A gutsy fighter of Romani (Sinto-Manouche) descent, he punched above his weight throughout his five year campaign in his increasingly hostile native Deutschland. A career light heavyweight, nominally, but typically weighing in around the modern light middleweight limit, and never above the MW limit of 160lbs, he routinely fought men weighing in the 170's or even as 188lbs! He is best known for his thirteen month, four-match rivalry with Adolf Witt, a "proper" German, as the gears of war and the Nazi regime's culture of ****genous intolerance began turning. Officially, until a dozen years ago, they were deadlocked at 1-1-1-1. Trollman is, however, now recognized as rightfully the victor of the series, at 2-1-1, with their controversial 4th meeting amended from a No Contest (as the crooked Nazi officials declared it upon Witt losing, being that it was for the German light heavyweight title, in a time when such prestige bestowed upon the untermenschen was unpalatable...this caused a riot, with the police allowing him, in order to keep the peace, to leave with his title - but tracking him down and stripping him of it within a week) to a decision for Trollman. His living relatives were even awarded with the belt - 70 years after it was stolen from him. The 2nd incident was a direct byproduct of Trollman vs. Witt IV, as the regime officials were so angered with him they ordered him to not only enter the proverbial tank so they could subsequently push Gustav Eder (another real Aryan, but less of a disappointment than Witt) into a crack at the still vacant title after claiming Trollman's scalp, but to do so by abandoning his usual box-and-move style and standing in the pocket with Eder, taking visible damage for the enjoyment of the crowd. Trollman followed his orders, soaking up a beating until he was knocked out in the fifth, but in a subtle yet powerful form of protest he fought in "white-face", skin covered in flour and hair turned artificially blonde - so the audience were not seeing a swarthy Roma get pounded but rather a mock-up of their own kind. He was put into a camp as part of the Porajmos ethnic cleansing initiative, and was brutally murdered by a German prisoner and Nazi collaborator/spy in plain view of the SS, after issuing his fellow inmate an embarrassing defeat in an informal boxing match for the guards' amusement. Any known footage of him? I can't find a scrap.
That sounds almost exactly like the plot of the 1989 Willem Dafoe boxing movie Triumph of the Spirit. Of course, that film was about the Jewish Greek middleweight Salamo Arouch, middleweight champion of Greece who fought 200+ bouts at Auschwitz concentration camp to entertain the Nazi guards. Although, "After the movie came out, another Jewish boxer from Salonika, Jacques "Jacko" Razon sued Arouch and the filmmakers for more than $20 million claiming that they had stolen his story and that Arouch had exaggerated his exploits. The case was later settled for $30 thousand." -Wikipedia article on Salamo Arouch. Stranger still, the Triumph of the Spirit article claims that it was a remake of the Polish film The Boxer and Death based on the life of Polish boxer and Auschwitz survivor Tadeusz Pietrzykowski. I guess it was a common kind of story for the time.
There's at least one movie about Trollman as well. Something about that just seems odd to me. A movie but no actual surviving footage.
.... I don't know what the problem is with Al Haymon, by the way, I've just picked up that he's "BAD" from venturing into the general forum ...
