Lilli Henoch

Lilli Henoch (26 October 1899 – 8 September 1942) was a German track and field athlete who set four world records and won 10 German national championships, in four different disciplines.

Henoch set world records in the discus (twice), the shot put, and the 4 × 100 meters relay events. She also won German national championships in the shot put four times, the 4 × 100 meters relay three times, the discus twice, and the long jump. She was Jewish, and during the Holocaust she and her mother were deported and shot by the Nazis in the Riga Ghetto in September 1943. Her father, a businessman, died in 1912. In 1924, she trained the women's section in Bar Kochba Berlin.

Long jump In 1924, Henoch won the German Long Jump Championship, having won the bronze medal in the event the prior year.

Shot put On 16 August 1925 Henoch set a world shot put record with a throw of 11.57 meters.

4 × 100 meters relay In 1926, she ran the first leg on a 4 × 100 meters relay world record—50.40 seconds—in Cologne, breaking the prior record that had stood for 1,421 days by a full second. She won the German national championship in the 4 × 100 meters relay in 1924–26.

Post-Nazi-rise disruption of career After Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933, Henoch and all other Jews were forced to leave the membership of the BSC, by the Nazi's new race laws. She then joined the Jüdischer Turn-und Sportclub 1905 (Jewish Gymnastics and Sports Club 1905), which was limited to Jews, for which she played team handball and was a trainer.

Because she was Jewish, the German government did not allow her to participate in the 1936 Summer Olympics. She and her mother were taken from the ghetto and shot by an Einsatzgruppen mobile killing unit in September 1942, along with a large number of other Jews taken from the ghetto. They were all buried in a mass grave near Riga, Latvia. Her brother Max Henoch was deported to Auschwitz on 19 April 1943. He was then sent to Langentstein Zwieberge on 9 February 1945. He starved to death there and died on April 1945.

In 2008, a Stolperstein was installed in her honor in front of her former residence in Berlin.