STRANGE BUT TRUE - Dec. 9, 2010

It was French playwright Albert Guinon who made the following sage observation: “There are people who, instead of listening to what is being said to them, are already listening to what they are going to say themselves.”

Most people at all familiar with the name Max Schmeling know him as the Great Nazi Hope, the boxer produced by Adolf Hitler in the 1930s to defeat Joe Louis, supposedly proving Aryan superiority. (He did defeat Louis in a match in 1936, though he lost a rematch in 1938.) What most people don’t realize, though, is that Schmeling did not subscribe to Hitler’s beliefs — he wasn’t...