By the Sword

by Richard Cohen

  The 1932 Games were to be held in August in Los Angeles—one of the earliest signs of Hollywood power. The German Olympic Association allotted two places to fencing—the only combat sport open to women as well as men for more than one hundred years and in 1932 one of just three in which women competed—and Helene was chosen, alongside Erwin Casmir, who had won the silver medal for foil at Amsterdam. As a consequence of the recession, each athlete was required to contribute 3,000 DM to cover their costs, a large sum that Helene nevertheless raised with ease after a visit to sponsors in Berlin. She was the reigning Olympic champion, only twenty-one yet widely seen as the foremost fencing stylist in the world.

  The gamine Helene continued as a ballet dancer up to her teens. It gave her invaluable flexibility and balance for her fencing. (illustration credit 15.1)

  Helene was superbly athletic, with exceptional balance, grace, and stamina. Her training as a dancer gave her an acute sense of her own body and what it could do—and also exceptional speed of reaction. Her coach had grounded her technique in the best Italo-German tradition. At just over five feet, ten inches—very tall for her time—and weighing 150 pounds, she would dominate her opponents, often beating men at practice—even at saber, which she sometimes did for fun. “On the strip she was a tigress: you felt her domination as soon as she put her mask on,” I was told. An American contemporary, who had tied for second place in the 1948 Games, told me, “I fenced her only twice, and each time she beat me badly. It wasn’t that she had any favorite move. Her fencing was so rounded, everything was marvelous.”

  Would she be the first woman to retain an Olympic title? The press certainly thought so: on her arrival in Los Angeles reporters surrounded her. A Los Angeles Recorder article, “Queen of the Fencers,” reported, “Her arrival at the Chapman Park Hotel created quite a furore among the other girl athletes, most of whom have short bobbed hair and envied this pretty miss her novel coiffure.” She was “a physical counterpart of a Super-woman.… Her arm is like iron, her grip like steel and her wrists are as dainty as a ballet-dancer’s.”1

  Two days before the women’s competition started, Helene learned that the German training ship Niobe had gone down with all her company, including her boyfriend, Alex Gaihardt. Still she fenced on, and managed to win through to the final, topping her semifinal, but in the final she came in only fifth. Some reports recorded that she had seemed “ill.”

  The gold went to her young former opponent, Ellen Preis (later Müller-Preis). According to two American observers, Curtis Ettinger and Leo Nunes, Preis sat with her Austrian colleagues and with German supporters, most wearing the black armband of the Nazi Party. Their odious jeering was demoralizing; when they learned of the death of Mayer’s beau, they used it to fuel their taunts. Preis may not have been an active part of this claque, however. In her memoirs, published in 1936, she writes sympathetically of her great rival, “What happened to Helene, who had fought so well, and without a single defeat, throughout the earlier rounds? She seemed nervous and tense, and teammates would gather round her, all talking at her, some criticizing her for not doing better. They don’t know how easy it is to lose—just a small thing going wrong, not noticeable to others, can take the edge off one’s performance.”2 Without family to comfort her, alone and in a foreign country, it is amazing that Helene performed as well as she did. Had she won the three bouts that she lost 5–4—including a vital bout to Preis, whom she led 4–1, only to be hit with four ripostes in a row—she would have tied for the gold. But defeat hurt her deeply. She knew she was the best—only she had lost.*

  Before the Games, Helene had accepted a two-year fellowship to study foreign languages at an exclusive women’s college, Scripps, in Claremont, some forty miles east of Los Angeles. Established in 1926, with about two hundred students at the time Helene enrolled, Scripps was one of the few institutions on the West Coast dedicated to educating women for a career. She threw herself into campus life that fall, continuing to fence but also becoming president of the Franco-German Society, the most popular club in college, with a hundred members.

  Her figure started to change. She had always had a healthy appetite, a reaction, she would explain later, to the hunger she had experienced during the severe food shortages of the First World War. Throughout her life she would suck the marrow out of bones, and she also displayed the characteristic German love of beer. “Helene Mayer’s magnificently willowy figure,” an American obituarist would write years later, “and blonde braided tresses, tightly rolled over each ear, became the symbol of Europe’s athletic womanhood.” But even at the Games the slim, model-like contours of the eighteen-year-old were being replaced by what another historian unkindly described as the look “of an Aryan brood mare” with “a rather beefy face and a strong jaw.” In a remarkable series of nude studies she made with the photographer Imogen Cunningham in 1938, she appears like a buxom Hausfrau, physically powerful, sensual, but Junoesque, the one-time dancer who had come to enjoy the good life.

  Yet Helene remained striking, even beautiful, with unabated self-confidence. She would sport brightly colored capes and scarves, American Indian jewelry, and close-fitting evening gowns. She loved grand entrances and would burst through the doors to a fencing meet and cry to the assembled company in a deep, powerful voice, “I AM HERE!” Maxine Mitchell, the American who tied for sixth place in the 1952 Games, recalled how Helene “livened up every party”: she “always made her final touch with a flourish, an explosive attack, then off with the mask, a shake of the hand, and a walk off the strip. ‘But, Helene, sometimes your attack doesn’t arrive!’—‘I know. It’s my reputation. You go and make reputation too, and you see!’ ”3

  Helene, in trademark headband and pigtails, dwarfing the Italian foilist Oreste Puliti. (illustration credit 15.2)

  Her fellow students described her as “exuberant,” “jolly,” “more fun than a barrel of monkeys,” “unforgettable.” In the words of one biographer, “she was vivacious, flippant, and flirtatious … there was an informal quality in her nature that Americans found unexpected and likeable.” She was invited to ranch barbecues, camping trips in the desert, a formal ball, even to meet Hollywood filmmakers, and found herself giving technical advice on swordfighting scenes. The official Scripps catalogue included a photograph of her in fencing kit, with the text “Miss Mayer’s presence on the campus is a feature of the life at Scripps.… She has persuaded the whole college to follow her own love of this sport.”

  Events back home presented a stark contrast to life in America. Within six months of Helene’s matriculation at Scripps, the Weimar Republic had drifted to its end. Unemployment had ballooned to 6 million, fighting had broken out in the streets, and the parliamentary regime had lost control. On January 30, 1933, Hitler was named chancellor. Almost immediately a flurry of anti-Semitic legislation was pushed through; outbursts of violence against Jews escalated.

  How much of this reached Helene in California is unclear. Fellow students recall her once calling Hitler “mad,” but otherwise, “she spoke rarely of politics.… She was always very fond of Germany.” Then, in April, she learned that the new “racial laws” in Germany had prompted her fencing club in Offenbach to cancel her membership; her name had been removed from its notice boards and scrolls of honor. When her family protested, a club spokesman explained, “They were not suspended, but they were no longer registered as members”—a piece of doublespeak that was a harbinger of things to come. The German Fencing Association declared that the actions of the Offenbach club did not affect Helene’s membership in the national federation: she could still fence for Germany.

  Helene’s story, of course, was part of a much wider picture. On May 31, 1931, the IOC had selected Berlin as the site of the 1936 Games. Initially, the leading Nazis had not thought well of the Olympics—its ideals of international goodwill and partnership were far from Hitler’s notions of racial purity and military strength. At the time of the 1932 Games, one Nazi writer described them as an
“infamous festival organized by Jews.” Hitler went even further, deriding the Olympics as “an invention of Jews and Freemasons—a ploy inspired by Judaism which cannot possibly be put on by a Reich ruled by National Socialists.” Goebbels, however, convinced his leader that the Games offered an ideal opportunity to show the world the “new Germany”; the Nazi view quickly changed.

  As soon as the Nazis came to power, they pursued their racist policies while the government tried to protect the Games in Berlin. In April 1933 Jewish boxers and referees were forbidden to take part in German championship matches. In August, Jewish athletes were banned from competing with Aryans in Germany and sporting clubs were ordered to expel Jewish members. By October, Jews could train and compete only with other Jews. Back at Scripps, Helene discovered that her exchange fellowship had been rescinded on “racial grounds.” The college generously said it would absorb the costs of her completing her course. Her thesis subject was hardly that of a professional sportswoman: “The Influence of French Symbolism on German Lyricism.”

  Helene graduated in the spring of 1934 and that same month traveled to New York to win the national foil title for the second year running: she would be U.S. champion eight times (there was no bar on non-Americans entering until many years later). Now, stranded and uncertain, she accepted an offer from Mills College, a prosperous liberal arts institution in Oakland, California, one of the oldest women’s colleges in the United States. She would teach German and fencing.

  On September 25, as Helene was settling into her new life, an article appeared in the college newspaper, headed “Hitler Threat Detains Fencing Champion in U.S.”: “The German girl fears a return to Germany because censors opened a letter to her mother allegedly criticizing Hitler. She cannot return to Germany in safety and, as she is here on a student’s passport, she can stay in the U.S. only so long as she remains a student. A teaching fellowship awarded her by Mills College solves her immediate problem.”

  Nowhere does Helene link her plight with German anti-Semitism, yet that November Hitler’s sports minister issued a decree forbidding “any German athletic organization to affiliate with a non-Aryan.… Every personal contact with Jews is to be avoided.” Helene issued a statement saying that she would be pleased to represent Germany in international competition. Six months later, interviewed again for the student newspaper, she declared that “should Germany invite her to participate in the 1936 Olympics, she would consider it an honor.”

  Matters were far from that simple. As early as May 1933, Jews in New York mobilized and called for a boycott of the Games. The following month, the International Olympic Committee met in Vienna, and American members pushed to remove the Games from Germany if discrimination against Jewish athletes continued. The next day a government spokesman in Berlin announced that “as a principle” Jews would not be excluded from German teams. One of the Americans, Brigadier General Charles E. Sherrill, the head of his country’s athletics association, in order to have concrete proof that the Germans would keep their word, asked that Miss Mayer specifically should receive an invitation to join the German Olympic team. Helene had become a test case.

  On November 21, at a meeting of the American Amateur Athletic Union, the delegates voted to boycott the Games unless Germany’s position was “changed in fact as well as in theory.” According to Richard Mandell’s The Nazi Olympics, the American protests “frightened the Nazis.”4 But they were too clever to succumb. In January 1935 seven German-Jewish athletes received a letter from their local sports authorities saying that their results were inadequate, so they had not qualified for selection. Surely Germany should not be forced to put Jews on its team on the grounds of their race alone?

  On a reconnaissance mission in Germany in the summer of 1935, Sherrill continued to harry Nazi officials, pointing out that despite their promises two years earlier they still had not sent an invitation to their leading gold-medal prospect. That August, another senior American athletics official, Judge Jeremiah T. Mahoney, urged that the United States withdraw, pointing out that the Nazis had made it impossible for Jews to qualify for German teams: they were eligible only if they belonged to a Nazi athletic organization, which by law they were not permitted to join. The boycott movement spread to other countries—Britain, France, Belgium, Canada, and the Netherlands—but while it was vociferous it remained small, and there were powerful voices on the other side, saying that politics must be kept out of sport; it was not for other countries to dictate to Germany whom it should select.

  That August, Helene received a cable from the influential Jewish-interest magazine American Hebrew. It posed four questions: “Did you receive and accept reported invitation to participate in the Olympics for Germany? Do you think in light of continued discrimination, America and other countries should withdraw? Do you regard yourself a refugee from Germany? Did you know Nazi papers repeatedly and tendentiously reported your suicide?”

  She cabled back, “I cannot understand newspaper write-ups because have not received invitation from Germany to participate in Olympic Games. Unable to answer your second question. Am absent from Germany since 1932 and therefore do not consider myself a refugee. Amused at suicide rumors.” She might have added that she did not feel close to the Jewish community; did not practice its religion; and did not want to be seen as a Jew.

  Meanwhile, the German government was preparing another bombshell. On September 15 were enacted the draconian Nuremberg Laws. Jews were returned to an almost medieval standing. A person defined as a Jew could not be a German; and a Jew was someone “of any religious preference who had at least one Jewish grandparent.” Helene was no longer a German citizen. She could not fence for Germany.

  Ten days later, the head of the German Olympic Committee arrived in the United States on a goodwill tour. “The Olympics without America simply would not be the Olympics,” he told The New York Times. He added that he was mailing a personal invitation to Helene to attend the German trials in February. “We do not know or have any way of knowing if she has retained her skill after four years, but we hope she will come over. Believe me, we wish more than anybody in America that we had some Jewish athletes of Olympic caliber. But we have none.”

  No letter ever reached Helene, nor was any explanation forthcoming as to how this new approach squared with the new laws. On September 27, the Times had a new story. Under the headline “Reich Recalls 2 Jews to Olympic Team—Invites Helene Mayer, Fencer and Gretel Bergmann, Highjumper to Be Members,” the paper reported that the German sports minister had given these assurances by letter to General Sherrill, “evidence that Germany is acting entirely within the spirit of the Olympic statutes and that these members of the German team will receive the same treatment as other candidates, although they are Jewesses” (a term used quite unselfconsciously by a paper with a Jewish proprietor).

  Texts of the letters sent to Helene and her high-jumping compatriot were provided. That to Helene read in part, “I beg you to consider yourself as a member of the pre-selected German team which will definitely be composed in the spring of 1936 after test matches. If you are prevented from taking part in these text matches, I am prepared to accept American sports tests as sufficient qualification.”

  General Sherrill told the Times that on the strength of these assurances he would now support the Games. The following day the paper reported that it had heard directly from Helene Mayer that no invitation had reached her. She did not believe that “any had been extended or would be forthcoming.” Over the next few weeks there were further exchanges between Sherrill, the Nazi sports authorities, and interested American parties without anything being decided. Then, on November 5, a Mills College spokesman boldly declared that Helene “would represent Germany only if granted full German citizenship rights. She has not received a reply to that offer. If the German committee and government refuse to grant such citizen rights, Miss Mayer will decline.”

  This was electrifying. Even if no one else would do so, Helene was recognizing
the reality of the Nuremberg Laws and going over the heads of the sports authorities direct to the Reich government. Three days later, the government announced that it understood that Miss Mayer had already accepted her place without any conditions. Helene repeated her stance, and so the war of words continued. Privately, Helene consulted the German consul general in San Francisco, and on November 18 he sent a lengthy but revealing report to his embassy:

  According to the implementation regulations of the Nuremberg Laws, which are as of now only known through the American press, a number of non-Aryans are granted the possibility to obtain Reichs-citizenship. Helene Mayer has two Jewish grandparents (on her father’s side). She declares that she is free of any religion and that she has never been in touch with the synagogue community with the exception of her school years during which she had to participate in both Jewish and Christian instruction. She further explained to me that she feels all the more bitter about her present situation because she does not want to have anything to do with Jewish circles and that she regards herself in no way as Jewish nor does she want to be regarded as Jewish by others.

  Regardless of the previously mentioned fact that Miss Mayer under no circumstances wants her petition with the Reichs sports leader to be considered as a condition, she is now of the opinion that she can compete with conviction for Germany in the Olympics, only if she has certainty that she will be regarded as an equal member of the national community. She specifically pointed out that she has to live in an environment which would not understand, if she were to compete for a country which regarded her as a political underling.