Wilhelm Ehmer, who spent his childhood in his native Hong Kong, lost his right arm in 1943 during a World War II air raid on Berlin. After the war ended, in which his two sons were killed in action, but his three daughters survived, he became a journalist and newspaper editor and also a writer with modest success. His work from 1936 Around the Peak of the World was his most famous, which described the failed summit ascent of Mount Everest by the British mountain climbers George Mallory and Andrew Irvine. Both lost their lives in this expedition. Ehmer won the silver medal with this work in the category “Literature – Epic Works” at the Berlin Games. During World War II he initially worked as a press officer in France and Norway, and from 1942 onwards as a clerk for soldiers’ newspapers at the High Command of the Wehrmacht in Berlin. Beginning in 1949, after a short period of imprisonment, he took an editor’s job in Lübeck. In 1973 he was awarded the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany (Verdienstorden der Bundesrepublik Deutschland).
Germany