Gottfried von Cramm
6th July, 1909
Ok. I know what you’re thinking. This is about bastards and this obviously German bastard was born in 1909. You know where this is going, right?
Well slow down a bit there, Judge. This is about bastards and bastards can be glorious bastards as well as nasty bastards. Calling someone a bastard isn’t necessarily always a bad thing. Australians will happily call their best mates a ‘cunt’ and call cunts ‘mate’, so let’s not jump to conclusions just yet, right?
Gottfried von Cramm was not only a German and born in 1909, which has immediately made you think of one thing only, but he was an aristocrat as well. Born at Schloss Nettlingen in Lower Saxony, he was the third son of Baron Burchard von Cramm and Countess Jutta von Steinberg. Not content with being born in one castle, he was raised in another, Schloss Brüggen, because nobody did multi-castle ownership like German posh bastards.
At the age of 10, Gottfried had the end of his finger bitten off by a horse and, hampered by this, he decided that he’d better take up tennis because, presumably, you don’t need all ten fingers to play tennis and it would, on reflection, seem like a safer career than anything to do with horses.
Luckily for the digitally disadvantaged Deutschlander, he was rather good at it and by 1932 he was playing for Germany in the Davis Cup and had won the German championships. He won the mixed doubles at Wimbledon in 1933 alongside the perfectly named Hilde Krahwinkel and won the French Open in 1934.
Gottfried von Cramm (left) with Irish tennis player George Lyttleton Rogers, 1932. I know what you’re thinking. Either Gottfried was a midget or George was a giant. Gottfried was 6ft tall.
Gottfried was young, handsome, Aryan as fuck and the perfect tool for a spot of propaganda for a feisty miscreant who had risen to power at that time in Germany by the name of Adolf Hitler. You might have heard of him. Gottfried, however, was having none of it and refused to participate in any NSDAP bullshit.
He was the epitome of the gentleman player, loved for his sense of fair play and sportsmanship. The 1935 Davis Cup Interzone final against the USA was lost when, at match point, Gottfried made a call against himself that nobody else had spotted, forfeiting the point.
He was Wimbledon finalist in 1935, 36 and 27, never winning the title. He won the French again in 1936 and made the final of the US Open, where he lost, in 1937.
At the peak of his popularity, he was the most famous German sportsman and adored by the public and then, on 5th March 1938, he was arrested by the government and tried on a charge of having a homosexual relationship with a young Galician actor called Manasse Herbst.
The arrest ruined him and caused a nervous breakdown. Admitting that he had an affair that begun before he married his first wife, Baroness Elisabeth Lisa von Dobeneck in 1930, and lasting until 1934, he was found guilty and sentenced to a year in prison. In addition, he was charged with sending money to Herbst, who had moved to Palestine, a crime on the basis that Herbst had the audacity to be Jewish.
Newspaper reports at the time suggested that Gottfried and Manasse started their love affair after Baroness Elisabeth had an affair with a Frenchman. Him being French seemingly a fact worthy of mention and implying that having an affair with a Frenchman was worse than having an affair with someone who wasn’t French.
Gottfried later changed his story to one of ‘mutual masturbation’ and his lawyer was later able to get the money laundering charge struck down on the basis that Manasse was a ‘sneaky Jew’.
The international tennis community rallied to his aid. Don Budge, the great American player collected a petition bearing the names of many high-profile athletes and sent a protest letter to Hitler. King Gustav V of Sweden protested to Germany on his behalf and Gottfried was eventually released after 6 months, returning to competitive tennis in 1939. Wimbledon refused to allow him to play that year on the basis that he was a convicted criminal.
Throughout the period of the National Socialist regime, Gottfried had openly refused to become a member of the NSDAP (that’s the Nazi Party, but the nazis didn’t call themselves Nazis. We did), even though Hermann Goering, who played for the same tennis club as him, tried several times to persuade him. Gottfried never mentioned Hitler in any of his victory speeches, was known to be privately critical of the Nazis, and watched anti-Nazi films, all of which put him under surveillance by the NSDAP.
In 1940, whilst at a tennis tournament in Rome, the German authorities ordered him to return home and he was conscripted into the German Army as a member of the Hermann Goering Division on the Eastern Front. Despite his noble birth, he was enlisted as a private and, because of his anti-Nazi sympathies and previous conviction, he was given a terrible posting. He won the Iron Cross for his service and eventually got himself promoted to a command position, but in 1942, with most of his unit dead and suffering terribly from frostbite, he was evacuated back to Germany, where, because of his past was dismissed from the army.
He spent the last years of the war as a tennis coach, traveling between Germany and Sweden. He became active in the German resistance and used his connections to pass secret messages between conspirators in the 20 July Plot that came so close to assassinating Hitler. When that attempt failed, he volunteered to be among those who might try again, a plan that never materialized.
He won the German championships again in 1948 and 1949, aged 40, but the war had robbed him of his greatest years. He married the Woolworth heiress Barbara Hutton in 1955 and they divorced in 1959.
He spent his later years as a tennis administrator, cotton importer and running his family’s extensive estates in Germany.
Gottfried Alexander Maximilian Walter Kurt Freiherr von Cramm died on November 8th, 1976 during a business trip to Cairo when his car was involved in an accident with a truck. His driver also died.
He was inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame in 1977.
Credit - Bundesarchiv, Bild 102-13555 / CC-BY-SA 3.0