GERMANY CAME TO A full stop that day. France also ground to a standstill. So did Scandinavia, the Low Countries, and lands far more distant from the ancient city of Rouen, where the contest was to be held.
Saturday afternoon is a busy time in Europe. Not that day. Factories everywhere shut long before the kickoff. Stores, shops, offices closed. Theaters emptied. Traffic subsided. Each metropolis suspended its normal activities.
The only crowded places were bars, cafés, bistros, bierstubes, trattorie. People poured into them to watch the game on television. Twelve countries had requested the match live for their national networks. All Europe was aroused.
Why this excitement over a game of football? First, because it was more than a game. This contest pitted the Stade Rouennais, champions of France, against Bayern-Munich, champions of Germany. Hence it was a French-German contest, the first time since the end of the war that a team from across the Rhine was to play in a country which had suffered more than four years of occupation, deportation, and even starvation.
Everyone who knew football realized there would be a twelfth man on the field for France: the French crowd in the stands.
But chiefly the match was important because of two outstanding players. Who in all France could forget that the greatest of German goalkeepers was the man who had shot French hostages during the war and been tried in the very city of Rouen? And if the Munich team was led and inspired by its veteran captain and goalkeeper, the French also had their star. He was a young, nervous, magnificent forward named Jean-Paul Varin. Everywhere in France he was called the “comingman français.”
In cities, towns, and villages throughout the land, thousands of boys addressed a football the way Jean-Paul did. Young men of every age tried to run like him, shoot like him, pass like him. He was far better known than any politician or movie star. When you saw men with their heads together in a café or a train, they were not necessarily talking about business or politics. More likely they were discussing Jean-Paul Varin.
Now he would come up against the great German veteran. After the Feldwebel von Kleinschrodt had gotten out of prison, serving six years of his ten-year term, he had felt lost. His brother had been killed in action in the last week of the war. Many friends were also gone. Some were still in Russian prisoner-of-war camps. His mother was dead. His family vanished. The great estate on the Baltic was in ruins, devastated by the Russians, then occupied by the British. Finally one night the main house and other buildings caught fire and burned to the ground.
Where could he go? What could he do? He did the thing that came naturally, the thing he liked best of all—he turned to football. It was a poorish living, coaching junior teams in and around Hamburg. For several years he practiced continually, running to get his legs back. At first it was difficult for him to keep up with his boys when refereeing one of their matches. Gradually his legs returned. So did his form. Often he played goal. As goalie he could see the entire field, watch all the boys in action, coach them as they ran and passed. With a whistle around his neck he would blow twice to stop play and race out to correct their mistakes.
The boys learned. They liked the challenge of the man in the goal before them. They improved. Before long his teams began to win. They were noticed, and he became known as the animator of football among the youth of Germany.
After several years in which he kept attracting attention, the manager of Werder of Berlin had the idea of asking him to try out for the team. He did, playing superbly. As a goalkeeper his age—he was then thirty-eight—mattered less. True, he had slowed down, but in goal he was magnificent. He knew all the techniques of the attacker. His reflexes were still keen, his coordination perfect, and he could outlast anybody on the field. When he stepped in for Werder-Berlin the team won nineteen straight games.
Next he transferred to Bayern-Munich and helped them win a title with his superb play in goal. He soon became mentor and team leader. Within a few years he had twelve caps—that is, he had played twelve times for his native land in international competition. Once he traveled to London, where his defensive play won a game against West Ham, the English champions. By this time he was God the father of German sport.
Now, with his team, he was returning for the first time to France. The small stadium at Rouen was, of course, sold out. It normally held fewer than 20,000 people, and although 10,000 extra wooden seats had been added, hordes had to be turned away. A makeshift press box had been constructed for the dozens of sportswriters and radio and television reporters. They came from as far away as Oslo in the north and Rome in the south. Suddenly this sleepy city on the Seine had become the sporting capital of the entire continent. Dozens of commentators speaking every language in Europe appeared, all concentrating on that afternoon of football.
So wherever you happened to be that day you heard their rapid-fire commentary—across the street, from the café on the corner, from every open window and every open door.
In France and Germany middle-aged men stared at television screens, dreaming dreams of their youth. Young men and boys saw themselves on other fields for other teams: Rotweiss of Essen, Real of Madrid, Benficia of Lisbon. No other single event in the history of sport had ever before united so many millions in so many disparate lands.
Yet who could forget one salient fact? Certainly nobody present at the game, no one watching in France, was unaware that the father of young Jean-Paul Varin had been murdered by the Feldwebel von Kleinschrodt in a small Normandy village twenty years ago. Everyone knew that as a boy of seven or eight he had witnessed the killing of his father. There it was. There it remained in the hearts and minds of French men and women. Try as they would, and many honestly did try, they could not expunge the bitter memories of that June day. The story of the shooting had been brought out in the trial. It had burned into them all. You might try to thrust it aside, you might say it was ancient history, an incident of two decades ago, best forgotten. You might make an effort to ignore it.
The fact, however, was that the greatest goalkeeper in the history of German football was the hated symbol of French defeat. He was the Butcher of Nogent-Plage.