Max Schmeling was four months into his 100th year when he died on Wednesday but it was not only the length of his life that made him unique among holders of the world heavyweight championship, which was in his possession for almost exactly two years between the summers of 1930 and 1932. His appeal as a propaganda tool brought him into closer contact with Hitler and Goebbels than was either comfortable or safe and it is doubtful if any fighter (even the great earlier champion Jack Johnson, who was hounded out of the US for being an unsubservient black man) was ever subjected to more overtly political pressure by his government.

Nothing in his epitaph does Schmeling more credit than the fact that he emerged from his risky experiences of the Nazi era with a reinforced reputation for honourable behaviour, and especially for personal resistance to racism. He defiantly refused to sever his association with Jewish managers and promoters and reports that he actively contributed to saving Jews from the death camps are supported by an American friend of mine, who told me of one family’s gratitude for being helped to escape across the Atlantic.

Schmeling’s financial assistance to his most celebrated opponent, Joe Louis, when the Brown Bomber’s later years were ravaged by rapidly declining health, is well documented. The toxic atmosphere surrounding their second meeting (Schmeling’s battering of Louis to a 12th-round knockout in 1936 was savagely avenged after little more than two minutes of the first round of perhaps the most historic of all rematches in 1938) was not of their making. That poison was the product of the Nazis’ ill-judged appropriation of their ageing title contender as a symbol of Aryan supremacy and of the violently bitter response inevitably provoked in New York. The subsequent relations between the two men were famously cordial.

It was less Schmeling’s talent than his identification with huge dramas, sporting and political, and his involvement with unforgettable (though, in some cases, hideous) men that ensured his name never lost its resonance. “Do you think Vitali Klitschko will still be interesting biographers and documentary filmmakers more than half a century after he stops fighting, as Max did?” a boxing historian asked me the other day. No answer was expected.

Max Schmeling was a no-more- than-decent heavyweight champion, but as a human being he earned a higher ranking. The long life was well deserved.