Gymnast Gustav Flatow won two gold medals in 1896 at the first modern Olympic Games in Athens—in Team Horizontal Bar and Team Parallel Bars.

Gustav Flatow was 1 of 10 German athletes who competed in the Athens Olympics.

Gustav fled to Holland at the beginning of World War II but was caught and interned in the Theresienstadt concentration camp. He died there just months before the end of World War II.

In 1997, the City of Berlin honored the memory of Gustav and cousin Alfred Flatow by renaming its Reichssportsfeld Strasse (street of the National Sports Complex) Flatowallee (Flatow Blvd.). The following year, the German Postal Service issued a set of four stamps commemorating the (1896-1996) Olympic Centennial. One of the stamps (200+80 marks) features Germany’s first Olympic gymnastics champions, the Flatow cousins.