Max Schmeling

Maximilian Adolph Otto Siegfried Schmeling was born in Klein Luckow, Brandenburg. Inspired by watching film of Jack Dempsey, Schmeling took up boxing in the 1920s during the Weimar Republic, developing a devastating, mathematically timed straight right-hand counter over his opponent's left jab. Moving to the United States in 1928, Schmeling won the vacant world heavyweight championship in June 1930 against Jack Sharkey in New York.

On 19 June 1936 at Yankee Stadium, Schmeling faced the seemingly invincible young sensation Joe Louis. Having observed that Louis dropped his left hand after throwing a jab, Schmeling executed a tactical masterpiece, timing his thunderous right hands over Louis's jab until knocking him out in the twelfth round in the Ring Magazine Fight of the Year.

Although Adolf Hitler sought to exploit Schmeling as a symbol of Aryan racial supremacy, Schmeling resisted regime pressures: he refused to dismiss his American Jewish manager Joe Jacobs, rejected the Nazi Party, and on Kristallnacht in November 1938, courageously hid two young Jewish brothers, Henri and Werner Lewin, in his hotel room at the Excelsior Hotel in Berlin, saving their lives. After World War II, Schmeling became a successful entrepreneur and a close personal friend of Joe Louis, quietly paying for Louis's medical expenses and funeral costs.