Helene Mayer

Helene Julie Mayer (20 December 1910 – 10 October 1953) was a German fencer who won the gold medal at the 1928 Olympics in Amsterdam, and the silver medal at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. She competed for Nazi Germany in Berlin, despite having been forced to leave Germany in 1935 and resettle in the United States because she was of Jewish descent. She studied at American universities, and later returned to Germany in 1952 where she died of breast cancer.

Mayer had been called the greatest female fencer of all time, and was named by Sports Illustrated as one of the Top 100 Female Athletes of the 20th Century, but her legacy remains clouded. At the Olympics in Berlin, where she was the only German athlete of Jewish origin to win a medal, she gave the Nazi salute during the medal ceremony and later said it might have protected her family that was in labor camps in Germany. Some consider her a traitor and opportunist, while others consider her a tragic figure who was used not only by Nazi Germany but by the International Olympic Committee to prevent a boycott of the Games.

After the Olympics, she returned to the United States and became a nine-time U.S. champion. She received citizenship in 1941 but returned to Germany in 1952. Mayer died the following year, leaving few interviews and little correspondence. Her mother lda Anna Bertha (née Becker) was Lutheran, and her father Ludwig Karl Mayer, a physician, was Jewish and was born in 1876. Her ethnic identity reportedly did not become an issue until the Nazi Party rose to power in the early 1930s.

Olympics Mayer won a gold medal in fencing at the age of 17 at the 1928 Summer Olympics in Amsterdam, representing Germany, winning 18 bouts and losing only 2. She later studied towards a master's degree at the University of California at Berkeley, and fenced for the USC Fencing Club. Joseph Goebbels required of the press that "no comments may be made regarding Helene Mayer's non-Aryan ancestry".

Return to Germany and death In 1952, Mayer returned to Germany, where she married an old friend, Erwin Falkner von Sonnenburg, in a quiet May ceremony in Munich. She was inducted into the USFA Hall of Fame in 1963.

Accomplishments

1924: German Foil Champion 1925: German Foil Champion 1926: German Foil Champion 1927: German Foil Champion 1928: German Foil Champion Olympic gold medal, Foil, German Team Winner Foil, Italian National Championships 1929: German Foil Champion World Foil Champion 1930: German Foil Champion 1931: World Foil Champion 1932: German Olympic Foil Team 1933: U.S. Foil Champion (outdoors) 1934: U.S. Foil Champion 1935: U.S. Foil Champion 1936: Olympic silver medal, Foil, German Team 1937: U.S. Foil Champion World Foil Champion 1938: U.S. Foil Champion 1939: U.S. Foil Champion 1941: U.S. Foil Champion 1942: U.S. Foil Champion 1946: U.S. Foil Champion