By the Sword

by Richard Cohen

  From my last conversation with her I have gotten the distinct impression that she expects to be granted the Reich’s citizenship and that—in the event that it will not be granted to her—she will have to take back her confirmation under the pressure of her current environment which she cannot leave right now. The pressure exerted on her by the press is particularly strong and she does not know how she will be able to escape this daily badgering any more.

  Under these circumstances I would consider it suitable and advisable that the question about granting citizenship to Miss Mayer should be settled immediately and with a positive outcome. Otherwise it is to be expected that Miss Mayer who has an impulsive temperament and does not always weigh her words carefully will let herself be carried away into making remarks which will do us unnecessary harm considering the typical, prominent big spread of the American press.5

  The German response to the letter was ambiguous. According to a New York Times report of November 26, the authorities had received Helene’s acceptance of an invitation to compete. At the same time they could assure her that she would indeed be considered a full German citizen despite her “Jewish blood.” How could that be? Jews were adjudged to be persons of 75 percent or more “Jewish blood.” She did not fall into this category.

  It appeared that back in Germany a groundless and insulting story was circulating that Ludwig Mayer might not have been Helene’s true father; so if she accepted that she was not legitimate, any trace of Jewish ancestry would be eradicated. But where did the 25 percent figure come from?

  Back at Mills College Helene ignored both the slur/compliment and the lack of logic. She let it be known that she had still received no direct word from German Olympic officials and so could say nothing; but she did call once more on the consul general. On December 3 he wrote to his embassy, “After Helene Mayer received a telegram from her mother yesterday, according to which her brothers are Reich citizens, and from which she concludes that Helene also has Reich citizenship, [she] has definitely decided to participate in the Olympic Games.”

  So that was the solution Helene had come up with: her mother had declared her a citizen! Her brothers had been recognized as citizens, ergo she was one too. There was no official documentation of this wonderful way out—for all parties—but no German official confirmed or denied Helene’s assertion. There remained the Nuremberg Laws, however. Helene had not disclaimed her official parentage: she still had a Jewish father and two Jewish grandparents. She was Jewish, whatever her citizenship; but so long as everyone turned a blind eye she was also on the Olympic team.

  Why was no one pointing out this obvious contradiction? Besides, if Helene was no longer Jewish, the claim of American and other sports leaders that they had been successful in getting a Jew accepted was no longer valid. Evidently both the American and the International Olympic committees had decided that they had to insist that Germany select at least one qualified Jewish athlete; this achieved, the Games could proceed. So, bizarrely, the German and American Olympic authorities became allies. The American press did not surrender quite so easily, several papers arguing that Helene had been forced to appear for Germany out of consideration for her family; had she refused to fence, her mother and brothers could have ended up in a concentration camp.

  Helene did not emerge unscathed. The journalist Georg Bernhard called her “Goebbels’s little heifer.”6 Much later, after the Games were over, in a radio talk broadcast all over the United States, Germany’s leading novelist, Thomas Mann—who had narrowly eluded arrest in 1933, fleeing first to Switzerland and finally to the sanctuary of Southern California—publicly upbraided Helene for throwing her mask in with the Nazis. Instead, he declared, she should have used her position to warn the world of the dangers of Hitler’s Germany. But in truth, as 1935 drew to a close, the heat went out of the Olympic debate—it had gone on too long, with too many equivocations on all sides. On February 13 Helene sailed to her homeland on the German liner Bremen. Upon landing, after an absence of four years, she told a reporter, “I’ve always intended going back. Once you’ve been in the Games you will understand. It’s a tremendous experience. And besides, I want a chance to win back that championship I lost in Los Angeles.”

  Helene was the only Jewish athlete to represent Germany at the summer Games. In the winter Olympics, held in the Bavarian Alps that February, there had been another contestant with one Jewish parent, Rudi Ball, on the German ice hockey team; but this was hardly noticed by the world’s press, or even in Germany, where only one family in five took a newspaper. What, however, of Gretel Bergmann, the high jumper, who also had publicly been told by the authorities that she would be part of the German team? Her story makes an interesting contrast to Helene’s.

  Born of Jewish parents, Bergmann had been accepted into the University of Berlin when, in 1934, her admission was withdrawn. She left for England to further her education and within the year won the British women’s high-jump championship. She was then told that the Nazis wanted her to return home to try out for the national team. She duly did, only to find “it was a charade. The handful of Jewish track and field athletes were not allowed to be in the German Athletic Association because we were Jews, and that’s where the best training and competition existed. We were forced to train in potato fields.”7 Even so, on June 30, 1936, just one month before the Olympics, she was permitted to jump at the last major Olympic trial and won easily.

  “I remember all the Nazi flags and official saluting and I jumped like a fiend,” she said. “I always did my best when I was angry. I never jumped better.” Her winning jump of five feet, three inches (1.6 meters) equaled the German record.† But it was not recognised, and was only restored to her in 2009.

  On July 16 Bergmann received a letter from the German Olympic Committee informing her that she was not after all to be included in the team: “obviously your performance did not qualify … looking back on your recent performances, you could not possibly have expected to be chosen.” When the high jump event was finally held at the Games, the winning leap was five feet, three inches, the same as Bergmann’s at the trials. But the Nazis knew what they were doing: the letter had been timed to arrive the day after the American team had set sail from New York—positive proof that they would not now pull out.

  Bergmann never met Helene Mayer and feels that the Nazis allowed her to compete because she was not “100 percent Jewish” and could be presented as an Aryan sportswoman—and because fencing was hidden away in a side stadium, not, like the track and field events, performed in the main arena in front of huge crowds. “I believe that the Nazis knew as early as 1934 just what they were going to do in 1936.”

  In 1937 Bergmann settled in New York. Within two years she was American high-jump champion. In 2002, aged eighty-seven, she was living in Queens (in 2012, aged 97, she does still). I went to visit her and was introduced to her ninety-year-old husband, also a Jewish athlete (a middle-distance runner). She showed me her many trophies and recaptured the years of anger and yearning. “The thought that I might have to represent Nazi Germany sickened me, yet I desperately wanted the chance to compete. But my motivation was different from any other athlete and not at all compatible with the Olympic ideals. I wanted to show what a Jew could do—to use my talent as a weapon against Nazi ideology.”

  Helene had no such agenda. Although to outside eyes she was an ideal selection, a reigning world champion, she had no wish to be tagged a “Jewish athlete.” She didn’t have anything against Jews; she just didn’t feel Jewish—she felt “like a German.” As she later told an American friend, “I never knew I was a Jew until the NSVD said I was, and now I don’t give a shit.”8

  During her months back in Germany, she lived among a protective coterie of friends and family and spent all the time she could training—not in Offenbach, whose club had expelled her, but at a salle in Königstein, near Frankfurt. There were training camps too, one in the north, then another in the south of Germany, with Hungarian and French c
oaches on supply, but Helene dubbed them “ghastly” and commissioned extra lessons from an Italian coach, Francesco Tagliabo. Her longtime teammate Erwin Casmir was now responsible for organizing the German fencing effort. “Helene Mayer’s ability was not even a question,” he recorded. “Nevertheless I had to inform myself about her present strength in fencing because we knew little about that.” Come the trials, “she qualified as top of all those who entered and nothing stood in her way after that.”

  A reception was held for the team in Berlin, where Helene shook hands with Hitler: as with other athletes who were introduced to him, no words were exchanged. Then came the march at the opening—4,000 athletes from fifty nations, with 100,000 people crowded into a stadium intended for 80,000, where Helene stood out as the tallest woman on her team. Then, at last the competition.

  At the Olympic Village, 1936. Helene kept this intimate portrait in her scrapbook of the Games. (illustration credit 15.3)

  On August 5 The New York Times reviewed the film Road to Glory, scripted by William Faulkner. That same day the women’s foil was contested in Berlin—a nice coincidence. Helene outshone her fellow team members, Hedwig Hass and Olga Oelkers, fighting her way without difficulty through the other forty-four competitors to the eight-woman final. The amphitheater where the competition was held was packed—unusual for a fencing event: the controversy surrounding Helene’s inclusion had led to an expectant and partisan audience.

  It soon became clear that the gold medal lay between three fencers: Ellen Preis, the reigning Olympic champion, who would go on to capture the world title in 1947 and 1949; a young Jewish Hungarian, Ilona Schacherer-Elek, delicate and stylish (off the piste she would promenade with a long cigarette holder at her lips) who had won the European title in 1934 and 1935 (when Helene had not competed) and who would win again in 1948 and 1951; and Helene herself, already a three-time champion. The 1936 final, even without its attendant dramas, brought together three of the finest women fencers of all time.‡

  The system then for deciding the gold medal was confounding. As was customary, the eight finalists were to fence the others in the pool, in three fights each for the best of nine hits (unless time ran out, as it would prove to do). Individual touches were then added up to decide the winner. Sure enough, it emerged that the gold medal would go to one of the three favorites; but which one? As Adrianne Blue recounts in her book Faster, Higher, Further:

  Tension was high. The crowd was warned to be silent. There was no sound as Mayer, who towered over Elek, lunged at her in the first of their encounters. Ilona Elek was small but quick, a left-hander. She had none of Mayer’s classic style, and she had a shorter reach but she was an excellent strategist.9§

  The crowd was willing her to lose, but Elek fought on, winning their three bouts, 3–2, 4–4, and 5–4. But only time would tell who would eventually be Olympic champion. Mayer went on to beat all her other opponents including every Aryan she faced. She must, it seemed, be ahead on points.

  Now came the crucial encounter of the finals: Mayer versus Preis, her tormentor in Los Angeles. To pick up Mandell’s account, here was “perhaps the most dramatic fencing match of the age.… In an atmosphere so tense that the crowded spectators were almost too choked to express empathetic satisfaction or dismay, the two great athletes lunged stormily or dodged with uncanny agility.” Incredibly (no official score sheets survive), the match ended in a draw: 2–2, 3–3, 4–4. The judges hurriedly added up all the finalists’ hits: a Jew had indeed taken the gold medal, but it was the Hungarian, Elek, by a single hit over Mayer; Preis had the bronze. One of Helene’s friends on the German team, Doris Runzheimer, a track athlete, was watching and later wrote, “There were four international judges at the last crucial match. Dubious decisions were made.” Others present, more objective, thought the judging fair.

  Hours later the three medalists stood on the winners’ rostrum in the main Olympic stadium, medallions around their necks, laurel wreaths in their hair. In the photograph cabled around the world, Elek and Preis are at attention, Elek holding in her left arm one of the oak saplings given to every victor at the Games. Helene is standing at attention too, but her right arm is extended in a stiff Nazi salute.

  The gesture seemed a clear affirmation of Hitler’s power, a pledge of allegiance to the Third Reich and all it stood for. All Germans who mounted the podium were required to make it. According to Susan D. Bachrach of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, “the film footage of this moment shows Mayer hesitating awkwardly as she gave the salute.”11 Perhaps. Would there have been any real danger to her or her family had she kept her arm by her side? Would, say, Gretel Bergmann have given the Nazi salute? “I ask myself that question every day of my life,” Bergmann herself says. “I don’t know the answer. I might be dead now. There was a terrible climate of unimaginable fear in Germany, and very few heroes.”

  A crowd of 100,000 stands to attention for the Hungarian National Anthem, while each of the three medalists wears an olive-branch coronet.

  And Helene Mayer salutes the Führer. (illustration credit 15.4)

  After the ceremony, Reinhold Heydrich, who had closely followed all the fencing events and who knew the Mayer family through university fraternity meetings with Eugen, came up to Helene and said in a voice loud enough to carry to one of her coaches, who passed on the story, “You Jewish c***. You’ve lost us the gold medal.” Helene replied, “I am really very sorry, but you’re a fencer yourself and know that some days you win, some days you lose. Today I lost. Auf Wiedersehen.” A few days later she left for America on the Heidelberg.

  Helene had been in Germany for six months. Back in the haven of Mills, she picked up the threads of her American life. By September 22 the Mills College Weekly was featuring a long interview with the college’s “ambassador” to the Olympics. Everything Helene told the paper was painfully superficial and bland, almost a Nazi propaganda sheet: “Helene returned with several good-looking suits, sports outfits, and fencing costumes which the German government generously gave to its athletes. In addition she brought back beautiful scarves and pins given her by the German government and several fine leather bags. To quote Helene, she ‘collected more stuff this year than ever before.’ ”

  The following month, Helene gave a talk to the student body, during which she referred casually to Hitler as “a cute little man.” There was no irony in her words: one of her audience recalls even today the shock of hearing her talk in such terms. Why did she deliberately block the full range of what she had experienced? Did she still believe that her German citizenship would be returned to her? (It never was.) In the principal account of Helene’s life—by a fellow Californian, Milly Mogulof—the author invokes “victimology theory,” according to which, as situations worsen, victims have diminished capacity to acknowledge their enemy. Mogulof also quotes Primo Levi on how victims are “tempted or teased into becoming accomplices in the atrocities committed against them … a corrosive process against moral values and moral choices.”

  It is possible to view Helene Mayer in this way, but it may be too kind. Above all, she wanted to be accepted as a good German and to triumph as the great fencer she knew she was. In 1937 she competed again for Germany in the world championships in Paris, found herself in the last eight along with seven of the Berlin finalists, and triumphantly took first place, Elek landing the silver medal and Preis once again the bronze. It was Helene’s last appearance at a world or Olympic championship, but perhaps she felt she had proved her point.

  In 1938 the Gestapo went to Helene’s mother’s house and threatened her, but Helene made representations and the threats were not repeated. During the 1936 Games Helene had also made some attempts to get Eugen to Peru, but nothing came of it and he ended up, with his brother Ludwig, doing national service—not in the Wehrmacht but in the Organization TODT, involved in sending drafted workers to the mines. Eugen’s widow Erica told me that Königstein seemed like “a forgotten village” for much of the war, but in 1
945 both brothers fled their posts and hid out in the Black Forest until Germany surrendered. “We should have listened to Helene,” Eugen concluded.12 Their uncle Georg August Mayer had died in Theresienstadt camp in 1942.

  When she realized there was no future for her in Germany, Helene set about making California her permanent home, settling into a three-room cottage near the Mills campus with her trophies, books, mementos, and photographs, including the photo of Hitler shaking her hand at the 1936 Games. She continued to speak German, to eat German food, to sing German songs; but in 1940 she became an American citizen. On top of her teaching responsibilities she was made a professor of political science at the City College of San Francisco. She cofounded a fencing club in San Francisco, then, during the war, helped teach German to American servicemen: one of the tasks she set them was to learn a map of Berlin by heart. In 1946, after winning the U.S. title for the eighth time, she considered training for the 1948 Games, but in the 1947 U.S. championships she lost a bout marked by doubtful decisions to an inspired local fencer, Helena Dow (wife of Warren Dow), and had to accept second place. This seems to have had a far greater effect on her than a minor setback should have, for thereafter she gave up serious competition. It is difficult to see how she could have envisaged herself at the Olympics again; not until 1964 were athletes who had represented one country allowed to compete for another, and Helene could hardly have fenced for Germany as an American citizen. But she must have looked on enviously the following year in London as Elek took her second gold medal; Preiss, yet again, was third.

  It was in 1948 that Helene first began experiencing sudden pain, weakness, and fatigue—the initial symptoms of the breast cancer that would kill her. In February 1952 she took leave of absence without pay from her work to return to Germany for a “recuperative period.” Three months later, in May, she married a “quintessentially Bavarian” aristocrat, Baron Erwin von Sonnenburg, an old family friend, and settled down to live with him in Germany. She had had several lovers in America and a number of proposals of marriage, but this dignified engineer was the first, she said, who came up to her standards.