[6] In 1932, after winning the Grand Prix de Paris, Richter hoped to be picked for the Olympic Games in Los Angeles.

After uncertain beginnings, the young German triumphed at the Vélodrome d'hiver by winning a competition for foreign sprinters.

Adopted in a few months by the Parisian public, Albert Richter became very popular in France and gathered a new nickname: the German eight-cylinder.

"[2]Richter became part of a travelling circus of sprinters[2] that included Jef Scherens and Louis Gérardin.

Two riders whom Richter consistently beat – Werner Miethe and Peter Steffes – were to play a role in his death.

Lon Pullen said: Miethe was already engaged in espionage work on behalf of the Reich, and he and Steffes were also later involved in marketing valuables taken from French Jews who had become victims of the Nazi pogrom.

In September 1937, Richter's manager, Berliner, threatened by Steffes with exposure to the Gestapo for alleged smuggling of marks outside Germany, fled with his family to Holland...

[3] He won the bronze medal in the 1939 world championship – the races were not completed because news came partway that Germany had invaded Poland – and then decided to avoid being called into the army, particularly because it would mean shooting at the French.

He also told Berliner that a Jewish business man from Cologne named Schweizer, who had already left Germany, had asked him to smuggle money for him when he went.

The station straddled the border and it was there that the German steam engine would be replaced by a Swiss electric locomotive.

Two Dutch sprinters, Cor Wals and Kees Pellenaars, later the Netherlands' Tour de France manager, had been on the train since Amsterdam.

They told the Belgian newspaper Het Volk that German soldiers walked through the snow on the station platform and went straight to Richter's compartment.

The Germans pulled his bike from the baggage van – not bothering with his suitcase – and cut open the tyres.

One version is that he was given the choice between suicide and a firing squad, that he shot himself with a revolver and that the Germans then said he had died on the eastern front.

When one of his brothers tried to see him on 2 January, he was shown Richter's corpse in the hospital morgue or, according to some reports, slumped in a cell.

Steffes' manner before the cameras left no doubt in the minds of viewers that his conscience was not clear on the matter...

The most currently accepted theory is that Victor Brack, acting upon information from Miethe or Steffes, had given the order for the apprehension and execution of Germany's greatest track rider.

[10]In the documentary, made by Raimund Weber and cameraman Tillmann Scholl in 1990, Auf der Suche nach Albert Richter ('Looking for Albert Richter'), Steffes' wife jumped in on a question asked of her husband and called Berliner "ein Schweinehund.

He was hanged for war crimes after being convicted at the Nuremberg Doctors' trial at Landsberg Prison, on 2 June 1948.