Johann Trollmann

Johann Wilhelm "Rukeli" Trollmann (27 December 1907 – April 1944) was a German Sinti boxer.

Early life

Trollmann was born in , a village part of Gifhorn, into a poor Protestant family. His father, Wilhelm "Schnipplo" Trollmann (1867–1933), was an ethnic German umbrella maker and part-time musician, while his mother, Friederike "Pessy" Weiss (1874–1946), was of Sinti origin. He had eight siblings: his three sisters Maria, Anna, and Wilhelmine, and five brothers Wilhelm, Ferdinand, Julius, Albert, and Heinrich. The family moved to Hanover, settling in the borough Ricklingen, in the early 1910s. Trollmann attended the local ''Volksschule'' until third grade.

Trollmann picked up boxing when he was a child and had his first amateur match at eight years old. He was called "Rukeli" by other Sinti, derived from the Romani word for tree ("ruk"), for his upright stance. Trollmann's youngest brothers, Albert ("Benny") and Heinrich ("Stabeli"), also boxed in their private time.

Although the family had kept close ties to the Roma community, the Trollmanns were regarded as assimilated. Trollmann's father had served in Braunschweig's water police during World War I while the family of his mother had long abandoned their itinerant lifestyle.

Career

Amateur boxing

Boxing as a sport had been severely limited during the German Empire, with outright bans in some regions. Training and professional matches became openly accessible in 1919 with the founding of the Weimar Republic. Trollmann entered the boxing scene in the early 1920s. He won the regional title of Hanover district's boxing championship four times in a row and became a member of the BC Heros Eintracht in 1922, thus joining the ''Deutsche Reichsverband für Amateur-Boxen'' (DRfAB). Trollmann became famous in the mid-1920s for winning the North-German amateur boxing championship.

With the rising popularity of boxing, Trollmann entered officially held matches as a middleweight by 1924. His looks made him popular with the audience, earning him compliments by both women and men during matches and dedicated columns in newspapers in his hometown. He was well-received for his distinct boxing style, which was compared to dance for Trollmann's quick and agile moves. Trollmann's critics primarily focused on his Romani heritage and mocked his technique as "un-German", with some newspapers derisively nicknaming him "the Dancing Gypsy" ("der tanzende Zigeuner") or just "Gipsy/Gibsy".

Trollmann sought to join the German national boxing team for the 1928 Summer Olympics, but was barred by officials, officially for "inedequate performance". For the middleweight class, the committee instead selected Walter Cunow, who had been previously defeated by Trollmann several times; Cunow himself would be replaced by Albert Leidmann. It has since been suspected that Trollmann's rejection was related to the Weimar government's unwillingness to be represented by a Sinto at the event.

Professional boxing

In June 1929, Trollmann left the BC Heros Eintracht and joined BC Sparta Linden, primarily made up of athletes with working class backgrounds, to focus on national competitions in professional sports. From then, he lived primarily in Berlin, being coached by Ernst Zirzow. Travelling throughout Germany, Trollmann fought against opponents, both German and foreign, in the welterweight to heavyweight classes.

Interference by the Nazi government

Following Adolf Hitler's rise to power in January 1933, the Nazi government officially renamed boxing to "German fistfighting" ("''Deutscher Faustkampf"'') and declared the sport as an integral part of the effort to create a "defensible '' Volkskörper''". The following month, DRfAB was restructured into ''Deutscher Amateur-Boxverband'' (DABV), part of the newly established centralised boxing association ''Verband Deutscher Faustkämpfer'', under chairman Georg Radamm, a long-time member of the Nazi Party. The change led to informal discrimination against athletes with non-German or mixed ethnic backgrounds. Trollmann's family had been largely conservative, with Trollmann's eldest brother Wilhelm ("Carlo") joining the SA in 1933, but he was ousted the same year for being Roma.

On 9 June 1933, Trollmann fought for the German light-heavyweight title against Adolf Witt, in a highly publicised match attended by Nazi officials, including VDF chairman Radamm. Aware that Trollmann was likely to win, which would call the Nazi government's professed superiority of the German "Aryans" into question, Radamm had instructed the jury to judge "no result" and although Trollmann clearly led by points over the course of six rounds, the jury obeyed Radamm's instructions. The audience rebelled and after thirty minutes, the jury acknowledged Trollmann as the victor.

However, six days later he was stripped of the title, with a VDF letter stating that both fighters had "performed inadequately" and that Trollmann had shown "unsportsmanlike behaviour" by crying tears of joy while receiving the trophy belt. A new fight was scheduled for 21 July, with runner-up , a heavyweight, as Trollmann's opponent. Trollmann was threatened that he had to change his "dancing" style or lose his licence. Trollmann arrived the day of the match with his hair dyed blond and his face whitened with flour, the caricature of an Aryan. He took the blows of his opponent as he was asked for five rounds before he collapsed. The defeat signalled his permanent expulsion from professional boxing, with his licence being revoked in the following autumn, but this did nothing to dismantle his popular image. To avoid further issues with Nazi officials, Trollmann briefly went into hiding in the region around Teutoburg Forest.

Between 1933 and 1935, Trollmann continued to earn a living as a boxer at carnivals and other small-scale events. He resided in Berlin-Charlottenburg with his girlfriend Olga Frieda Bilda (1915 – after 1975), having a daughter, Rita, in March 1935. The couple married on 1 June 1935.

Detainment

In July 1935, Trollmann was detained at following a forced sterilisation order. With the introduction of the Nuremberg Laws in September 1935, the persecution of Sinti and Roma in Germany dramatically increased. Trollmann was labelled "feeble-minded since birth" and forcibly sterilised 23 December 1935, as part of Nazi eugenics efforts targeting ethnic minorities. In September 1938, Trollmann divorced from his wife in hopes of covering for his daughter who, under the Nuremberg Laws, would be judged a ''Mischling'' for being half-Sintiza.

By 1938, Trollmann had been transferred to Hannover-Ahlem subcamp, but was released the same year. In November 1939 he was drafted into the Wehrmacht as an infantryman. He was stationed in occupied France, Belgium, and Poland, where he was wounded in June 1941 during the early stages of Operation Barbarossa, being returned to Germany as a result; he was officially discharged in early 1942, when Sinti and Roma were banned from serving in the military.

The Gestapo arrested Trollmann in June 1942 while in Hanover. He was tortured during custody at the city's branch office of the and in October of the same year, he was interned Neuengamme concentration camp in Hamburg. He tried to keep a low profile, but was recognized by '' Schutzhaftlagerführer'' , who had been a boxing official before the war. He used Trollmann as a trainer for his troops during the nights in exchange for a slice of buttered bread for each time Trollmann was knocked out. Having already lost 30 kg before arriving in Neuengamme, the spars were treated as leisure by the SS guards and regularly devolved into beatdowns, causing Trollmann's health to deteriorate further. After three months, the prisoners committee decided to act and faked Trollmann's death on 9 February 1943, being listed in the camp book as having died of pneumonia compounded by vascular disease. His family received an urn, which was buried at Anger Cemetery in Hanover. In reality, the committee had managed to get him transferred to the Wittenberge satellite camp under an assumed identity.

Death

By spring 1944, the former star was again recognised and the camp elders organized a fight between him and Emil Cornelius, a former criminal and hated "Heu" commando Kapo (a prisoner given privileges for taking on responsibilities in the camp, often a convict working for a reduced sentence or parole). Trollmann won, Cornelius sought revenge for his humiliation and forced Trollmann to work all day until he was exhausted, before attacking and killing him with a shovel. Trollmann was 36 years old. According to fellow Sinto internee Rudolf Landsberger, the SS covered up the death as an accident and buried Trollmann in a forest outside the town cemetery.

Two of Trollmann's brothers also died as a result of the Romani Holocaust: his youngest brother Heinrich, who had also been a communist, died in Auschwitz concentration camp in 1943, while another brother, Julius ("Mauso"), died in 1958 from long-term health effects of his imprisonment, having been rendered paraplegic from severe beatings at a hard labour camp.

Rehabilitation and commemoration

In 2003, the officially recognised Trollmann as the winner of the 1933 championship.

On 9 June 2010, the anniversary of his championship fight, the German artist collective Bewegung Nurr erected a temporary memorial "9841" in the Berlin Victoria Park to honour Trollmann. The memorial was also displayed the following year in Hannover and in Dresden in 2012 for six weeks. The title refers to Trollmann's prison number.

In 2015, the Italian alternative rock band C.F.F. e il Nomade Venerabile released the song ''Come fiori'' dedicated to Trollmann. This song was the inspiration for the theathral show ''My Inv(f)erno... gypsy life'' which opened the X edition of the International TeatroLab Festival at the Tagliavini theatre in Novellara in March 2019.

In 2016, Dario Fo, recipient of the 1997 Nobel Prize in Literature, published the book ''Razza di zingaro'' based on Trollmann's life.

In 2022, the German television series Babylon Berlin season four, a fictional version of Trollmann is portrayed by Hannes Wegener and is revealed to be the half-brother of one of the series' leads, Lotte Ritter. A fight takes place between Trollman and Willy Bolze, who in real life was Trollman's first professional boxing opponent. The dates are different in the show with their fight taking place in 1931 instead of 1929.

Professional boxing record

References

External links

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{{DEFAULTSORT:Trollman, Johann
1907 births
1944 deaths
German Sinti people
People who died in Neuengamme concentration camp
Romani sportspeople
German people of Romani descent
German civilians killed in World War II
German people who died in Nazi concentration camps
People from Gifhorn (district)
People who died in the Romani Holocaust
People who faked their own death
German male boxers
Deaths by beating in Europe
German Army personnel of World War II
Boxers from Lower Saxony
20th-century German sportsmen