Running shoes worn by a German Jewish runner in pre-Olympic training

Gerhard Neubeck was born on February 28, 1918, in Dortmund Germany to Jewish parents, Siegried and Emmy Neubeck. His father, born in 1888, was a physician. His mother was born in 1892 in Bochum. In 1933, the Nazi dictatorship took control of Germany. Legislation to persecute the Jewish population was aggressively pursued. Jews were fired from their positions, businesses were confiscated, and they were barred from public facilities such as schools, parks, and athletic facilities. Gerhard was a competitive runner and participated in pre-Olympic trials for the 1936 Olympics to be held in Berlin. The camp where Gerhard and the other Jewish athletes trained was segregated from the participants and no Jewish athletes were named to Olympic teams. It was a political ploy designed to counter criticism of Nazi regime policies and portray the country as open minded and tolerant.

During the Kristallnacht pogrom on November 9-10, 1938, Gerhard and his father were severely beaten by Nazi thugs. The family’s home was vandalized and destroyed. Gerhard and his parents fled to the Netherlands. On January 21, 1940, they sailed for New York aboard the SS Westernland. They settled in Brooklyn. Gerhard attended New York University for his undergraduate degree, received a Masters from Northwestern, and then returned to New York and earned a doctorate from Columbia University. In 1941, Gerhard had married Ruth, whose family had left Germany with the assistance of Hermann Göring. They had three children. In 1953, the family moved to Minnesota where Gerhard began an illustrious career as a professor of family social science at the University of Minnesota. He was a pioneering educator in the field of human sexuality and also a noted practitioner as a marriage and family counselor. Gerhard, 89, passed away on January 28, 2008, in St. Paul.