Gottfried Von Cramm

Passions

Vocation

German amateur era tennis champion and twice French Open champion. He was ranked World No. 2 in both 1934 and 1936 and World No. 1 in 1937. The Nazis wanted to exploit his blonde good looks as a symbol of Aryan supremacy, but he refused to identify with Nazism. Probably in revenge, they jailed him for an earlier homosexual relationship with a Jewish actor, and this damaged his career abroad. However, a more probable reason for his imprisonment was because of his losing streak in international tennis; he had lost in the 1937 Davis Cup deciding match to the American Don Budge and Germany did not continue to the finals. In the war, he was discharged from the military because of frostbite. After the War was over and he was released from captivity, von Cramm resumed his tennis career. He won the German Championships in 1949 at the age of 40 and played his last Grand Slam event at Wimbledon in 1951, where he lost in the opening round to Jaroslav Drobny. Von Cramm became a successful businessman and was tragically killed in a car crash on 8 November 1976 aged 67. Link to Wikipedia biography