This little tale of intrigue involves three bastions of truth, honesty, fairness and incorruptibility.
1. Hitler and the Third Reich.
2. The International Olympic Committee.
3. Journalism and the film industry.
Agnes Zwanzger was a midwife in the little town of Erichshot in Germany during 1918. Like most midde-aged folk, her short-range eyesight was, in optomological terminology "substantially ratshit". Additionally, she'd spent the previous evening demolishing many steins of lager which had the effect of blurring her vision even more. So, when the infant Ratjen eventually plopped out into her hands she announced "It's a girl. Halleleujah, now has anyone got some aspirin for my headache, I'm going home to sleep off this hangover."
The parents raised the child as a girl, apparently oblivious to the surplus-to-requirements sexual equipment that must have been dangling around in the breeze between her legs.
After puberty when Dora noticed that more bodily development seemed to be taking place inside her frilly pink knickers instead of where it should be happening filling up her sports bra to maximum capacity, she diverted all of her frustration into achieving athletic excellence.
The 1936 Olympic Games had been awarded to Germany before the charming part-mustachioed Mr Hitler came to power.
Mr Hitler subsequently developed a reputation for occasionally exhibiting unsportsmanlike behaviour. He didn't like his team being beaten, especially by Jewish teams whom he liked the least of all.
So, when Gerhardt Vanker, the German athletics coach suggested
"Yo Adolph baby, Mein Fuhrer, there's this guy in the athletics training squad pretending to be a chick, how 'bout we enter him in the Olympic women's high jump" Mr Hitler saw it as one way of preventing "any of those inferior obnoxious little Jewish girls from winning it."
Unfortunately Dora only managed 4th place in the event which displeased and disappointed both Mr Hitler and Dora herself.
She trussed up her troublesome genitalian trio even tighter, trained harder, and won the women's high jump gold medal at the 1938 European Athletics Championship with a world-record sproing of 1.67 metres.
Few people, even fellow competitors, ever suspected that Dora was not female, but no-one could pull the gender wool over the eyes of Manfred Schwass the train conductor on the Vienna to Cologne express on 21 September 1938 in which Dora was traveling.
Manfred had spent a lifetime on the trains ogling and mentally recording every set of long sexy legs, wiggling derrieres and jiggling bosoms that had ever passed by him.
He was what the legal fraternity might term an "expert witness."
When Manfred observed Dora, meticulously attired in a brocade dress and sparkling earrings, making her way towards the women's toilet, he noticed some slight discrepancies from normal feminine behaviour.
The early-morning farting, belching, groin scratching and five o'clock shadow which accompanied this girl convinced Manfred that Dora was perhaps more biologically suited to using the gentlemens toilet facilities.
He reported the matter to the police at Magdeburg, the next train station.
Dora's secrets were finally exposed.
She changed her name to Heinrich, handed back the gold medal, and thereafter lived a life of partial seclusion refusing interviews to speak about her life. The uncorroborated story about Hitler and the Third Reich being involved in Heinrich's career first appeared in a popular magazine in 1966 and was the basis for the 2009 film "Berlin 36".
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It is most probable that the sporting conspiracy allegations are in fact not true, and that Heinrich was simply the unfortunate victim of inept parenting.
He died in 2008.
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