Gustav Flatow

Gustav Felix Flatow ( born January 7, 1875 in Berent, West Prussia, † January 29, 1945 in the Theresienstadt concentration camp ) was a German device Turner and Olympic champion.

Life

Flatow graduated after school 1890-1893 commercial training in Berlin. Subsequently, he was commercially active until 1899.

Flatow was there from 1893 a member of the gymnastics club in 1850. At the 1896 Summer Olympics in Athens he took as one of ten German gymnasts as well as his cousin Alfred Flatow part and won the team silver ( gold was there only from 1904) on the parallel bars and the Reck. However, the Flatow could not repeat that success at the Summer Olympic Games in Paris in 1900 and retired completely from the sport back to work in both the 1899 adopted by him textile company Edmond Leon. In addition, he was involved from 1925 on the Dutch Texilfirma " Brandel " in Rotterdam and founded during the later 1930s own Texilfirma.

As a result of the Nazi seizure of power in 1933 emigrated Flatow, who was a Jew, in the Netherlands. There he could after the German occupation in 1940 initially hide from the Nazis. New Year's Eve 1943, he was arrested and deported in February 1944 in the Theresienstadt concentration camp, where his cousin Alfred Flatow was in 1942 lost their lives. In January 1945, the now emaciated to 20 kg body weight Gustav Flatow died in Theresienstadt.

His urn was discovered in 1986 by journalists and buried in what is now Terezín.

1997 honored the city of Berlin, Alfred and Gustav Flatow, renamed by the Reich Sports Field road near the Olympic Stadium in Flatowallee. On Lohmühleninsel on the Landwehr canal in the district of Kreuzberg also recalls the Flatow sports hall with their name and a plaque to the two Flatows. The German Post AG was the 100th anniversary of the Olympic Games is a series of four postage stamps; one of them shows Gustav and Alfred Flatow.

In Berlin -Köpenick the sport emphasized Flatow High School is named after the two cousins ​​. In 1989, he was inducted into the International Jewish Sports Hall of Fame.

Prior to his former home in Berlin- Charlottenburg, Schlüterstraße 49, stumbling blocks were laid for him and his family on 24 July 2012.