In the minds of most Americans, Max Schmeling was a villain — the living embodiment of the Nazi party and its notions of racial purity.
Yet the millions of Americans and Germans transfixed by the radio broadcast of his legendary 1938 bout with Joe Louis had no idea this boxer had risked his life to save the lives of a pair of San Francisco Jews.
Schmeling died Feb. 2 in his native Germany at the age of 99.
And, while he may have looked the part, the raven-haired boxer was no Nazi. Despite considerable pressure, he never joined the party, refused to fire his American Jewish manager, Joe Jacobs (who, famously, once gave a Hitlerian salute with a smoldering stogie planted between his fingers), and, most notably, saved the lives of two Jewish brothers during a Berlin pogrom.
In a j. story from 2002, San Francisco hotelier Henri Lewin recalled the day Schmeling saved him and his brother, Werner, sheltering them in his plush suite at the palatial Excelsior Hotel.
“In the Third Reich he committed an act of treason, breaking the law of the Third Reich to clean itself of every Jew,” Lewin told j. at the time.
At the time, Schmeling was the apple of the Third Reich’s eye, having defeated Louis and taken his heavyweight title belt in a 1936 match still considered one of the greatest upsets in boxing history.
“So, if this guy is caught helping Jews, what the hell do you think the medal is for that, huh?” asked Lewin.
In what was viewed as an almost Manichean battle of good vs. evil, Louis dispatched “The Black Ulan of the Rhine” in 1938 in a sporting moment that transcended the ring, reducing the myth of Aryan supremacy into a bloodied pulp, face-down on the canvas after only 124 seconds.
Following his crushing loss to Louis, Schmeling lost favor with the German government. In 1940 he was drafted, served as a paratrooper and seriously injured in the war.
He fought a few bouts in the late ’40s to bring himself and his Czech-born actress wife, Anny Ondra, back from the financial brink. He parlayed his winnings into a lucrative Coca-Cola distributorship.
On a 1954 trip to America to referee a bout, Schmeling visited Jacobs’ grave in New York before meeting Louis in Chicago. The two kindled an unlikely friendship; Schmeling passed the oft-destitute Louis money and even paid for his funeral in 1981.