Johann Trollmann
One universe's Jenny Everywhere once reflected on, and recounted, the story of Johann Trollmann, nicknamed Zigeuner, a 1930s German boxer who fell victim to Nazi oppression.
Description
Physical appearance
Trollmann was an unsurprisingly a fit, quite muscular man. He had naturally brown hair which he kept cropped short, and once dyed blond to prove a point. At the time of the fateful 1933 championship, he was clean-shaven. (COMIC: Bras de Fer)
Personality
Jenny described Johann Trollmann as “full of life, courage and humour” — “stubborn, decisive, a bit of a charmer”. She thought that they would have gotten along. (COMIC: Bras de Fer)
Biography
As recounted by Jenny Everywhere, Trollmannn, born in 1907, was a Sinto Tsigane, hence his nickname. He was a well-liked middleweight professional boxer in 1930s Germany. He fought a championship match against the “Aryan” Adolf Witt, to the ire of the Nazi-leaning panel of judges, who attempted to award the victory to Witt despite Trollmann having visibly won the match.
In the face of public outcry from the audience, the judges retracted themselves and gave Trollmann the medal after all, but a smear campaign was subsequently started against him in the media, claiming that his unpredictable, dodging-focused style of fighting was “un-German” in spirit — and a week after the match, his title was struck from the records once again. To prove a point, Trollmann showed up to his next fight with his hair dyed “Aryan-blond” and stood unmoving as the other fighters pummeled him. Subsequently, Trollmann was drafted by force and sent to the Eastern front, where he stayed and fought until 1942, when he was sent to the concentration camp of Neuengame, where he was ultimately shot by an SS firing squad on February 9th, 1943.
Jenny, living in the 2010s, felt a kinship of sorts with Johann, feeling that they would have gotten along if they'd lived in the same time. She often thought about his story while training as a boxer herself, and she once decided to tell a softened version of Johann's story to a group of children as part of an A.T.D. “reading workshop” for which she had volunteered. (COMIC: Bras de Fer)
Behind the scenes
Although Bras de Fer attempts to tell a realistic narrative of Trollmann's life, its portrayal of the events surrounding his death does not match the biography published by the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust in 2016. According to that source, while he was indeed imprisoned in the Neuengamme concentration camp in 1942 (as shown in Bras de Fer), he was comparatively well-treated by the commandant, who wished to make use of his boxing talents to train his own troops; nevertheless his health began to fail due to the living conditions, and he was smuggled by the prisoners committe out of Neuengame to the adjacent camp of Wittenberge under an assumed name. There, he was ultimately murdered not by an SS firing squad but by a vengeful Kapo with whom he had gotten into a boxing match, and who felt humiliated by Trollmann's victory. The HMDT dated those events to March 1944,[1] As of 2022, Wikipedia instead gave April 9th, 1944 as the date of his death.[2]
