Susanna "Sonja" Graf (December 16, 1908 – March 6, 1965) was a German and American chess player. She was a women's world championship runner-up and a two-time U.S. women's champion. In 2016, she was inducted into the World Chess Hall of Fame. Early years Born in Munich, Susanna Graf was the daughter of Josef Graf and Susanna Zimmermann, both Volga Germans from the Samara region, who had moved to Munich in September 1906. Her father was originally a priest in Russia, but moved to Munich to pursue life as a painter. She later wrote that despite the suffering she endured at the hands of her father, she was grateful that he taught her the game of chess when she was still a child. Chess became her means of escape, both mentally and physically, and she began spending all her time in Munich chess cafés. Her fame as a coffeehouse player grew and she was introduced to and became the protégée of the German master, Siegbert Tarrasch. By age twenty-three, she had beaten Rudolf Spielmann twice in simultaneous competition and turned chess professional. She began traveling throughout Europe, following the chess circuit both for the experience and to distance herself from what she considered the ominous National Socialist movement based, at the time, in Munich. During the early decades of the 20th century, female chess players were a rarity and Sonja Graf basked in the popularity and attention her sudden fame brought her as much as she exploited the freedom and independence of her new itinerant lifestyle. In 1934, she played against the era's other woman champion, Vera Menchik, in an unofficial match in Amsterdam and, subsequently, in an official 1937 world championship match in Semmering, Austria. She lost both matches (by the scores of 1–3 and 4½–11½), but was invited, along with Menchik, to participate in what would normally have been an exclusive male tournament held that year in Prague. She did not win against any of the champions, and her best result was a draw with the Estonian master Paul Keres. In Argentina and the United States In 1939, Sonja Graf traveled to Buenos Aires, Argentina to play in the Women's World Chess Championship, held concurrently with the 8th Chess Olympiad. As a result of her outspoken defiance of Hitler's government, she was taken off the list of German participants and played under "Libre" ("free" in Spanish) flag. In