In 1936, the German heavyweight boxer Max Schmeling faced off against Joe Louis at Yankee Stadium, in what became the first loss of Louis’s professional career. When the two fought again, in the same venue, two years later, spectators saw the match as a contest between a representative of a state that had embraced racism as its guiding principle, and an African American. But, writes Dean Karayanis—drawing on an interview with the veteran Jewish sportswriter Jerry Izenberg, who listened to the 1938 fight on the radio as a boy—Schmeling was hardly the avatar of Nazi Germany spectators on either side of the Atlantic imagined:
President Franklin Roosevelt, Mr. Izenberg said, “let it be known he had called Louis and said, ‘You’re fighting for America. You’ve got to do this,’ and Louis was ready to go.” He chuckles at the narrative now. “That’s according to the myth.”
Later, Mr. Izenberg got to know both men. “Schmeling,” he told me, “wasn’t fighting for Hitler. He was fighting because he beat this guy, [Louis], once. He was too old to win the title, everybody said, but he could win it now. That’s what motivated him.”
Schmeling, meanwhile, fought Hitler’s overtures to join the Nazi Party and on Kristallnacht, even hid two Jewish brothers in his apartment. “Max asked me several times over the years not to mention it, . . . not to ‘glorify’ him,” one of the brothers, Henri Lewin, said in 1989. “He told me that what he’d done for me and my brother Werner in 1938 was ‘doing the duty of a man.’”
After so much hype, the rematch ended just two minutes and four seconds into the first round. This time, it was Schmeling who was beaten into submission. When his trainer threw in the towel, America rejoiced, but the man they’d cast as a Nazi stooge carried no hard feelings. When Louis died in 1981, Schmeling was a pallbearer and helped pay for his funeral.
Read more on New York Sun: https://www.nysun.com/article/louis-schmeling-emerges-from-the-myths-of-history-on-its-85th-anniversary