Wartime Service and Postwar Career
After the outbreak of World War II, Cramm was drafted into military service in May 1940 as a member of the Hermann Goering Division. He saw action on the Eastern Front and was awarded the Iron Cross. Because of his previous conviction he was dismissed from military service in 1942. Despite his noble background, Cramm was enlisted as a private until he was given a small company under his command. His company faced the harsh conditions of the Eastern front and Cramm was flown out because of frostbite with much of his company dead.
While war robbed Cramm of some of his best years for tennis, he still won another German national championship in 1948 and was already forty years old when he won it for the last time in 1949. He played Davis Cup tennis until retiring after the 1953 season and still holds the record for most wins by any German team member.
Following his retirement from active competition, Cramm served as an administrator for the German tennis federation and became successful in business as a cotton importer. In addition, he managed the farm property he had inherited from his father at Wispenstein in Lower Saxony.
Read more about this topic: Gottfried Von Cramm
Famous quotes containing the words wartime, service, postwar and/or career:
“The man who gets drunk in peacetime is a coward. The man who gets drunk in wartime goes on being a coward.”
—José Bergamín (1895–1983)
“I like the silent church before the service begins, better than any preaching. How far off, how cool, how chaste the persons look, begirt each one with a precinct or sanctuary!”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Fashions change, and with the new psychoanalytical perspective of the postwar period [WWII], child rearing became enshrined as the special responsibility of mothers ... any shortcoming in adult life was now seen as rooted in the failure of mothering during childhood.”
—Sylvia Ann Hewitt (20th century)
“Whether lawyer, politician or executive, the American who knows what’s good for his career seeks an institutional rather than an individual identity. He becomes the man from NBC or IBM. The institutional imprint furnishes him with pension, meaning, proofs of existence. A man without a company name is a man without a country.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)