Max Schmeling

Max Schmeling was a German heavyweight champion of the 1930s whose two fights against Joe Louis became major worldwide events.

Maximilian Adolph Otto Siegfried Schmeling was born on 28 September 1905 in Klein Luckow, in what was then the German Empire, and endured a difficult childhood shaped by the hardships of the First World War before discovering boxing and moving to Berlin to pursue the sport professionally. He became Germany's light heavyweight champion in 1926 and won the heavyweight title in 1928. Schmeling won the world heavyweight championship in 1930 by disqualification after Jack Sharkey struck him with an illegal low blow, becoming the first European to hold the title and the only man in boxing history to win the heavyweight crown that way. He lost the belt to Sharkey in a controversial 1932 rematch decision. Schmeling's two fights against Joe Louis became defining political events of the 1930s: his stunning 1936 knockout of the previously undefeated Louis was seized upon by Nazi propaganda as proof of Aryan superiority, despite Schmeling's own discomfort with the regime's exploitation of his victory. Their 1938 rematch, held as tensions escalated toward the Second World War, ended in a first-round knockout defeat for Schmeling, delivering a symbolically powerful victory for Louis and for anti-Nazi sentiment worldwide. Schmeling served in the German Luftwaffe during the war, being wounded during the Battle of Crete, and quietly used his post-war wealth, earned partly through a Coca-Cola bottling franchise, to financially support his old rival Joe Louis in Louis's later years of poor health and financial hardship — an act of loyalty that helped rehabilitate Schmeling's public image. He died on 2 February 2005, at age 99, in Wenzendorf, Germany.

Technical counterpuncher, right hand specialist

Bridged boxing eras, survived Nazi regime complexities

• International Boxing Hall of Fame 1992
• Germany's Sports Hall of Fame 2006