Jutta Hempel

     Jutta Hempel (born September 27, 1960 in Flensburg) is a German former chess prodigy who showed a remarkable aptitude for the game at a young age; by age three she could watch a game of chess and replay it from memory and by the age of four she was playing competitively at the Youth Center in Flensburg. 
     By the age of five, Hempel was the top junior player in Flensburg. On her sixth birthday she scored 9.5-2.5 in a four-hour simultaneous exhibition. In her next simultaneous exhibition, which took place in the town square, she scored 9-1. In one simul in 1966 she took on 20 opponents and scored 6-4 before her father then stopped the simul because she was exhausted. 
     She won the Flensburg junior championship at age seven. She also played six games of simultaneous blindfold chess. At the age of eight she continued to give simultaneous exhibitions, some of which were broadcast on television. 
     At nine, Hempel managed to win a chess problem solving contest. Her most impressive accomplishment was her two draws against IM Jens Enevoldsen at age 9. And when she was sixteen, she was champion of Schleswig-Holstein (the northernmost of the states of Germany. Hamburg is the main city.). 
     It also appears that during the mid-1960s she played correspondence chess with some success. The last time she played in a tournament was on June 2, 1979, at the Flensburg Lightning Tournament where she finished first and was undefeated. 
     Afterwards she went on to further education in business studies in Kiel, with the idea that she should first get an education and only then perhaps start playing again. She spent two and a half years as an employee in a Danish bank, after which she continued as a student in Kiel until the end of 1985. 
     In 1986 she started work at the Land Bank in Kiel. Then in June of 1986 she married, and is now called Hempel-Nissen. She said, “A woman cannot earn a living from chess. But if I have children I will teach them to play, because chess has been a great help to me with everything.” 
     It would seem that despite her early success her development ended rather abruptly. One person posting on chessdotcom said he knew her when he lived in Flensburg where she played at the chess club and said. “She was especially good at blitz, but in normal chess she was not exactly a star in our club, rather middle class. With the white pieces, she often open with 1.a3.” She seems to have preferred offbeat openings and tactics. 
     

British Pathe - various shots 6 year old Jutta Hempel at play