The fhrer hated football but he also knew its power – and was keen to exploit a sport that encouraged elimination of a common enemy, writes Kate Connolly
In the light of his disdain for the sport, Adolf Hitler’s one-off decision to attend a football match was a fairly momentous one. Motor racing, boxing and Wagner were much more the fhrer’s cup of tea.
But as his advisers had pointed out, August 7 1936 was a particularly auspicious occasion: Germany were playing Norway on home turf at the Olympic Games in Berlin’s concrete Post Stadium. And as the national team had been tipped to win, it was a propaganda opportunity not to be missed. Victory would demonstrate to the world that the Third Reich was a power to be reckoned with and would unite the nation in the belief that fighting for the fatherland was a worthy cause.
But it was to be Hitler’s first and last visit to a game. After just six minutes, Norway had scored, and their second goal in the 84th minute was the deciding factor. Hitler, who had been accompanied by Paul Joseph Goebbels, Hermann Gring and Rudolf Hess, leaped up red-faced and swept out of the stadium without even waiting for the final whistle.
“The fhrer is incensed,” propaganda minister Goebbels wrote. “I can hardly bear it. A bag of nerves.”
According to the national football magazine, Kicker, an “Ash Wednesday mood” spread throughout the land, the tragedy being as much that Germany had lost to another country as the fact that the fhrer had been there to witness the shameful event. To rub salt into the wound, both goals had been scored by a player with the Jewish-sounding name of Isaaksen.
Throughout the dozen years of Hitler’s reign, the Nazis desperately tried to manipulate football in order to further their political cause. But, particularly on an international level, their lack of understanding for the unpredictability of the sport put them in a virtually no-win situation.
The Germany-Norway match and other embarrassing and, in the eyes of Goebbels, “unforgivable” defeats – most notably against Switzerland on the fhrer’s birthday and a crushing loss against Sweden – were proof that attempts to exploit the sport as a way of demonstrating German superiority were not very clever.
Following the Sweden defeat, as Goebbels turned over in his mind what was to be done, he wrote in his diary: “100 000 left the stadium in a depressed state. Winning a match is of more importance to the people than the capture of a town somewhere in the east.”
Over the past half-century, while most other areas of German society have worked hard to exorcise the ghosts of their Nazi past, the footballing world has failed to come clean. Those with the keys to the country’s football archives have painted a picture of innocent players and their trainers as unwitting pawns in Hitler’s sophisticated propaganda games.
But a recently published book by sports commentator Gerhard Fischer and writer Ulrich Lindner paints a darker and highly damning picture of how footballers willingly collaborated with the Nazis.
In the first detailed study of the history of German football between the years 1933 and 1945, including first-hand accounts from players and managers of the day, Hitler’s Strikers chronicles how the sport became inextricably wrapped up in the political ideology of the day.
Its appearance is certainly timely. Next year the German Football Federation (DFB) celebrates its centenary. The DFB must be forced to come to terms with some unsettling truths, insists politologist and football fan Walter Jens. “German football needs to be reminded that it has a history … a political history which, as one of the big opinion-formers in our country [the biggest perhaps], it finally needs to critically reappraise.”
Most members of the Nazi elite were too old to belong to the generation of football fanatics to emerge during the 1920s. But even if he didn’t understand the game, Hitler was astute enough to realise very early on that an activity which had such strong pulling power and offered him ready- made mass rallies also had propaganda potential that was waiting to be milked.
He was keen to exploit the qualities of a sport that encouraged the idea of a corporate identity and which could assist him in consolidating his power.
“The trend was to invite the countries that one had just occupied, in order to show who was boss,” says Hans Joachim Teichler, a sport sociologist specialising in the era of national socialism. “But on the whole, this method of manipulation was an utter failure because Germany always seemed to have such bad luck.”
Goebbels was forced to rework the Nazi’s warped philosophy on football. He set himself the ambitious goal of trying to prevent defeats by the national side in order to keep the nation’s morale high, and thus discouraged matches with obviously stronger sides.
When all else failed, Goebbels issued orders to the national team forbidding them to lose again. And then what?
In 1942, when Germany was beginning to feel the blow of defeats on the war front, he simply issued a ban on all international games.
It was back to the drawing board, and it was agreed that football was best exploited at home instead, as a form of diversion and a spectacle that would demonstrate to the nation that the proof of the pudding was in the playing rather than the end result and that its boys had the mettle to succeed in war as well as on the pitch.
So club and league football continued in Germany almost throughout the war.
Football commentators were encouraged to use military vocabulary in their reporting of matches. And to emphasise the connection between prowess on the pitch and the battlefield, results of battles at the front were broadcast through loudspeakers at football matches.
When attempts to machinate worked, they worked well. In April 1938, just one week before an Austrian referendum on the Anschluss (union) with Germany, the teams met for a head to head in Vienna. The Germans were ordered to play “beautiful, unaggressive football” in order to downplay fears of Germany as a threat and to boost Austrian morale. Austria won 2-0 and 99% of Austrians subsequently voted in favour of the Anschluss. But two penalties granted to the Austrians were questioned by fans on both sides. An order was said to have come from above to allow the Viennese certain concessions.
A new German football team emerged after the Anschluss, comprising five Austrians and six Germans, and was looked on by fans as a joke.
“This mishmash of players greatly affected Germany’s performance over the next few years. It would be the equivalent of suddenly creating a national side by mixing England and Scotland,” says author Lindner.
The footballers themselves were forced to undergo Nazi schooling, learning by rote things such as the fhrer’s birthday as well as perfecting the Nazi salute. “We had lessons every Tuesday after practice,” recalls Herbert Moll who played for Bayern Munich. “We had to take an official state exam. Those who passed earned a stamp in their `player passports’. Those who didn’t were chucked out.” The successful ones also received meal tickets, second-class train passes and a few Deutschmarks for every match.
Albert Sing, a midfielder for the national side between 1941 and 1942, says no footballer who was involved at the time can get away with saying they didn’t know what was going on. “The whole thing was pure propaganda,” says the 82-year-old. “Then in February 1943, Goebbels declared that everyone had to fight … a week later we were all called up.”
>From as early as 1933, the national football magazine carried a DFB advert banning Jewish players from the nation’s football clubs.
Sing’s insistence that what was going on was crystal clear extends to the disappearance of around 300 Jewish players who went missing, mostly without warning, and were never seen again. Little effort was made then – or since – to discover exactly what happened to them.
The most famous Jewish players who were considered national heroes long before the rise of the Nazis and held several records between them were Gerhard Fuchs and Julian Hirsch. The Kicker Almanac – a football annual that contains records of all players from 1908 onwards – failed to include a mention of either player.
While Fuchs managed to escape to Canada, Hirsch stuck around. Jobless and in a desperate last bid, he advertised his services as a football trainer in Kicker, in vain. On March 1 1943 he was arrested and sent to Auschwitz. Two days later he sent a postcard to his daughter; it was the last anyone ever heard of him. Hirsch and Fuchs were the last Jews ever to play in the German national team.
The story of the contrasting fates of two national players offers the starkest possible illustration of how German football should have been irreversibly altered by life under the swastika.
Asbjorn Halvorsen, a Norwegian Jew who had been player of the year twice during his time at Hamburger and who was Norway’s manager during the historical match witnessed by Hitler in Berlin, weighed just 40kg and was suffering from typhus, pneumonia, rheumatism, and malnourishment when he was transported from a concentration camp in Alsace to Neuengamme near Hamburg in 1944.
There the former defender encountered a former team-mate, ex-centre forward and now SS Hauptscharffehrer Otto “Tull” Harder, who had volunteered for the Nazi party in 1932 and had later become a camp guard.
After the war Harder was arrested and stood trial. In his defence he said that he had treated the prisoners well, providing them with a football pitch, and that the only reason people had died was because they were “used to the poor quality food in the Jewish ghettos and were unable to cope with the quality and quantity of food offered to them in the camp”.
The DFB has said it plans to handle the darkest era of its history later this year. It will dedicate “between 15 to 20 pages” to it in a centenary celebration book due out later this year.
When asked to be more specific, a representative for the federation intriguingly replied: “We’ll be dealing with it in a statistical manner.”
ENDS
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