Luciano Gonzalez
06/20/2020 - 8:29
- Clarín.com
- sports
Porajmos ( devotion ) and Samudaripenes (great massacre) are the terms used to define the genocide of the Roma population in Europe during the Nazi regime. Although there is no consolidated record, it is estimated that at least 250,000 people of this ethnic group died in the gas chambers and tens of thousands were shot in the territories occupied by patrols of the Schutzstaffel (SS). After the Jewish people, it was the most punished group in those years. One of those victims was Johann Wilhelm Trollmann , a German light heavyweight champion, who was stripped of his title and license, locked up and killed in a concentration camp.
The persecution and stigmatization of gypsies had been steeping in western Europe for several centuries when Trollmann was born on December 27, 1907 in Wilsche, a small town located 60 kilometers west of Hanover, one of the industrial poles of the old German Empire, where he moved as a child. Together with his parents and his eight brothers, he grew up in the old town of the state capital of Lower Saxony, in a modest house located on Tiefenthal street, which today is called Johann Trollmann.
At just eight years old and during the First World War, Rukeli ( Young Tree , in the Roma language) began to practice boxing, a sport that was then prohibited and would only be legalized after the fall of the Empire and the establishment of the Weimar Republic in 1918. As an amateur, he won four regional championships and one northern German championship before turning 20.
After being excluded from the Teutonic Olympic team that would participate in the 1928 Amsterdam Games, he moved to Berlin and began his professional career in October 1929. Very soon his name became known for his way of fighting: fast, agile and owner of A very good technique and mobility on the ring was the other side of traditional German boxing, which consisted of standing up to hit and receive without quarter. He was a fencer among gunboats . This style earned him admiration, but also criticism from those who contemptuously called him "gypsy dancer" .
An extremely intense career that included 52 fights in just over three and a half years placed him at the gates of the German light heavyweight championship, in times when globalization was not even a dream and national titles were worth much more than today. The curious thing was that Nazism provided him with involuntary help to take the last step towards that chance.
Johann Trollmann broke with the traditional German boxing style in the 1930s.
Almost immediately after Adolf Hitler's inauguration as chancellor on January 30, 1933, many sports organizations enthusiastically joined the process of arianization of society that fueled the Nazi regime. In April of that year, the Association of German Boxers (VDF) resolved to expel all Jews from its bosom and prohibited Jewish managers, doctors, dentists and lawyers from working under its orbit, while suspending all its members "no belonging to the Reich, who cannot demonstrate a national spirit or who have shown tendencies of disintegration of the national spirit ”.
One of those reached by that persecutory legislation was Erich Seelig , who was stripped of his medium-heavy title and had to emigrate to France, where he continued his career before moving two years later to the United States, after passing through London and Havana. There, he went on to fight for the median world title in December 1939: he was knocked out in the first round by Al Hostak in Cleveland.
The vacancy that led to the expulsion of Seelig led the VDF to order a match to crown the new champion between Adolf Witt and Trollmann. These two fighters had already fought three times the previous year: Rukeli had won the first, in Dresden, had tied the second and lost the third, both at the Flora theater in Hamburg. The fourth crash was scheduled for June 9 at an outdoor venue at the Bockbrauerei brewery in Berlin.
The favoritism of the sports and political authorities was clear. As an example, it is enough to mention that in the Völkischen Beobachter (Popular Observer), the official newspaper of the German National Socialist Workers' Party, Trollmann was referred to as “an effeminate man whose style has nothing to do with true Aryan boxing . ” But among the fans In a time when boxing was a mass sport in Germany, the Romani boxer was the preferred one.
That night, Trollmann controlled Witt, punished him with long, precise punches, and was kept out of reach thanks to his legwork and waist movements. Thus, it was clearly imposed after the 12 rounds agreed. But the ring officers, by order of Georg Radamm, president of the VDF, decided to declare the fight without decision.
Johann Trollmann was a German light heavyweight champion for just eight days.
The authorities' resolution generated massive disapproval among the public, who rioted in the compound to demand that the new champion be crowned. Even some saddles flew to emphasize the claim. Finally, after an alleged review of the ruling, Trollmann was declared the winner and new owner of the crown . Between emotion and anger, the winner cried on the ring upon hearing the decision.
However, the champion's joy did not last long: eight days after the fight, the VDF declared the title vacant again considering that both Trollmann and Witt had had "insufficient performance" to earn the title. Furthermore, Radamm considered that the winner had shown "improper conduct". "A German boxer cannot cry, much less in public," he told the Berliner Lokal-Anzeiger newspaper .
Six months later, the governing body of Teutonic boxing would order a new combat to try to consecrate its new light-heavy monarch. Despite the fact that his performance had been evaluated as "insufficient", Witt was offered another chance and this time he did not miss it: he defeated Paul Vogel and obtained the scepter that he would keep until August 1937. For Trollmann, however, there was no second chance, but rather the opposite .
Six weeks after his duel with Witt, Rukeli was allowed to face welterweight champion Gustav Eder, albeit under threat of suspension if he failed to fight "in German style . " As a measure of protest (modest in form, enormous in modern times), Trollmann stepped into the ring with his jet-dyed blonde hair and olive skin covered in talc. From the initial bell, he put aside his usual mobility, planted his feet on the canvas and exchanged blows without giving or asking for a truce. He received like never before and was knocked out in the fifth round.
That categorical defeat began to mark the end of his career. Although he managed to make, not without difficulties, ten more official fights (of which he lost eight), the shadow of Nazism was posing on him. In 1935, his license was permanently canceled, so he could only continue fighting at fairs in exchange for some tickets . Anyway, the worst was just looming, for him and for thousands of Roma.
Johann Trollmann was considered not only an exquisite boxer, but also a sex symbol.
In December 1935, a supplemental decree to the Nuremberg Laws (passed two months earlier) prohibited them from marrying or having sexual relations with "persons of German blood", as they could produce "racially suspicious" offspring. In September 1936, they were deprived of their rights as citizens and their children were excluded from schools.
The chase was escalating. The open hunt began in June 1938 with the so-called "Gypsy Cleaning Week" , during which around 700 German and Austrian Roma were sent to the Dachau, Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen and Lichtenburg concentration camps, and thousands more were caught.
Among the detainees was Trollmann, who spent several months in the Hannover-Ahlem forced labor camp, where he was also sterilized, a practice that the Third Reich had begun to implement in 1933 on the grounds that the Roma were "hereditary patients whose only solution it is elimination ”. By then, the former champion had already divorced his wife, Olga Bilda, with the aim of keeping her safe from persecution, as well as her daughter Rita.
Shortly after his release, he was recruited by the Wehrmacht (the German Army) to fight in World War II. He first lined up at a base in France, but in mid-1941 he was sent to the eastern front. He was wounded during Operation Barbarossa (the invasion of the Soviet Union by Axis forces) and finally expelled from the Wehrmacht in 1942 on "racial grounds".
At that time, transfers of Roma to death camps were already regular, mainly to Bergen-Belsen, Mauthausen, Ravensbruck and Auschwitz-Birkenau. In the latter, a special complex was created, the Zigeunerlager (Gypsy Camp), after the Dec. 16, 1942, the SS chief, Heinrich Himmler, signed a decree that provided for the mass deportation of those who were considered “antisocial and criminal without possibilities of education ”. Among the thousands who perished there was Heinrich, one of Johann's brothers .
He had a similar fate: he had been arrested by the Gestapo in Hannover in June 1942 and was transferred in October to the Neuengamme concentration camp near Hamburg, where he received prisoner number 9841. There he had to train SS forces and was also forced to box against Roma and Jews. In some cases, the losers were shot minutes later.
Trollmann was initially believed to have died in Neuengamme on February 9, 1943, but an investigation by sociologist and journalist Roger Repplinger published in 2008 and based on the testimony of prisoner Robert Landsberger allowed it to be established that this death was simulated by a self-organized group of inmates , who also managed to get the ex-boxer to be transferred to Wittemberge, another detention center on the same premises, with the idea that the particularly cruel torments to which he was subjected because he was a public figure would diminish there.
However, in Wittemberge he was also recognized and forced to fight after his days of forced labor. In one of those fights, as early as 1944, he had to confront Emil Cornelius, a kapo (an inmate who collaborated with the guards and watched over his fellow captives). Rukeli knocked out his opponent, who after recovering, beat him to death.
The sequence of persecution, death and oblivion by Johann Trollmann is a sample button from the history of the Roma people. The genocide was only recognized by the German authorities in 1982, which enabled a compensation policy to be activated. Almost four decades of rejection had been sustained in the argument that their elimination had not been due to ethnic reasons, but rather that they had been considered "antisocial".
Since 1994, the Roma community has commemorated the Samudaripen every August 2. On that day in 1944, 2,897 women, the elderly and children were killed in the Zigeunerlager gas chambers. Just in 2001, the Auschwitz State Museum opened a permanent exhibition on this genocide.
It took Trollmann a while longer to get the official relief : in December 2003, on the initiative of the promoter Eva Rolle, the Association of German Professional Boxers (BDB) recognized him as the mediocre champion of that country for his victory against Adolf Witt in 1933 . His nephew Manuel Trollmann received an honorary belt. And in Hannover, Hamburg and Berlin commemorative monuments were installed .
Rukeli's life and death inspired various artistic productions, including the novel "The Forbidden Champion" by Italian Nobel Prize winner Dario Fo; the biography "Rukeli: Johann Trollmann and the anti-Nazi Roma resistance", by Jud Nirenberg; the play "The boxer" by Felix Mitterer, released in Vienna in February 2015; and the film "Gibsy: the fight for the life of Rukeli Trollmann", by Eike Besuden.
MFV