Helene Mayer (1910–1953) was one of the outstanding foil fencers of her generation, and her Olympic career became entangled with one of the darkest chapters of European history. Born in Offenbach am Main, Germany, to a Jewish father and a Protestant mother, she won the women's individual foil gold medal representing Germany at the 1928 Amsterdam Olympic Games on 1 August 1928. That victory made her the first Jewish woman to win an individual Olympic gold medal.
While studying and fencing in the United States, Mayer witnessed the Nazis' rise to power in Germany. In 1933, her German fencing club excluded her because of her Jewish ancestry. Nevertheless, she was invited to represent Nazi Germany at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, when the regime was facing international pressure and possible boycotts over its persecution of Jews. According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, she was the only athlete of Jewish ancestry to compete for Germany at those Summer Games.
Mayer won the silver medal in women's individual foil in Berlin. Standing on the medal podium in the uniform of Nazi Germany, she gave the Nazi salute, as did other German medalists. The gesture remains one of the most controversial images of the Games. Historical accounts debate her personal reasons for returning and participating, so her motives should not be stated as established fact. After Berlin, she returned to the United States, won the world foil title in 1937, and later returned to Germany in 1952. She died in Heidelberg in 1953, aged 42. Her life illustrates the collision of athletic achievement, Jewish ancestry, exclusion, propaganda and personal choices under dictatorship.
