Helene Mayer
Helene Mayer · Sports
Olympic fencing champion of 1928 and world champion of 1937, the 'half-Jewish' alibi of the Berlin Games of 1936, where she took silver and gave the Nazi salute
20 décembre 1910, Offenbach-sur-le-Main, Allemagne — 15 octobre 1953, Heidelberg, Allemagne
Offenbach, Los Angeles, Oakland
Helene Mayer is recognized among Jewish contributors to Sports — Olympic fencing champion of 1928 and world champion of 1937, the 'half-Jewish' alibi of the Berlin Games of 1936, where she took silver and gave the Nazi salute
Origins and early life
Helene Mayer was born in Offenbach am Main on 20 December 1910, the daughter of Ludwig Karl Mayer, a Jewish physician, and of Ida Becker, a Lutheran, and was raised in her mother's church; under the Nuremberg laws she was a 'Mischling of the first degree', a half-Jew, and this fiche rests on her father alone.
Work and career
She was the greatest woman fencer of her age: German champion at thirteen, Olympic champion in foil at Amsterdam in 1928 at seventeen, with eighteen victories in twenty bouts, European champion in 1929 and 1931, 'the blonde He', the tall golden girl whom Germany adored. She went to California in 1932 for the Los Angeles Games and stayed to study at Scripps College; in 1933 her fencing club in Offenbach expelled her as a non-Aryan, and she learned of it from the newspapers.
Recognition
Then came the episode that history remembers, and this fiche states it plainly: in 1936 the Reich, pressed by the International Olympic Committee and the threat of an American boycott to show that Jews were not excluded from German sport, invited her — the one 'non-Aryan' — onto the German team; she accepted, won the silver medal in Berlin behind the Hungarian Jew Ilona Elek, and on the podium raised her arm in the Nazi salute, a gesture for which she has been condemned and defended ever since, and which she never explained.
Later years
She beat Elek for the world title in Paris in 1937, returned to America, won the United States championship eight times, and became a citizen in 1940; she went back to Germany in 1952 to marry, and died of cancer at Heidelberg on 15 October 1953, at forty-two.
Verify and go deeper with these external references.
Source: https://www.britannica.com/biography/1936-Olympic-Games-Fencing-for-the-Fuhrer-1367966
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Olympic fencing champion of 1928 and world champion of 1937, the 'half-Jewish' alibi of the Berlin Games of 1936, where she took silver and gave the Nazi salute
Source: https://www.britannica.com/biography/1936-Olympic-Games-Fencing-for-the-Fuhrer-1367966
