Max Danz

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Max Danz (born September 6, 1908 in Kassel ; † June 20, 2000 there ) was a German doctor and sports official. In 1949 he was co-founder and at the same time the first chairman of the German Athletics Association . For his services he was awarded the Great Federal Cross of Merit with a star and shoulder ribbon.

Max Danz 2nd v. re. in a white suit

Life

Athletic career

In the 1920s, Max Danz was a member of a gymnastics movement. First Danz was a member of the TG Kassel and later of Hessen Kassel. At that time he was already one of the best runners over 400 and 800 meters. In 1930 he took part in the university festival and came third over 800 meters. In 1931 he took part in the German championships and won the 3-by-1000-meter course. In 1932 he took part in the Olympic Games . Due to a torn Achilles tendon , he ended his active sports career in 1934.

Medical career

In November 1933 Danz joined the SS (membership number 144085), but was released in September 1934 for "moral inferiority". At the earliest possible point in time, he joined the NSDAP in 1937 (membership number 5,917,387). Between 1930 and 1936 Danz studied medicine at the universities in Berlin and Marburg . After studying medicine, he received his doctorate in 1937. med. and got married. Since he was released from his obligations to the Wehrmacht in 1937 "because of insufficient aptitude", he first worked in various Berlin hospitals (most recently as a senior physician), then in 1941 he set up an internal medical practice on Kurfürstendamm. Towards the end of the Second World War , Danz was drafted into the Wehrmacht and worked in hospitals in Hesse. Here he came into American captivity. Released from this after three months in autumn 1945, he returned to Kassel and opened his own practice as an internist in the family house that had not been destroyed.

Career as a sports official

Denazified early on, Danz was one of the driving forces behind the sport of Kassel, where he made a name for himself as the head of the football department and in the athletics department of KSV Hessen Kassel . In 1946 he was one of the co-initiators of the newly emerging Hessian athletics association. Kristina Jost-Hardt was able to show in her dissertation that he was working specifically on rebuilding German athletics as a unified association. When the last president (until 1945) Karl von Halt returned from a Soviet internment camp shortly before the re-establishment in the western zones , he pushed him to the meaningless post of honorary president in order not to have to give up the planned chairmanship himself. In 1949 he was a co-founder of the German Athletics Association and also became its chairman. Danz campaigned for Germany to be accepted back into the IAAF after the war . Between 1952 and 1976 he was the head of the delegation for the German Olympic team .

In 1952 he became a member of the European Committee of the IAAF and in 1981 its honorary vice-president. The European Athletic Association emerged from this association in 1970 . Through negotiations with the GDR , Danz contributed to the fact that Germany competed with one team in 1956, 1960 and 1964, as well as at the European Championships in 1958 and 1962. After the boycott at the European Championships in 1969 , Danz no longer ran as DLV chairman in 1970 and was made honorary president.

Awards

Max Danz received a total of 24 different honors, including the Olympic Order and the Great Federal Cross of Merit (1967) with a star (1973) and shoulder ribbon (1989). He also became an honorary citizen of Kassel in 1989 .

Critical appraisal

In 2011 the city of Kassel thought about naming the previously unnamed place in front of the Auestadion Max-Danz-Platz because of his merits . The local advisory board questioned about this rejected this request because of Danz's opaque Nazi past . Danz had been a member of the NSDAP and after 1945 he directed the fortunes of Olympic sport in the Federal Republic together with former high sports officials of the Third Reich. These included Karl Ritter von Halt , a former member of the Friends of the Reichsführer SS , and Adolf Friedrich zu Mecklenburg , the last Reich sports leader of the Hitler regime. Long after 1945 he could only comment on Halt that he had “never seen him as a propagandist for National Socialism”. When South Africa responded from the Olympic Games in Tokyo in 1964 and Mexico in 1968 with the so-called South African Games in 1969 because of its demand for racial segregation , Danz justified Germany's participation in these games with the words: We have an old friendship with South Africa. On a tour of South Africa in 1959, Danz announced the basis on which this friendship was founded:

"Racial segregation is often misunderstood abroad. Apartheid is necessary because the whites are in the minority and because they are responsible for the development of the country. "

Danz's handling of the subject of doping is also to be viewed critically . After the abuse of anabolic steroids by numerous West German athletes during the 1968 Olympic Games in Mexico City, he confessed that anabolic steroids were not harmful and only stimulated the organism. This statement had moved the German discus thrower and shot putter Brigitte Berendonk to a critical article about the widespread anabolic abuse in the newspaper Die Zeit after the Olympic Games .

literature

  • Winfried Joch & K. Wilhelm Köster: Dr. Max Danz - A biographical sketch , Hildesheim 2017. ISBN 978-3-942468-83-1
  • Klaus Amrhein: Biographical manual on the history of German athletics 1898–2005 . 2 volumes. Darmstadt 2005, DNB 1012731138 . (published by German Athletics Promotion and Project Society)

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Max Danz in the Sports-Reference database (English; archived from the original )
  2. ^ Biography from Leichtathletik.de
  3. ^ Winfried Joch , K. Wilhelm Köster : Dr. Max Danz. A biographical sketch. Arete, Hildesheim 2017, pp. 14-19.
  4. ↑ Information about Max Danz on the Hessian education server ( memento of the original from September 8, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / dms.bildung.hessen.de
  5. ↑ Kristina Jost-Hardt: The reorganization of athletics in the western occupation zones of Germany after the Second World War. Dissertation at the University of Göttingen, 1987.
  6. ^ Arnd Krüger : A Cultural Revolution? The Boycott of the European Athletics Championships by the West German Team in Athens 1969. In: European Committee for Sports History (Ed.): Proceedings Fourth Annual Conference. Volume 1, Universitá, Florence 1999, pp. 162-166.
  7. ↑ Data on Danz at the German Olympic Sports Confederation
  8. ↑ a b Thomas Lange: Zoff about place names. ( Memento from April 29, 2013 in the web archive archive.today ) In: Extra-Tip. April 19, 2011.
  9. ↑ Winfried Joch: Faster, higher, further. Facets of sport . LIT, Münster 2000, p. 70.
  10. ↑ German sports echo. Berlin March 19, 1969. Quoted after: Lothar Kalb: Sendboten Olympias. The history of foreign studies at the DHfK Leipzig . LUV, Leipzig 2008, p. 39.
  11. ↑ Max Danz. In: Der Spiegel. 48/1959.
  12. ↑ Klaus Latzel, Lutz Niethammer (Ed.): Hormones and high performance. Doping in East and West. Böhlau, Cologne / Weimar 2008, p. 43.
  13. ↑ Klaus Latzel, Lutz Niethammer (Ed.): Hormones and high performance. Doping in East and West. Böhlau, Cologne / Weimar 2008, p. 43.

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Danz, Max
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German doctor, chairman of the German Athletics Association
DATE OF BIRTH September 6, 1908
PLACE OF BIRTH kassel
DATE OF DEATH June 20, 2000
Place of death kassel