The Ratjens were simple folk, and although they later took over a bar, they barely made enough money to live on. The couple already had three daughters when Mrs Ratjen gave birth on November 20, 1918. On September 22, 1938 Dora's father Heinrich made the following statement to the police: [...]"When the child was born the midwife called over to me, 'Heini, it's a boy!' But five minutes later she said to me, 'It is a girl, after all.'"
[...] Nine months later [...] Heinrich Ratjen called a doctor and asked him to inspect the child's genitalia while he was at it. Something wasn't quite right, he told the doctor. In his statement to police, he said: "The doctor replied, 'Let it be. You can't do anything about it anyway.'"
[...] the child was raised as a girl. Dora attended a girls' school, was religiously confirmed in 1932 as a girl, and liked playing ball and shopkeeper. "My parents brought me up as a girl," Dora told the police in 1938. "I therefore wore girl's clothes all my childhood. But from the age of 10 or 11 I started to realize I wasn't female, but male. However I never asked my parents why I had to wear women's clothes even though I was male."
Dora started to become particularly concerned when she didn't develop breasts like all the other girls. From the age of 17 onwards she shaved her legs every other day, and sooner or later she experienced her first ejaculation. But she was too embarrassed to talk about what was happening to her. An officer who spoke with the alleged fraudster at length said Ratjen must have felt "sexless," a hermaphrodite forced to accept the cards that fate had dealt. "However because he has lived almost all his life in female circles he thinks he can only live his life from a female perspective."
[...] Ratjen's life became a big game of hide-and-seek; a life among women, first Dora's three older sisters, later with female friends. Dora discovered a love of sport, joined Komet Bremen Athletics Club in 1934, and after graduating from high school she became a packer in a tobacco factory.
[...]By the age of 15 Ratjen was an outstanding high-jumper, and in 1934 she was the regional champion of Lower Saxony and one of the strongest contenders for the German Olympic squad. Dora may have appeared wiry and boyish, but so were many other sportswomen at the time.
[...]Germany had begun feverishly preparing for the Olympic Games since the early 1930s [...]. Hitler and his sports minister were greatly concerned about national comparisons, and determined to demonstrate the German nation's sporting superiority. It was at around this time that Germany's top three female high-jumpers -- Bergmann, Ratjen, and Elfried Kaun -- met for the first time.
Unfortunately, the joy was short-lived for the Jew among them. Whereas Kaun and Ratjen were among the "chosen," as the German press dubbed them, Bergmann was left out by the Nazis shortly before the start of the Games.
[...]"I never had any suspicions, not even once," Gretel Bergmann says to this day. "In the communal shower we wondered why she never showed herself naked. It was grotesque that someone could still be that shy at the age of 17. We just thought, 'She's strange. She's odd.'"
[...]Her unmasking in September 1938 was therefore a liberating experience. "Ratjen openly admits to being happy that 'the cat has been let out of the bag,'" noted a police officer after her arrest. "He has been waiting for this moment for a long time because he was well aware that he wouldn't be able to compete as a woman forever."
[...]a police physician arrived from Magdeburg to determine Ratjen's sex, and came to the unambiguous conclusion: "The secondary sexual characteristics are entirely male. The named person can unambiguously be considered a man." However the doctor did note one distinctive feature: "A thick band of scar tissue running backwards from the underside of the penis in a relatively broad line. It is therefore questionable whether this band of scar tissue would allow him to engage in sexual intercourse in a normal manner." This anatomical anomaly probably explains the confusion about Ratjen's gender at birth.
[...] The very same day, a radio message was sent to Berlin: "Women's European high-jumping champion Ratjen, first name Dora, is not a woman, but a man. Please notify the Reich Sports Ministry at once. Awaiting orders by radio."
Reich Sport Minister Tschammer und Osten reacted immediately. The senior officer called the criminal investigation division in Magdeburg personally and demanded the arrested athlete be sent to Hohenlychen sports sanatorium for further tests. But the results were the same: Ratjen was a man.
[...]Dora promised the authorities he would "cease engaging in sport with immediate effect." [...] Speaking to the Bremen health authorities, Heinrich Ratjen insisted "Dora shouldn't be allowed to wear men's clothing under any circumstances because she couldn't urinate while standing. Nor would he permit Dora to take a man's job." For her part Dora's mother told police she still hadn't come to terms with her child's "transformation from a girl into a man."
[...] Ratjen's father initially even objected to a change of name, while civil servants argued about how Dora's name should be changed. Correcting a person's name and their sex posed a considerable problem for the authorities. It therefore wasn't until January 11, 1939 that staff at Verden district court amended the entry for the girl Dora into "A boy." Two months later, on March 29, 1939, Ratjen's father wrote to the police chief of Bremen: "Following the change of the registry office entry regarding the child's sex, I would request you change the child's first name to Heinrich." And he ended his letter, "Heil Hitler!"
[...] And yet the case was clearly important to the Nazis themselves, as attested by the five-page report signed personally by security chief Reinhard Heydrich and sent to chancellery chief Hans Heinrich Lammers. This letter [...] contains no evidence of any previous manipulation. In fact the report provides an amazingly frank summary of events, including the comment that the case "did not prompt undesirable public debate or even conflict in the international sporting arena."
[...] Damage limitation was conducted behind the scenes, just as the Ratjens had requested. Germany openly returned its European Championship gold medal, and the runner-up in Vienna was crowned the victor. Ratjen's record was struck from the books.
[...] Gretel Bergmann emigrated to the United States in 1937. She found out about the allegedly deliberate Nazi mega-plot from a magazine she came across during a visit to the doctor in 1966. "I had to screech and laugh. Everyone thought I was insane," she recalls.
[...]Time devoted just a few sentences to describing how Ratjen had "tearfully confessed" that the Nazis had forced him to represent Germany as a woman "for the sake of the honor and glory of Germany." The magazine finished the segment with an alleged quote from Ratjen: "For three years I lived the life of a girl. It was most dull." It's not clear if Time ever spoke to Ratjen.