Deutsche Bundespost Helene Mayer

DEUTSCHE BUNDESPOST on 6 June 1968 issued a First Day Cover of "Olympic Personalities/Athletes", including Helene Mayer. These stamps -- five in total  -- were semi-postals with postage values and surcharges added for cultural donation, or in this case the surtax was used for the Foundation to Promote the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich. This FDC is unique in that it appeared on a cachet designated for the 1972 Munich Olympics. The postmark was dated 28 August 1972 with a fencing design.

Helene Julie Mayer (1910 – 1953) was a German-born fencer who won a gold medal at the 1928 Olympics in Amsterdam, and a silver medal at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. 

Mayer has 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. 

The controversy stems from her participation in the 1936 Berlin Olympics. She was the only German athlete of Jewish ancestry permitted to represent Nazi Germany in fencing.

Prior to this, the Nazi Party had rescinded her German citizenship while she was studying in the United States. As countries became aware of Nazi  Germany's discriminatory practices, international participation in the Olympic Games came into question. 

In the United States, sports organisations and trade unions discussed the possibility of boycotting the 1936 Olympic games. In 1933, the Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) of the United States, which supervised Olympic competitors, voted not to send a team if Jews were to be discriminated against in the German Olympics. The International Olympic Committee (IOC) asked for assurances from the Olympic Organising Committee of Berlin that German Jews would not suffer discrimination and would be permitted to try out for the German team. As a concession to  mounting political pressure, the Nazis allowed twenty Jewish athletes to train for the Olympics. Eventually only one was allowed to compete for Germany – Helene Mayer.

While Helene Mayer left little historical record, what is known from her contemporaries is that she did not consider herself Jewish. Her father, Ludwig Karl Mayer, a physician, was Jewish; whereas her mother, lda Anna Bertha (née Becker) was Lutheran. Helene did not appear to identify with either parent. It was said that her primary concern was to be a successful athlete and that preoccupation may have blinded her to the Nazi racism. It was also supposed that Mayer saw Olympic glory as an opportunity to reclaim her German citizenship.

Whatever her reasons, Helene Mayer did represent Germany in the 1936 Olympic Games, placing second, earning the silver medal, and as all German athletes were required to do in Berlin that year, gave the Nazi salute. It should be noted that for all of Hitler’s claims of racial superiority, the gold medal went to the Hungarian Ilona Ela, also half-Jewish.

After the Olympics, she returned to the United States where she studied and taught German and fencing at American universities. She became a nine-time U.S. fencing champion. She received American citizenship in 1941 but returned to Germany in 1952 where she died from breast cancer in 1953.

Source: Centre for Jewish History, Wikipedia