[5] Her mother lda Anna Bertha (née Becker) was Lutheran, and her father Ludwig Karl Mayer, a physician, was Jewish and was born in 1876.

[6] In January 1933, the Offenbach Fencing Club rescinded her membership on the basis of new Nazi legislation banning Jews.

[10] Mayer won a gold medal in fencing at the age of 17 at the 1928 Summer Olympics in Amsterdam, representing Germany, winning 18 bouts and losing only 2.

She finished fifth at the 1932 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles, having learned, two hours prior to the match, that her boyfriend had died in a military training exercise in Germany.

[11][9] She then remained in the U.S. to study for two years as an exchange student at Scripps College, earning a certificate in social work in 1934.

[11][9] Ultimately, she settled in the United States and had a successful fencing career, winning the US women's foil championship 8 times from 1934 to 1946 (1934, 1935, 1937, 1938, 1939, 1941, 1942, and 1946).

[8][9] In 1938, she won the Amateur Fencers League of America's San Francisco Division men's title; however, two days later she was stripped of the title, as the League adopted a rule banning competition between women and men, stating that since fencing involved physical contact, "a chivalrous man found it difficult to do his worst when he faced a woman."

[14][15] In 1952, Mayer returned to Germany, where she married an old friend, Erwin Falkner von Sonnenburg, in a quiet May ceremony in Munich.

[8] The couple moved to the hills above Stuttgart before settling in Heidelberg where she died of breast cancer in October 1953, at age 42.