Gertrude Krombholz

Gertrude Krombholz was born on 13 July 1933 in Tetschen, then part of Czechoslovakia and now Decin in the Czech Republic. She was the only daughter of a lawyer and a mother who loved sport. She attended primary and secondary school in Leitmeritz. After the expulsion of Sudeten Germans at the end of the Second World War the family came to Bavaria, and she took her Abitur at the municipal girls' grammar school in Regensburg.

From 1952 to 1957 she studied for a grammar-school teaching qualification, taking sport at the Bavarian Sports Academy and chemistry and geography at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich and the Technical University of Munich, then still the Technische Hochschule. After her probationary teaching period she passed the second state examination in 1959. She also completed a broad dance education in Germany and abroad, including the dance teacher examination of the General German Dance Teachers Association. In the early 1970s she finished that ADTV training in Nuremberg while already working at the university, and was then the only ADTV dance teacher at a German university.

Krombholz taught from 1959 to 1962 at the Gymnasium of the state boarding school in Marquartstein, first as a trainee and then as a young teacher of chemistry as well as sport. In 1962 she became a lecturer at the Bavarian Sports Academy, and from 1963 she headed the training of women physical education teachers there, at one stage teaching more than 30 semester hours a week in theory and practice.

In 1973 the academy and the university institute for physical education were transferred to TUM as the Sports Centre and the central institute for sports science. Krombholz headed gymnastics, dance, music and movement and later became senior academic director of sports teacher education, a post she held until her retirement in 1998.

She was chief hostess and co-choreographer for the opening ceremonies and ceremonial programme of the Olympic Games in Munich in 1972, Innsbruck in 1976 and Lake Placid in 1980. In 1973, while preparing a sports performance to mark the farewell of Rudi Sedlmayer as president of the Bavarian Sports Association, she developed the idea of integrative wheelchair dance. She presented it at the 1975 World Gymnaestrada in Berlin. The demonstration, titled as dancing leisure sport for all, involved 128 performers, including 14 wheelchair users, and was judged the festival's best demonstration group.

She then worked to spread wheelchair dance in Germany and abroad, travelling to more than 40 countries. From 1989 to 2002 she chaired the Wheelchair Dance Sport Committee of the international disability sports organisations ISOD, EPC and IPC, helping to establish the form inside those bodies. In 2002 the International Paralympic Committee awarded her the Paralympic Order. According to a 2023 TUM profile she officiated at 16 Paralympic Games from 1984 onwards, often supervising victory ceremonies, most recently at Pyeongchang in 2018.

In 1976, using sources from the Munich city archive and the Leipzig dance archive, she reconstructed the medieval Moriskentanz and founded the Munchner Moriskentanzer, a TUM group attached to central university sport. The ensemble has given more than 500 performances. In 1991 the dancers visited Drottningholm Palace at the invitation of Queen Silvia of Sweden, who had herself been a chief hostess at the 1972 Munich Games.

Between 1978 and 1981 she studied modern history and in 1981 completed a doctoral dissertation, summa cum laude, on the development of school sport and physical education teacher training in Bavaria from its beginnings to the end of the Second World War. The original work ran to 3,584 pages; a shortened version of 617 pages was published in the new series of the Munich city archives. In 1982 the Friends of TUM awarded it a prize as one of the best doctoral theses of the year. In 1998, on her retirement, she endowed the Gertrude Krombholz Prize at TUM for the best work in applied sports science.

Colleagues and students knew her as Krombine. She lived for many years in Munich's Nymphenburg district. In 2006 she had an accident in that flat and could no longer live there alone. From hospital in Schwabing she arranged to move to the Augustinum senior residence in Diessen am Ammersee, a place she had first considered years earlier after a former Marquartstein pupil, by then a director of the home, and his wife advised her to put her name down.

At the Augustinum she kept up daily exercise, including aqua jogging, and in 2012 she founded a rollator dance group after watching a resident who had lived in Argentina dance a tango with her walking frame. She led the group, which practised in the winter garden, into 2025. In a 2023 interview on her 90th birthday she said she had not really registered that she was supposed to be 90, still felt twenty years younger when she looked at her desk, and attached great importance to moving every day. Public accounts of her life do not dwell on a spouse or children.

Krombholz died on 1 November 2026 in Polling, near Weilheim in Upper Bavaria, at the age of 93. The TUM School of Medicine and Health published a memorial notice on 4 November, and the German Association of Sports Science, of which she had been a founding member, announced her death on 6 November. A death notice appeared in the Sueddeutsche Zeitung on 7 November. No cause of death was made public. The university and the association offered their sympathy to her family.

Krombholz is remembered as the teacher who opened dance to people who had been left at the edge of the floor, first in wheelchairs and later with rollators, and as a formative figure in Bavarian sports teacher education. TUM department head Joachim Hermsdoerfer said the prize she endowed had encouraged many younger sports scientists, and that her dance appearances at graduation celebrations remained unforgettable.

Her work on wheelchair dance helped move the form from a single choreographic idea in 1973 into the structures of international disability sport, and earned her the Paralympic Order. The Munchner Moriskentanzer continue to perform the reconstructed dance she revived. In later life she offered a simpler lesson, one she said she wanted to pass on to friends: make sure you move, in some way, every day.