism of the war. “With Schmeling, nothing was haphazard, nothing was left to chance any more than he could help it,” Ring declared in May 1946. “He had the bullhededness and the arrogance of the Nazi, he had the regimented mind, the capacity for taking pains, the one-track line toward his objective.” Two years later, Fred Kirsch, hoping to stage a Schmeling bout, asked Secretary of State George Marshall to admit him into the country, but reporters, veterans groups (including some former prisoners of war), and a member of the House Un-American Activities Committee objected. Even the normally amiable Louis weighed in, recounting for The New York Times Schmeling’s charge that he had fouled him deliberately in their first fight. “That’s one more reason why I don’t like Max Schmeling,” he said in November 1948.
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