Helene Mayer

In 1924, Helene Mayer won the German national championship in women’s foil fencing at the age of 13. She went on to successfully defend her title six years in a row.

Her extraordinary talent dazzled the country, earning her fame and adulation. Statues of her were sold in souvenir shops throughout Germany. 

Many considered her to be the greatest female fencer in history.

She represented Germany at the 1928 Amsterdam Summer Olympics, bringing home a gold medal. Four years later, she competed in the Los Angeles Games. Two hours before her final matches, she learned that her boyfriend had died in a military training accident. She finished fifth.

Mayer stayed in California and attended college for international law, hoping to perhaps become a diplomat for her country one day.

In 1933, Hitler and the Nazi Party took power in Germany, and quickly set to work stripping away the rights of Jewish citizens — including Mayer, whose father was Jewish.

Mayer’s membership in her hometown fencing club was revoked, and it became clear she could not return to Germany. The former celebrity was reduced to teaching German at a college in Oakland.

She continued to fence successfully in the United States, but pined for her homeland and the fame that had been snatched away from her.

In the run-up to the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, many in the United States were advocating a boycott of the games as a rebuke to Hitler’s regime.

Regarding the prospect of a boycott as a potential disaster, American Olympic Committee head Avery Brundage convinced Germany to allow a Jewish-German athlete to compete — a public relations stunt to mask the Nazi's heinous treatment of Jews.

An invitation was extended to Mayer to try out for the German team. Homesick and desperate to reclaim her lost Olympic glory, she ignored the Nazis' atrocities and accepted.

Her return to Germany was far from triumphant. The press ignored her and the government tolerated her presence with thinly veiled disdain.

She fought in the Olympics with determined ferocity, but ultimately lost her final duel against Ilona Elek of Hungary.

Standing on the winner’s podium to accept her silver medal, Mayer concluded her last Olympics with a Nazi salute to Hitler, the leader of the regime that would soon carry out the genocide of her people.

Mayer returned to the United States, where she continued to win championships. She finally returned to Germany in 1952, but died of cancer just a year later at the age of 42.

In her tragically short life, she gave few interviews and left behind little correspondence, making the reasoning behind her deal with Nazi Germany, and her feelings about it, an enduring mystery.