After the Catastrophe

Nothing prepared battle-hardened Allied soldiers for what they would encounter as they drove deep into Nazi Germany in early 1945. Inconceivable horrors greeted the liberators, first as the Soviets reached the major killing centers in Poland. For many who had experienced firsthand the brutality of Nazi Germany on the battlefront and in the faces and stories of those recently released from occupation, shocking scenes awaited. Continuing their genocidal rampage to the very end, Nazi oppressors fled their crimes, leaving abandoned camps, mass graves, boxcars overflowing with corpses, and thousands upon thousands of emaciated, dying prisoners.

The nature of the atrocities faced by Allied liberators is tragically exemplified in the transformation of concentration camp Bergen-Belsen in the final year of the war. At the end of 1944, the camp held fifteen thousand prisoners; by the time the British arrived on April 15, 1945, a massive influx of prisoners, largely from Eastern Europe, had quadrupled the number. Even for those who had endured Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen offered a staggering measure of suffering beyond comprehension. The Nazis made no effort to house or feed the thousands in the camp. Overcrowding meant that there were no bunks or toilets. Barracks, many half built, fell apart, exposing people to the elements. Many lost their wits as they were left to die. Cries of thirst and anguished starvation filled the nights.

One Auschwitz survivor named Renee Salt was transported to Bergen-Belsen as a sixteen-year-old. Her first memory of arriving at the camp, after being forced to walk a road littered with the corpses of previous transports, is hellish: “We saw skeletons walking, their arms and legs were like matchsticks—the bones protruding through the remains of their skin. The stench that arose from the camp was terribly overpowering. It seemed that, after all we’ve been through already, this was something new and horribly different.”^[1] On the same day that British troops freed Bergen-Belsen, SS officers and camp guards from Ravensbrück and Sachsenhausen marched seventeen thousand women and forty thousand men westward and deeper into the last German-controlled areas.^[2] Amid the total collapse of Nazi Germany, these prisoners would not be released.

Similar scenes awaited American liberators at Dachau, Mauthausen, and Buchenwald. Recently liberated captives often could not comprehend the new reality. Enfeebled and terrorized, many inmates struggled to make the transition to freedom. Hundreds died of typhus and other diseases in the days after liberation, assuming they had survived the death marches in the first place. On countless roads and railways across Europe, prisoners died of exhaustion and hundreds more by SS bullets and stray Allied bombs. An estimated 250,000 to 375,000 perished on these forced marches, which continued right up until the German surrender.

The collapse came with a fitting coda. Just over a week before capitulation, Adolf Hitler committed suicide in his vast underground bunker in Berlin. Alongside was his new wife and the ever-faithful propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, who, with his wife, had carefully poisoned their six children before killing themselves. Thus ended the Nazi revolution, which had proclaimed a triumphant return to national glory just twelve years earlier. Instead, the world suffered death and destruction beyond imagining—an estimated fifty to fifty-five million people died in the Second World War, with almost half of those coming from the Soviet Union alone. Five million German soldiers died, along with nearly six million Jews. It all began with promises of glory, territorial expansion, and the pursuit of racial purification. But it ended in a whimper of cowardice and the ruin of a country widely considered to be among the most civilized in the world.

For those who survived, the end of the war did not mean the end of the Holocaust. Disease and malnourishment claimed thousands after Hitler’s defeat. In Bergen-Belsen alone, three hundred inmates died each day over a two week span immediately after liberation. By mid-May 1945, millions of people were on the move, often against their will, as others sought to return to their homelands. These “displaced persons” (or DPs) came to represent the largest migration of people in the shortest amount of time in human history. And the Allied armies were ill prepared to administer the peace. At Dachau and dozens of other former Nazi concentration camps, prisoners remained behind barbed-wire fences, often wearing the same striped camp uniforms that only days prior had been a despicable symbol of Nazi oppression. Worse yet, in some DP camps prisoners lived side by side with Nazi POWs who had been their wartime persecutors.

In the chaotic mix of fugitives and refugees in these places, Jews were but one small minority among a multitude of different peoples looking to restart their lives. Few would categorize the suffering of the Jews as unique in the broader scope of the European catastrophe. Insult followed injury for many. Exiled Jews from the former Reich found themselves treated as “enemy nationals” rather than as victims. They were viewed suspiciously as Germans and Austrians first. Tosia Schneider, a Polish Jew who survived deportation and forced labor, recalled in a 2006 interview, “I tried to lead some kind of a normal life. It was a difficult, confusing time for me. You have to realize: I had lost my whole family, not just the immediate family, but my home town, my neighborhood, my place in the world, there was no time for mourning, and suddenly it all came back and we became aware of all the losses.”^[3]

Jewish survivors called themselves “She’erith Hapletah,” the surviving or spared remnant, a term taken from ancient Hebrew scripture in the Book of Ezra (9:14–15), which speaks of the resilience and vitality of the Jewish people. In these times, the obliteration of Jewish communities across Europe haunted the residents of these assembly centers. Survivors’ attempts to rebuild their lives were profoundly interrupted as thousands were prevented from leaving DP camps. The victors imposed strict immigration quotas on refugees seeking to leave Europe for Britain or America. Families torn asunder, survivors usually had nowhere to go. For those who left Germany for the East, the outcomes were no better. In Ukraine and Poland, for example, many Jews saw their Gentile neighbors claim their homes and property, meeting them with hostility and violence upon their return home.

The Germans and their allies had it much better. Prisoner-of-war camps in Europe and in the United States were generally well run and hospitable, in line with the Geneva Conventions. Ex-Nazis and Wehrmacht soldiers played soccer and watched movies, and some even enrolled in college courses. In the Jewish DP camps, survivors of the Holocaust had to fight for extra rations after years of starvation. Shockingly, the medical needs of the DPs were attended to by German doctors and nurses—many of the same people who had inflicted the deadly medicine of the Nazis in their euthanasia and prisoner experimentation programs just weeks earlier. While a few prominent Nazi doctors and medical officials would face justice in the ensuing years, thousands more transitioned seamlessly to service in Allied-run hospitals and clinics. One grotesque example saw more than six hundred medical personnel—doctors, nurses, orderlies, and dentists—join the Allied medical staff at Dachau, the Nazis’ first concentration camp and site of the first horrific medical experiments on POWs and political prisoners.^[4]

With tens of millions of people migrating in 1945, weary survivors crisscrossed Europe seeking a safe and hopeful landing. Remaining Jews from Hungary tried to return home; ethnic Germans, no longer welcome in western Poland and the Czech Sudetenland, fled north and west; and a motley collection of prisoners of war, demobilized soldiers, and former slave laborers sought relief from their deprivations. Many poured into the western zones of occupation in Germany controlled by the United States, France, and Britain.

Questions of rendering swift justice dominated the attention of the liberators. Attempts to “de-Nazify” Germany were met with evasion and deception. Perpetrators and collaborators went to great lengths to hide their identities. Others made their escape. While survivors struggled with confinement, thousands of Hitler’s helpers either blended back into society or fled overseas, to South America or the United States, often with visas in hand. Each “hidden” Nazi who secured a precious exit visa to America meant that one fewer displaced person held in the Allied camps would get out. Seven million stateless people waited while Nazi collaborators, including a small cadre of SS officers, entered foreign countries harbored safely as so-called war refugees. The most notorious of these were Adolf Eichmann and Josef Mengele, two men directly implicated in the deaths of millions. Years after the war, investigations revealed that these Nazi fugitives had considerable assistance from the Vatican and the International Red Cross as they fled through Italy and the Middle East using secret escape routes and falsified travel documents provided by these two powerful institutions.^[5] As long as these war criminals claimed to be anticommunist and Catholic, they had friends in high places.

Despite the impossibility of rendering complete justice, the Allies brought to account a handful of the masterminds of the Nazi genocide. In the course of their efforts, leaders of a combatant nation were held responsible for their deeds for the first time. By October 1946, the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg had rendered historic and precedent-setting verdicts against twenty-one major Nazi war criminals for their “crimes against humanity.” Not mere “victors’ justice” or a measure of revenge, the trials produced vast documentation and crucial eyewitness testimonies leading to meaningful criminal verdicts; some were acquitted, the death penalty came for about half of the Nazi elite, and suicide followed for the most famous defendant, Hitler’s named successor and favorite confidante, Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring.

Word filtered back to London and Washington that survivors in the DP camps were suffering under Allied administration. At first, perpetrators, collaborators, bystanders, and victims were often all joined together in liberated camps and refugee centers. Inspections were ordered by President Truman, who sent an emissary, Earl Harrison, the dean of the University of Pennsylvania Law School. Jewish groups also pressed for the inspections. Frightening accounts of squalid living conditions, mistreatment, and abject misery could not be believed. But Harrison’s report confirmed anecdotal claims, and the postwar euphoria in America and Britain dimmed a bit. Harrison succinctly concluded: “As matters now stand, we appear to be treating the Jews as the Nazis treated them except that we do not exterminate them.”^[6] Despite the hopelessness and contempt endured by those contained in DP camps, survivors of the worst genocide in human history responded with the passions they pursued before the war, and the greatest among these was soccer.

By the end of 1946, more than 150,000 Jews remained in German territory, but the proportion increased significantly over the following year to nearly one-third of all DPs living in the Western occupation zones. Organized initially by countries of origin, Jewish DP camps later became hotbeds of Zionist activity, and educational opportunities abounded. Many took to building a new generation: a baby boom exploded in Jewish DP camps, far outpacing others living in Germany.^[7] Life prospered in many other ways. As was seen across wartime Europe, from labor camps in Ukraine and concentration camps in Germany to walled-off camps and ghettos in Czechoslovakia and Poland, soccer filled the lives of the people seeking to start anew and searching for hope after so much death.

Soccer in the DP camps was the most popular recreation among those whose political status was in limbo. Boxing also drew fervent support in the detention camps. The European Jewish diaspora proved that life would flourish again. Survivors cultivated their ancient traditions. Converting buildings that were once used to administer suffering, survivors established schools and Yiddish-language newspapers. They returned to Kosher cooking, opened Jewish libraries, and directed theater productions. But sports were far more popular than the rest. Thousands of athletes on hundreds of teams competed on fields across the British and American occupied zones. Curiously, Jewish sports clubs in the British zone were no match for those in the American zone in number, organization, or professionalism. DP camp soccer teams competed within supraregional leagues, and trophies and championship titles were awarded. Soccer was most certainly a distraction in the fight against the monotony of camp life, but it was also an ideological struggle—training for a Zionist future in Israel. We know most about sports that took place in the American zone because newspapers were widely available, serving as the primary sources of documentation.

Every other major camp in the American sector was obsessed with soccer. The Föhrenwald DP camp, third largest behind other Bavarian assembly centers named Landsberg and Feldafing, hosted many games in the DP camp league, which began play in 1946 followed by a formalized championship in 1947. Twelve teams from each of the major camps competed in two rounds, and Föhrenwald finished in fourth place, thirteen points behind winners Landsberg, who won seventeen of their twenty-two matches, suffering only a single loss.^[8] In the earliest days of the DP camps, play was rough and spectators uncontrollable; consequently, a rules committee governed play, often enforcing strict league bylaws in stern fashion. One player identified in camps records only as “Steiner,” from the second Föhrenwald team, was banned for two months for striking an opponent.

Located near Wolfratshausen, at the confluence of the Isar and Loisach rivers in southern Bavaria, Föhrenwald was originally built on the eve of the war to house IG Farben employees (the company that licensed the patent for deadly Zyklon B, the killing agent in the gas chambers). Föhrenwald would also play an outsized role in the history of post–World War II Europe, as the strongest refugee voice concerning immigration to Palestine came from within the camp.

Later transformed to hold slave laborers, Föhrenwald was hastily converted into a DP camp in June 1945. Streets in the camp were named after American states. Föhrenwald expanded rapidly with the arrival of new refugees and new births. Famously, within a year of its opening, nearly two hundred women were pregnant. Jewish culture proliferated: residents formed a yeshiva (a center for Hasidism) and a synagogue with mikvah (Jewish ritual bath); fire and police services and a vocational training institute began; residents could read at least two weekly newspapers; and Allied governors established a youth home, a camp court, and a genuine hospital.

In Landsberg, as in almost every DP facility, nearly all of the residents were between the ages of twenty and thirty-five. Those young and strong enough to survive as workers in the Third Reich filled the camp, with a heartbreaking absence of children and the elderly. At Feldafing, the birth of self-governance for Jewish captives gave American officials a model to use in the dozens of other DP destinations. Set on the shores of a lake and on the road to Innsbruck, with impressive stone buildings and military barracks, Feldafing was once the alpine destination for Hitler Youth members seeking elite training as the future of Nazi Germany.

Time was needed to set up sporting competitions in the tumult of occupation. Survival was first and foremost in the minds of camp administrators and residents. The search for surviving family and friends dominated waking hours. Bulletin boards in each camp held desperate handwritten messages of hope. Residents in the DP camps often lived nearby their places of liberation. Residents in these camps initially were Poles, Ukrainians, and Latvians, some of whom were Nazi collaborators and included kapos from concentration camps. But after August 1945 and the findings of the critical Harrison Report, the camps were segregated for Jews alone.

Soon, everyday life returned, especially at the turn of the new year in 1946. Though it is not possible to pinpoint the start of the zone-wide football competitions, the first recorded match came in early October 1945: the camp newspaper at Landsberg announced a 7–0 victory of Ichud Landsberg over Maccabi Turkheim (the only exclusively Jewish camp in June 1945) with two thousand spectators looking on.^[9] Sport clubs in Landsberg were particularly well organized: volleyball, basketball, track and field, table tennis, and boxing were all on offer. Except for soccer, boxing was the most popular competition as it reinforced a combative, pugilistic answer to years of anti-Semitic propaganda portraying Jews as weak and effeminate. Zionist fans embraced boxing as a type of national defense sport. Organized soccer started with friendly matches, and a highly competitive championship encompassing all of southern Germany soon followed.

Waves of Jews fleeing pogroms in Poland and economic depression in 1946 raised the number of Jewish DPs in the American zone from 40,000 to 145,000.^[10] Officials worked to cultivate soccer fields, clearing out open spaces and requisitioning American machines to level out future football grounds. Donated equipment came not just from Jewish organizations but also from American charities, including Catholic and Protestant groups.

The DP camp at Bergen-Belsen will be forever associated with the concentration camp where Allied liberators discovered ten thousand unburied dead and sixty thousand prisoners, most barely alive.^[11] After the camp stabilized, Jewish leadership began to look after the surviving remnant, Jews from Romania, Hungary, and Poland who accounted for almost seven of every ten residents in Bergen-Belsen. Sports clubs proliferated in track and field, table tennis, handball, and, inevitably, soccer. On July 19, 1946, Belsen’s first team, calling themselves Hatikvah (Hope), played Ichud (The One) from Landsberg. So successful was the friendly that Ichud later played Belsen’s second team, Hagibor (Hero), made up exclusively of Hungarian Jews. With 2,500 spectators on the sidelines, Ichud Landsberg thrashed Hagibor Belsen 4–0. Such huge attendance at these matches is especially remarkable when one realizes the largest of the DP camps held no more than five or six thousand people. Later, teams in the British-controlled zone, such as Bergen-Belsen, were excluded from the main DP camp league, which was limited to teams from the American sector. But other teams would form in the camp; one Polish team earned a match against British soldiers as early as November 1945.

The most improbable of survivors who played competitive football in Bergen-Belsen was Martin Abraham Stock, a German Jew who three times survived the lethal camps at Płaszów (Poland), Sachsenhausen, and Bergen-Belsen, to go on to become the first-ever Jewish representative on the executive board of the DFB in the postwar years. Stock, born in Hamburg, served in World War I after a successful career as a player and board member of an obscure German football club called Altona-Hamburg. Purged from his club after the Nazi revolution, Martin Stock was deported on November 8, 1941, along with 969 Jews from Hamburg to a ghetto in faraway Minsk. He was among only eight who survived, later shuttling between concentration camps until his liberation day at Bergen-Belsen. Such was his passion for football that he refused to leave Germany. Stock returned to the game, serving the DFB and participating in the fifty-year anniversary of Altona and honoring returned soldiers, some of whom had played for the club but who had also kept the extermination machinery running smoothly for Nazi Germany. When he finally left German football, resigning his post with the DFB in 1950, Martin Abraham Stock was so beloved that Sepp Herberger and the general secretary of the DFB saw him off at the airport on his departure to a new life in Brazil. Largely forgotten in the years that followed, Stock’s compelling story has only recently been unearthed by historians.^[12]

Soccer dominated the sports reporting in all of the DP camp newspapers. One tournament over Passover between April 18 and 22, 1946, included an opening parade with team flags and three thousand spectators. Qualifying matches, held at the Landsberg camp, reduced twelve teams down to the final two, and Landsberg and Feldafing met in the final. This time, the football grounds swelled with some five thousand watching on. Play was fierce as neither team would back down, and with much of the match remaining play had to be cut short when Feldafing players acted “unsportingly” toward the referee. The tournament went unfinished with no winner declared.

The top league in the American zone included the nine best teams, calling itself the A-Klasse. The opening match for the A-Klasse came on July 13, 1946, and teams were made up of former professionals from Poland and other clubs across Europe. Most accounts give the league a high rating. Matches were evenly contested and the quality of play strong. Tickets to matches provided much-needed revenue for DP clubs. The top matches dominated news coverage. From the summer of 1946, we find this account:

Just as in civilian life, events off the pitch affected the game on the field: rowdy and unruly spectators threatened to disrupt play and excess aggressiveness resulted in a rash of injuries early on. The disciplinary committee suspended a number of DP players for playing with and against Germans and for teams using Christian players. Many at the time interpreted such outbursts and indiscretions as natural extensions of highly competitive sporting behavior, but others saw them as reflections of the pent-up frustrations of displaced persons unsure of their future.

Nearly two years of peace in Europe brought renewed excitement to the business of living. When winter turned to spring in 1947, sport again took center stage. Rivalries and an increasing sense of professionalism made soccer more popular than ever. Dozens of DP camp teams from the lower ranks fought fiercely for promotion to the A-Klasse. In 1947, the league expanded from nine to twenty-two teams, which were then organized by a northern and southern division with ten and twelve teams, respectively. No team would rise higher than Ichud Landsberg, who became repeat champions.

For many, a lack of work and meaningful diversions behind the barbed wire became unbearable. But players and spectators drew deep meaning from sport. Matches served as an outlet from the temporary, mundane existence lived in the camps. Sport was a type of occupation—it structured daily life and allowed people to channel frustrations and consume time. In the DP centers, gyms and sporting equipment allowed physical renewal.

Many displaced persons saw themselves as strangers in a murderers’ land—one common refrain heard on the assembly areas was that “our blood is in their soil.” With Jewish cultural foundations destroyed, players and fans took pleasure in renewing their identity as Jews, as they gathered pitch-side to watch and cheer. Matches against occupation forces from the United States and teams representing Switzerland and Poland added powerfully to this growing identity. But never would DPs play against German teams. Sport contributed greatly to the physical restoration of a people. Astute observers called it a “productive forgetting.”

Emotional investment was significant for these footballers. A Jewish youth leader in charge of a team of young male Holocaust survivors who found refuge in England remembered the reply of one boy who lost his temper in one match. Rebuking the boy for fighting, the young man replied, “I’ve lost so much that I can’t keep losing.”^[14]

With the November 1947 UN partition of Palestine and the end of the British Mandate on May 14, 1948, the State of Israel came into existence and the exodus began. DP camps across Germany emptied: the 165,000 Jewish DPs living in the American and British zones in April 1948 would see their numbers plummet to half just five months later.^[15] With mass immigration to Israel and the closing of the DP camps, competitive sport came to an abrupt and sudden end. Föhrenwald remained open several more years, becoming the last DP camp to close in 1957.

Rebirth of German Football
in the Occupied Zones

Rebuilding German football in the occupied zones depended greatly on where the matches would be played. As the outcome of the war became clear, the leading Allied powers agreed to divide Germany into four regions to be governed by each of the soon-to-be-victorious nations. Once German surrender was complete, each nation set about administering the peace and imposing its will on the defeated. In the Soviet zone, old clubs were banned from reforming and their property confiscated. Stalin had long envisioned a radical reorganization of Germany according to communist ideals, even before Hitler committed suicide. In the eastern half of Germany, large crowds were banned from gathering, and centralized state control of football meant that politics dominated the sport.

The French zone of occupation, in the far southwestern tip of Germany, was run more along the dictates of revenge. With memories of Verdun and yet another German occupation of their country within two decades, military authorities in the French zone, including the long-disputed Saarland, ran German football. The French were in no mood to be sporting: all football activity required approval, and strict travel restrictions were imposed on teams. And usually these applications were turned down. Thus life was generally hardest for the occupied in the Russian and French zones, but in a curious twist of fate, it would be the Americans, who knew the least about the game and its traditions, who reinvigorated German football.

The British rivaled the French in their animosity toward the Germans. In some cases, retribution guided British policy in the northwestern part of Germany. One of the rival clubs to the great Schalke 04 and Dortmund teams, in what was once known as the Gauliga Westfalen in the Nazified 1930s, was Westfalia Herne. The team kept their name but little else under the British, who confiscated all club equipment and the football grounds owned by the club. One English officer even demanded that Herne burn their uniforms.^[16] But the British love for the game eventually eased the more punitive aspects of occupation, and by fall 1945 matches featuring the region’s best teams against British army sides were the talk of the district. One day in November, thirty-five thousand gathered to watch Schalke 04 play against a team representing the Fifty-Third Army Division in Wuppertal, a match won by the Germans 2–1.

Footballers and club officials returning to their home grounds were devastated to find clubhouses in ruin and craters where playing fields once had been. Shock led to dismay at the sight of baseball diamonds and goalposts for American football standing where once perfectly manicured soccer fields lay. A skeptical pause soon gave way to approval of reorganization of German football clubs. American leniency led to one of the first postwar friendlies, a match featuring Schwaben Augsburg against a team of POWs on July 1, 1945, well before the American war with Japan was over.^[17] Smaller football associations in the south of Germany, rich in footballing tradition, scrambled quickly to reform teams with whatever players could be mustered. One of their first actions was to create the Oberliga, a zone-wide league that started play a mere three weeks after its formation.

That Germany was in ruins would not deter these new football pioneers. Teams often played for meat, vegetables, and boxes of coal. Equipment was in very short supply, and most teams only had one ball. The loss of a game ball to a nearby creek or forest usually meant the end of a match. Transportation always presented a problem; some club officials found themselves traveling to meetings in coal cars or with their teams on trains lacking heat and basic food provisions. Material goods were scarce, and clubs often improvised uniforms from scrap fabric. Red shirts were especially popular in these times, despite prohibitions by the Allies. In some cases, club uniforms were made from leftover flags and banners that no one seemed to want anymore. All you had to do was remove the swastikas. And in the small city of Hamm, twenty-five miles northeast of Dortmund in the soccer-mad Ruhr region, a local club used gravestones to bolster the stairs leading to the grandstands, making sure the inscriptions faced downward so as not to disturb arriving fans seeking to escape the deprivations of life under occupation.^[18]

Nationwide football returned to greater Germany in the fall of 1947 when the four Oberligen, representing Berlin and the occupation zones in the north, south, and west came together (joined one year later by the French southwest, which struggled under military rule) for a knockout-round tournament. Winners from each of the zonal playoffs faced off in a two-round playoff to determine the finalists, and when the dust settled FC Kaiserslautern faced off against FC Nürnberg in the first national championship of the postwar era. On the Kaiserslautern side, five childhood mates put on the club shirt, including two sets of brothers, most famously Fritz Walter and brother Ottmar. In a strange irony, Nuremberg, the spiritual home of the National Socialists, was also represented in the final, though the city itself had suffered a particularly devastating bombing campaign because of its prominence in Nazi politics. An animated crowd of seventy-five thousand filled the stands in Cologne on June 21, 1948, and when FC Nürnberg emerged 2–1 winners, the proud club celebrated their return in front of the Nuremberg central train station, with tens of thousands of fans standing on a huge swathe of rubble as if it were a home-ground terrace.

Sepp Herberger waited out the first five years after the war’s end. Unlike his fellow DFB colleagues Otto Nerz and Felix Linnemann, both of whom did not survive imprisonment for their Nazi Party associations, Herberger escaped the more serious penalties of de-Nazification after paying a fine and living in a professional wilderness for a time. He had relocated to Cologne, where he could keep an eye on young prospects and craft a living for himself by training future coaches, some of whom would one day bring German football back into the modern world. Herberger had always kept in close contact with his former players. And he waited for his broken country to reappoint him as national team trainer, a mere formality once the timing was right. To Herberger’s horror, the job was opened up and advertised by the DFB. Undeterred, the single-minded man from Mannheim lobbied hard for his old job, writing angry letters and calling upon journalist friends whom he believed owed him a favor or two for being such a great interview over the years.^[19]

The DFB relented and by January 21, 1950, Germany had a proper football coach, a reinvigorated national football association, and an emerging collection of players ready to represent their partitioned country. Then, nine months later almost to the day, the “new” nation of West Germany rejoined the community of world football when FIFA lifted its ban in late September. Eight weeks later, Switzerland agreed to be the first opponent for post-Nazi Germany, and the ever-reliable Swiss played the role perfectly, going down to their hosts (minus an injured Fritz Walter) 1–0 in front of 115,000 fans in Stuttgart. With Sepp Herberger back at the helm and memories of the power and precision of the Breslau Elf beginning to fade, Die Mannschaft was ready to write a new national story. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Germany had a hard time finding opponents during the Allied occupation. Among non-German-speaking nations, only the Republic of Ireland and Turkey agreed to play them in friendly matches between 1951 and 1953.

With the Cold War intensifying in Europe and Germany on the front lines of the battle, football once again took on a political edge. The World Cup tournament had been restarted in 1950 after a twelve-year hiatus, with South American powerhouse Uruguay winning their second championship, beating host Brazil 2–1. Uruguay claimed the newly renamed Jules Rimet Cup, so changed to honor the twenty-fifth anniversary of Rimet’s presidency of FIFA. Neutral Switzerland was rewarded with the next world championships, and West Germany’s preparations for their first World Cup since the debacle in Italy in 1938—when the national side crashed out in the first round against the Swiss—were erratic at best, but also had the unexpected side effect of producing a thaw in relations with its neighbors. Part of the predicament was the wide range of competition in the various Oberligen in the western zones. The best teams, from which the national team drew players, often beat club rivals by scores of 8–0 and 9–0. Some teams simply weren’t tested. In Oberliga Nord, Hamburg tallied more than one hundred goals in the 1951 season, leaving the team unchallenged until the nationwide finals began.

Doubts mounted the next year when Herberger’s side lost successive matches to Turkey, Ireland, and, painfully, France, who so thoroughly outplayed the Germans that Fritz Walter considered quitting the team. That the French played with revenge on their minds was lost on Walter. The press started to turn on both coach and team, and only a hard-fought draw in Madrid in December 1952 seemed to save Herberger’s job.

When the time came to enter official World Cup qualification, West Germany continued to stumble. An uninspired away draw to Norway was followed by a mediocre 3–0 win against Saarland. The Saarland, still occupied by French troops, had attained independent status within FIFA (until its reabsorption into West Germany in 1956) and competed in qualification matches for the 1954 World Cup. The return match against Norway produced a 5–1 victory in November 1953, boosting hopes among the German faithful. The winter break followed, and in March 1954 West Germany traveled back to Saarland (an away match at home?) for the deciding qualification match. Extra intrigue attended the match: Saarland was managed by Helmut Schön, the former SC Dresden star and a German international under Herberger.

Playing on Sepp Herberger’s fifty-seventh birthday, West Germany claimed a 3–1 win, securing passage unconvincingly to the fifth World Cup tournament. Amid lackluster performances and relatively poor preparations, Germany was just happy to continue playing. Awaiting them in their group was pretournament favorite Hungary, who had completely humiliated England 6–3 at Wembley Stadium and 7–1 in Budapest in the lead-up to the championships. No one could conceivably challenge Hungarian supremacy as the Mighty Magyars brought a four-year unbeaten streak to Switzerland. In the minds of most observers, there was only ever going to be one winner of the 1954 World Cup: Hungary.

The very idea of West Germany contending for the Jules Rimet Cup in Switzerland was ludicrous. The nation had been excluded from the 1950 World Cup and successive Olympic games in 1948 and 1952. Their performances gave no indication of being world class. So it was that in their opening match of group play, Germany went down 1–0 to Turkey inside of three minutes. But twelve minutes later, Germany leveled the score and went on to dominate play, finishing the game as 4–1 winners. The second match pitted the Germans against the invincible Hungarians. In the years following this match, analysts have long speculated why Sepp Herberger decided to drop eight players ahead of the contest. Some guessed he wanted to lull the Hungarians into a false sense of supremacy. The national team trainer played it coy, evasively dodging questions about his tactics. The match finished a humiliating 8–3.

The loss brought down condemnations and calls for Herberger’s head. In truth, the trainer fielded a reserve team so as to rest his squad for the more pivotal playoff rematch against Turkey three days later. West Germany went on to soundly defeat the Turks 7–2, and after dispatching Yugoslavia in the quarterfinals 2–0, with an own goal and a strike by Helmut Rahn making the difference, West Germany faced Austria in the semifinal. The descendants of the Wunderteam, this version of the Austrian national team outlasted Switzerland in their epic quarterfinal to win 7–5, a match still considered as one of the best ever played in the World Cup. West Germany came into their semifinal riding a wave of momentum, but the old animosities were largely gone for their Teutonic neighbor to the south. As the rains fell on the last day of June, Germany walked off the pitch as 6–1 victors, with four goals coming from set pieces. They played the Austrians “off of the park.” German industriousness was replaced with technical brilliance and teamwork built on a familiarity bred in childhood—five of the starting eleven played football together for boyhood club Kaiserslautern. The rains continued to fall on the Swiss countryside, and when the day came for the final match in Berne, the Hungarians would have to battle more than their German counterparts.

When Hungary and West Germany walked out on the pitch at the Wankdorfstadion on Sunday, July 4, 1954, they immediately saw the effects of the heavy rain that had fallen the previous day. Mud clung to players’ boots, but the Germans had an extra weapon in their arsenal. Team bootman Adi Dassler, the founder of the Adidas sporting goods company, was on the bench next to Sepp Herberger, and he was well prepared for days like these. Though the weather had remained clear at kickoff, conditions deteriorated rapidly and rain in the second half turned the pitching to a bog in some areas. Dassler had supplied boots to the national squad for years, but in the Berne mud he switched to longer removable studs, giving the Germans a decided advantage.

The Germans still had to play the game, and after nine minutes they went down two quick goals, scored by Ferenc Puskás and Zoltán Czibor. Rather than becoming demoralized, Herberger’s men responded immediately. Two minutes after a failed back pass that had gifted Hungary their second goal, Fritz Walter played a first-time ball to Rahn, who sent a blistering cross from the left—meant as a shot—to the goalmouth, where prolific inside right Max Morlock of FC Nürnberg pounced on the slightly deflected pass, just barely tapping the ball inside the left post before the keeper could claim it, for the Germans’ first goal. The equalizer came just seven minutes later on a volleyed corner by Helmut Rahn. Before twenty minutes passed, four goals had been tallied, and the teams played late into the match deadlocked at 2–2.

What came next became known as Das Wunder von Bern—the Miracle of Berne. The Hungarians dominated long stretches of the second half, but their possession came to naught. The Germans desperately cleared two shots off the goal line and the crossbar, and some heroic goalkeeping saved them other times. Puskás saw his equalizer at the end called offside by the Welsh linesman. But six minutes from time, the inevitability of a Hungarian victory was swept away when Helmut Rahn blasted home the winning goal, a left-footed shot from the edge of the penalty box coming from a poor clearance by the Hungarians.

Equal to the goal in German consciousness was the radio commentary on the day. In this era before television, millions back home anxiously sat by their radios listening intently to the match. Forever imprinted on collective German memory was the ecstatic reporting of German radio commentator Herbert Zimmermann:

Rahn’s goal and Zimmerman’s call defined a nation and erased, for a time anyway, German shame and the dark days of a humiliating occupation. German football writer Uli Hesse reflected on the power and meaning of the team’s victory over the Hungarians to a broken nation still reeling from the Nazi hangover: “Half a century later, every true football fan beyond school age can still recite the words as if they were a poem, knowing that what follows is the voice urging Rahn to try a shot from deep, then realising the player does exactly that. ‘Aus dem Hintergrund müsste Rahn schiessen . . . Rahn schiesst!’ [Rahn should shoot from deep . . . Rahn shoots!]”^[20] The phrase “Wir Sind Wieder Wer” (“We are somebody again”) is commonly mentioned to express the profound meaning of the Miracle at Berne to the German people. From this victory, a new postwar identity emerged for Germany, one which by most accounts would drive the economic miracle that came in the decades that followed.

After the match, ecstatic celebrations erupted across West Germany. The first of many public gatherings and parades came after the German national team’s arrival in Munich after the short train ride from Switzerland. An estimated two million people greeted Die Mannschaft as they descended onto the Munich train platform. Players were showered with gifts in the week that followed. Holding forth in the Löwenbräukeller beer hall in Munich, DFB president Peco Bauwens joined in the celebrations, offering a speech that was broadcast live by a Bavarian radio station.

Undoubtedly fueled by alcohol, high emotion, and a lingering sense of nationalism, Bauwens offered the usual platitudes about German fortitude and spirit before moving on to darker themes. He continued by suggesting the World Cup victory was inspired by the Nordic god of thunder, Wotan. In his mind, the players had carried the German flag in their hearts. Bauwens’s beer-cellar fervor reached a crescendo when he apparently identified the team’s success as the result of a loyal allegiance to the Führerprinzip—the Nazi-sanctified principle of having one strong man leading the others.^[21] Before he could finish his speech, the radio station cut him off. Mysteriously, all tapes and transcripts of the broadcast were lost, but the damage was done. Angry denunciations of the toast, labeled by some as the Sieg Heil speech, appeared widely in Bavarian newspapers. The foreign press was aghast when they heard the first two verses of the forbidden national anthem—forever corrupted by the Nazis—“Deutschland über alles,” sung by German fans. Peco Bauwens’s chilling blend of Aryan mysticism and a nationalism fed by athletic triumph was too much to take. Nine years removed from the end of the war and like the nation, the German Football Association still had much work to do to come to terms with the war and the Holocaust.

Pitchside in Berne, West German captain Fritz Walter took possession of the 1954 version of the Coupe du Monde, handed to him by the cup’s eponymous namesake, FIFA president Jules Rimet. Four years earlier, few were sure that the tournament would ever resume after twelve years of devastating war and occupation. As Walter held the trophy aloft for all to see, the modernist figurine created by French sculptor Abel Lafleur had already taken a long, winding path to Berne. The story of the Jules Rimet Cup reads like a gangster caper. Only in this tale, the gangsters ransacked an entire continent. But for a solitary Italian football official, the Rimet would have ended up in Nazi hands, yet another priceless object hoarded by history’s greatest thieves.

During the Nazi reign of terror, Europe’s artistic and cultural heritage came under relentless attack, orchestrated much like the Blitzkrieg warfare of the German army. In every country they conquered, Nazi military and political officials looted central banks and pillaged national museums and private collections, sending confiscated gold reserves and other treasures back to Germany. Hitler’s racial and military crusades enabled an art and money plundering operation unparalleled in modern times. The Jules Rimet Cup became a target in this massive search-and-seizure operation. Thwarted on the pitch in the 1938 World Cup in France, Nazi Germany essentially gave up on football as a reliable means of statecraft. Envying the success of Mussolini’s fascists in winning successive world championships in 1934 and 1938, the Nazis turned to the next best option for securing the trophy: they would steal it. With ally Italy in possession of the cup, the mission seemed simple. But the changing fortunes of war saw Mussolini ousted and the Nazis forced to occupy the Italian Peninsula.

Paying close attention to the rapidly changing events in his country, Italian Football Federation official Ottorino Barassi took matters into his own hands. Word of Nazi plans to seize the Rimet trophy, along with other priceless Italian artifacts, reached Barassi, and he secretly removed the trophy from a Rome bank, taking it back to his hometown of Cremona in northern Italy. Weighing just over thirteen and a half pounds and measuring fourteen and a half inches tall, the gold-plated, sterling silver Coupe du Monde was an Art Deco masterpiece sculpted in the likeness of Nike, the Greek goddess of victory. Her arms, spread as though they were the shining source of the light of the sun, held a simple, chalicelike cup.

The stature of this trophy grew with the phenomenal success of the World Cup tournament. Hiding it in a town that was a symbol of fascist domination likely emboldened Barassi. Nazi soldiers eventually appeared at Barassi’s house, searching thoroughly for the statuette, world football’s Holy Grail. Shockingly, they failed to search under Barassi’s bed. If they had, they would have found an old shoebox containing the most coveted prize in the game. A few years later, Ottorino Barassi looked on as FIFA chief Jules Rimet handed the cup over to winners Uruguay as the World Cup restored the possibility of sport and peace over war and domination. Rising from the cataclysms of war, the reborn tournament, hosted brilliantly by Brazil, set into motion the spectacle and passion that now defines the quadrennial event celebrated by the entire planet.

In a dramatic postscript to this story, the Jules Rimet Cup would change hands many more times in the coming years, beyond the footballers who earned it. On the eve of the 1958 World Cup in Sweden, Germany returned the cup but, mysteriously, it now had a new base and was a few centimeters taller. Speculation was that the original was lost and a replica had been produced by the Germans for the next competition. The mystery went unsolved.

Several years passed, and four months before England hosted the 1966 competition, the trophy once again went missing, nicked from a one-day sport stamp exhibition where it was on display. A ransom note for fifteen thousand pounds led to the quick arrest of a middleman by Scotland Yard, but the cup remained missing—that is, until a week later, when barge worker Dave Corbett was walking his black-and-white Collie “Pickles” in his local park and stopped to make a phone call at the public phone box. As the dog scratched around, Corbett noticed that his furry companion had torn open a newspaper-wrapped parcel hidden in a nearby bush. Seeing the glint of gold and the words “Brazil 1962,” an astonished Corbett could not believe his eyes. Pickles had found the World Cup and, by doing so, saved an embarrassed nation. Later that summer, England won their first Jules Rimet Cup, famously paraded around by team captain Bobby Moore as he was carried around the Wembley pitch on teammates’ shoulders.

But the perilous journey of the trophy did not end there. At the 1970 World Cup in Mexico, Brazil defeated fellow two-time champions Italy 4–1 to win the world title and the right to take permanent possession of the Jules Rimet. This is the tournament of the incomparable Pelé, the Golden Ball winner as most valuable player and inspirational leader who scored and assisted twice in the final. This 1970 Brazil team is widely considered to be the best World Cup squad ever to take the field. But thirteen years later, thieves once again made off with the trophy, stealing it from the poorly guarded headquarters of the Brazilian Football Federation in Rio de Janeiro. It has never been seen again.

Sepp Herberger had endeared himself to players, fans, and journalists over the years with his quirky, gurulike sayings that later became embedded in German culture. Herberger’s most famous and pithy utterances served to remind whoever was within earshot that football is an unpredictable, difficult-to-control game and that you must never let your guard down. Herberger enjoyed the longest tenure of any national team trainer—he managed a total of twenty years, six during the Nazi era, retiring in 1964 and handing over the reins to former player and acolyte Helmut Schön (who also took West Germany to their second World Cup title as hosts in 1974). Perpetuating the spirit of Kampf, the soldierly struggle glorified during the 1930s, Herberger’s miracle team beat the more skilled Hungarians in the mud of Berne because they were more fit and outworked every opponent. For those twenty years, Sepp Herberger’s influence on the development of German football was enormous, and he linked prewar squads to the team that reached the pinnacle of the world game. Generations of German soccer players and coaches learned to play football in a style first developed under Adolf Hitler.^[22]

After the World Cup win, Sepp Herberger was lionized in Germany along with his players. Decades passed and his reputation only grew. Herberger became a household name and a cultural icon, remarkable for the fact he had joined the Nazi Party in the 1930s and survived the reckoning that followed largely unscathed. But he is best remembered for his succinct sayings that are spiritual cousins to well-worn football maxims known today, like “Play to the final whistle” and “The best team doesn’t always win.” Every German of a certain age knows Herberger’s now famous lines, “Der Ball ist rund” (The ball is round), “Das Spiel dauert 90 Minuten” (The game lasts for ninety minutes), and “Nach dem Spiel ist vor dem Spiel” (After the game is before the game). He demanded simple obedience to these maxims; they prevented complacency and guaranteed dedication and supreme effort among his players.

To a nation stepping out of the long shadow of war, Herberger and his soccer teams meant a great deal. Each of their first three world championships represented a milestone in German national identity and a frightful reminder of German unity and strength to its neighbors. The win in 1974 as host nation over Johan Cruyff and the Brilliant Oranje of the Netherlands lingered long in the collective Dutch memory of the occupation. Years later, England striker Gary Lineker, after losing the 1990 World Cup semifinal to eventual champion Germany on penalties, channeled the legendary German coach with his own cheeky twist: “Football is a simple game; twenty-two men chase a ball for ninety minutes, and at the end, the Germans win.” The 1990 World Cup win in Italy came on the eve of German reunification, at a time when many experts expected the reconstituted German team to dominate for years. Such predictions didn’t come to pass. It would be another twenty-four years until Germany returned from the footballing wilderness to claim another World Cup title, overcoming Argentina in extra time in the Estádio do Maracanã in Rio de Janeiro, becoming the first European country to win a World Cup in South America.

Reconciling the Past

The return of Germany to the community of civilized nations happened faster than anyone would imagine. Success on the football pitch enhanced the rebuilding of the nation, renewed with postwar economic vigor. Yet it would take several decades for the national football association to come to terms with the past. When the DFB began preparations to host the 2006 World Cup, they recognized that the eyes of the world would be fixed on Germany and the past would be questioned.

DFB accounts of the Nazi period whitewashed the close relationship enjoyed by the DFB and the National Socialists. But with centenary celebrations of the founding of the German FA in 2000 came mounting pressure on the DFB to open up its archives, and in turn, the DFB offered to sponsor a self-investigation. Many players and association officials had been labeled as “fellow travelers” by German courts after the war, in effect exonerating them of any serious guilt. At the club level, Borussia Dortmund was the first to respond to requests from the DFB to critically evaluate the past. Like many Rhineland clubs, Dortmund was full of socialist and communist loyalists among the players and club officials, the first targets of Nazism. German historians had already revealed that well into the 1970s, nearly half of the DFB governing committee at the time had been NSDAP members. Shockingly, one member of the DFB executive board was a man who served two years in prison for SS war crimes.

From its very founding, the Deutscher Fußball-Bund was a deeply conservative organization that was easily pulled into the nationalistic aims of Nazism. DFB national team trainer Sepp Herberger allowed himself to be used by the Nazis in their propaganda machinery; his active cooperation, including a cameo role, with the popular football film Das Grosse Spiel (The Big Game, 1942) contributed to the stability of the regime. Guilt was be shared and Herberger’s reputation diminished. The concept that gained hold in this period of reflection and accountability was “seduction”; like many professional fields in Nazi Germany, football joined with lawyers, doctors, and teachers in being seduced by Nazism. True, there were ideologues and true believers in every walk of life, but opportunism, passive acceptance, careerism, and blind ambition were more typical explanations of this deeply rooted complicity.

The most decorated and prominent club in German football is Bayern Munich. For decades, the Bavarian outfit was seen as the club of the beer halls and the Brownshirts. Because Munich was the birthplace of National Socialism, Bayern Munich was tainted by association in the public eye. The truth was quite the opposite.

In the years leading up to the Nazi revolution, Bayern was a provincial club with few successes to trumpet. But it was a stout Jewish man named Kurt Landauer who brought Bayern Munich to the heights of German football. The forceful Landauer brought a number of innovations to the Bavarian side. The youth academy flourished under his watch, and fiscal responsibility kept the team afloat in the depths of economic depression in the early 1930s.

A progressive philosophy brought beautiful football to Bayern. When others imitated the English style, Kurt Landauer was inspired by the Hungarian style not-so-coincidentally played by the best Jewish footballers in central Europe. The Bayern chairman rejected the notion of Kampfgeist, the “spirit of struggle” so enthusiastically embraced by the Nazis. Instead of a martial struggle, he saw football as a game of artistry and joy, played by men who sought to display their creativity with the ball. Landauer took the helm as club president in 1919 and for the next decade built a team to rival German giants Schalke 04, FC Nürnberg, and FC Saarbrücken.

With a membership and a board of directors with strong Jewish influence, Bayern Munich would be denounced later as a Judenklub. Yet Bayern never gave in to prevailing political sentiments of the time. Such sly resistance did not last long, especially in the birthplace of Nazism. On the very day Dachau was established on the outskirts of Munich, Kurt Landauer was forced to resign his position in the nationwide Nazi purge of sport and education. During the Nazi period, it was actually local rivals 1860 Munich who collaborated with the National Socialists and not Bayern, who resisted by appointing non-Nazis, answering secretly to Landauer, who ran the club behind the scenes. A few years later, he was arrested on Kristallnacht in 1938 and sent to Dachau like tens of thousands of other Jewish men. Landauer stayed in Dachau just thirty-three days, owing his quick release to his military service in World War I.

Loyalty to the club remained strong despite Nazi anti-Semitism, and when Bayern Munich, now officially Judenfrei, traveled to Zurich to play a friendly against a Swiss club, one of the few instances of open rebellion by a German football club made the news. Bayern players, forbidden by the Gestapo to meet officially with Landauer, who had fled to Switzerland, instead spotted their former club president in the stands and lined up to applaud the man who brought Bayern from anonymity to their first of many championships in 1932. After the war, Landauer returned to Munich and to the post of club president, going on to become the longest-tenured chief executive in club history.

In the postwar years, like so many German institutions, FC Bayern Munich ignored the Nazi period in official club accounts, in essence repressing the horrors of the Holocaust. More often, club officials simply deflected questions about the Nazi era, relying on the euphemistic phrase “the political events between 1933 and 1945.” But after the 2006 World Cup, Bayern and many other clubs looked more critically at their histories, and in time forgotten heroes were brought back to the forefront and finally given the honor they deserved. In 2009, on the 125th anniversary of his birth, Kurt Landauer was recognized as the father of the modern Bayern Munich with a memorial ceremony at the concentration camp of Dachau, located just seventeen miles from the club’s new modern training ground and stadium.

Hundreds of Jewish footballers and club officials essentially disappeared in the Nazi period, and few within the DFB ever asked questions about their status. Several were especially well known as soccer grew into a mass phenomenon in Germany and across Europe between the wars. Two names stand above the rest. Julius Hirsch and Gottfried Fuchs together formed the most fearsome strike force in the early years of German football, propelling Karlsruhe FV to their first and only domestic championship in 1910. Hirsch was the first Jewish player to represent the national team. Fuchs’s claim to glory was the ten goals he scored against Russia in a group match at the 1912 Olympics in Stockholm, a German record that stands to this day. Both men were erased from DFB archives in the Nazi years.

The best player of his generation, Gottfried Fuchs was later compared to Fritz Walter. Fuchs escaped the clutches of Nazi Germany, immigrating to Canada after 1937. Julius Hirsch did not escape. Troubled by personal problems in the intervening years, including multiple suicide attempts before his deportation to Auschwitz in March 1943, Hirsch was declared dead in May 1945, another victim of the Nazi death factory.

It wasn’t until sixty years later that the Deutscher Fußball-Bund formally acknowledged the fate of Hirsch and other Jewish footballers. Recognizing the close relationship between the DFB and the Nazis, Julius Hirsch was honored posthumously with an award granted to individuals and clubs that actively advance human rights. Dubbed the Julius-Hirsch-Preis, the first prize was awarded in 2005 to celebrate efforts to combat racism, anti-Semitism, and xenophobia, and it went to Bayern Munich for its staging of a friendly, a “match of peace,” between its under-seventeen team and an Israeli-Palestinian youth squad. While nothing can truly make amends for the appalling indifference and obfuscation of a complicit past, German football is moving forward, like much of the rest of Germany, offering a genuine remembrance of a complicated and tragic history.

Remembrance of Survival and Resistance

Impenetrable. The Holocaust seemingly falls beyond our human capacity to understand it. The enormity of events that came together to make the war and genocide that followed seems out of reach to the modern observer. But it is the individual stories revealed here that illuminate and explain. Soccer under the swastika helped preserve a more civilized existence. When stripped of propagandistic and nationalistic aims, soccer in the Nazi era affirmed human agency, lived out in hope, strength, and perseverance. The motivations shown by the countless men, women, and children who picked up a football and started playing wherever they found themselves ensnared in Nazi-occupied Europe are myriad. Like all who fell captive to the Nazis, their imprisonment created confusion, uncertainty, and, bizarrely, opportunity.

In the debased moral landscape of the camps, each prisoner had to consider his or her own survival above everything else. One pathway to survival, as we have seen, was football. But the games were so much more; they meant defiance, resistance, and rebellion against one of the most heinous political ideas in human history. Others played simply to reclaim an element of their humanity in an expression of pleasure and entertainment. Clearly, there was a redemptive element to the suffering endured by those held captive and murdered by Nazi criminals. For as many surviving heroes as we identify in these stories, we also find many more who perished.

The loudest voices should be those that have been silenced forever: the millions murdered by starvation and by disease brought on by ghettoization, those who perished by bullet and by gas chamber. Millions were denied the right to experience life and fulfill their dreams. While many embraced life as fully as possible in the camps and ghettos, others gave in to despair or the darker impulses of their nature. One Auschwitz survivor reminds us of these blurred lines between prisoner destinies in the Nazi universe.

Young Dutch Holocaust survivor Louis de Wijze was just the right age to avoid being killed outright for being a Jewish child and thus deemed unworthy of life as the future of the Jewish people. De Wijze was also a soccer player who made his debut for a top-division side in Holland as a seventeen-year-old but soon after the occupation was deported to Westerbork. He stayed in the transit center about eighteen months, earning an assignment to a favored labor detail in the camp where he was fed well, working his way into excellent physical condition. This conditioning later allowed de Wijze to endure starvation rations and murderous labor at Auschwitz-Monowitz, his destination after Westerbork. De Wijze admits that this combination of blind luck, endurance, and his own resourcefulness led to his survival when everyone around him died. De Wijze outlasted the vast majority who entered the camps at Westerbork, Auschwitz, and finally Buchenwald. But his own admission in the following passage is tempered by another revelation long after the war:

Just a few pages later in this same memoir we learn that Louis de Wijze passed a deadly selection (his second) at Auschwitz-Monowitz only to step back in line after handing off his bundle of clothing to an emaciated Czech prisoner named Hugo and pushing the stunned man back into the “line of life.” Certain death would have followed his deception had he been caught.

Selflessness and survival. Many memoirists from the Holocaust acknowledge an inescapable contradiction about life in the camps. Opportunism and luck intermingled with capricious executions, random beatings, and torture. Many who survived by playing football were self-interested but also self-sacrificing. Heroic behavior was on display, though it was less likely to be confessed because of survivors’ guilt. In the space between heroism and selfishness lies remembrance. The legacy of these witnesses has forced entire nations to confront the near-distant past. Yet one disturbing reality still confounds: what is to be made of the innumerable bystanders to this devastating history?

The Legacy of Indifference

The Holocaust is a tear in the fabric of Western Civilization that has never quite been repaired. Millions were thrown into the storm of steel and mechanized death. Seemingly, little has changed in the years since. Indifference still plagues humanity. Genocide has not abated; if anything, it marches on unhindered. Complicated and deeply entrenched historical and political conflicts also make prevention of genocide in contemporary times exceedingly difficult. But it doesn’t have to be this way.

We must engage our moral imagination. With the passing of seventy years since the end of the Holocaust, we can easily forget the struggle. Testimonies of soccer survival can inspire us to resist apathy. With history as a guide, we can stand collectively in the breech between goodness and the twin evils of authoritarianism, which is obvious, and passive indifference, which is more obscure. In occupied France, for example, we know that about 10 percent of French citizens aided the resistance while another 10 percent actively collaborated with the Nazis in tracking down and deporting their fellow citizens. The silent 80 percent did neither, choosing inaction and, ultimately, deciding to self-protect. This pattern repeated in nearly every country touched by the Holocaust. It is a choice between action and inaction. In the popular parlance, we can become “upstanders.” Moving from a place of uncertainty and unconcern begins with remembrance.

The last twenty years have seen a proliferation of Holocaust memorials across Germany. Shame and denial are being replaced by an honest national self-reflection on the past. The most famous of these memorials sits in the shadow of the Brandenburg Gate, not far from the Reichschancellery building where the final vestiges of the Nazi empire collapsed so many years ago. This Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe is an impressive field of over 2,700 monolithic concrete blocks that to some resemble rectangular burial vaults. These stelae of various sizes are spread across nearly five acres of undulating ground in the very heart of Berlin.

As monumental as places like these are, a different type of memorial has also sprung up across Europe, one that is more intimate and personal. Blocks on a much smaller scale fill sidewalk spots in front of the last known residence of Jews deported to their deaths between 1933 and 1945. Known as stolpersteine (stumbling stones), these four-inch cubes of granite are covered with a brass plate that is stamped with details of the individual lost to Nazi hate: the name, birth date, and known fate of the person or group, and the dates of deportation and death, if they are known. The creation of German artist Gunter Demnig, more than fifty thousand stolpersteine have currently been laid in eighteen different countries, with the first stone placed in a Cologne sidewalk in 1992. Each stone is a commemoration of a single life. Passersby are often caught off guard when they encounter them on the streets, elevated ever so slightly above street level. Jewish footballers have found a place in these memorials. Prewar German player Julius Hirsch was honored with a stone on November 9, 2006, in Karlsruhe, Germany, on the very same day Kristallnacht is remembered. Stolpersteine were laid for Sally Meyer and Julie Lichtmann in Gelsenkirchen, the victims who lost their textile business to Aryanization and the opportunism of Schalke 04 star Fritz Szepan. Famous Dutch football figures were honored in 2009—the final homes of radio announcer Han Hollander (on Amstelkade 118 in Amsterdam) and goalkeeper Juda de Vries serve as de facto sites of tribute in a country where collaboration and indifference reigned.

Short is the time for hearing those who bear witness. For those still alive as witnesses to the Holocaust, the opportunity to experience justice has largely passed. We are now left with remembering. There is no reckoning with the enormity of the events, but we can account for the individual stories because in them we find meaning. Some have rejected this notion of finding meaning in the Holocaust. This is patently false as one does not have to find meaning in the suffering. That would be offensive to the memory of those who suffered and perished. But we can find meaning in these extraordinary tales of resilience and resistance. And in ordinary stories of soccer. We are at the end of the survivor era. The witnesses are fading away with each passing day. Almost all of those who left behind their testimonies are now gone. The accounts found here offer a legacy of remembrance. Football takes on significance beyond the pitch. Today the modern game is a spectacle; in the Nazi era it actually meant life and death.

It is most fitting to give the final word on soccer under the swastika to a survivor of the Holocaust. With so many voices silenced forever, and with the haunting realization that the last living witnesses to the Holocaust will soon fade into history, we celebrate the strength of those who lived to see the end of the deadliest war in human history. And we rejoice in the beauty of a game that inspired people standing at death’s door to play without thought of what tomorrow would bring.

A onetime goalkeeper in the concentration camps, Czech Jewish novelist Arnošt Lustig survived a death march back into Germany after enduring the horrors of Terezín and Auschwitz as a young man. After his liberation from Buchenwald, Lustig went on to become a professor of literature at American University in Washington, DC, where he was well known for joining in pickup soccer games with international students well into his seventies. One of the foremost novelists of the Holocaust, Lustig elevates this child’s game in his writing to a place of reverence and inspiration as it was played in Nazi Europe. Just two years before his death, the writer reflected on the power of the game to serve as a symbol of defiance and a pathway to preserving humanity:

Quoted in Rees, Auschwitz, 266.

Bergen, War and Genocide, 229.

Testimony from the permanent exhibition of the Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora Memorials Foundation (2010).

Eric Lichtblau, The Nazis Next Door: How America Became a Safe Haven for Hitler’s Men (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014), 4.

Ibid., 8, n. 8.

Quoted in ibid., 4–5.

Bergen, War and Genocide, 240.

Angelika Königseder and Juliane Wetzel, Waiting for Hope: Jewish Displaced Persons in Post–World War II Germany, trans. John A. Broadwin (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2001), 127.

Philipp Grammes, “Sports in the DP Camps, 1945–1948,” in Emancipation through Muscles: Jews and Sports in Europe, ed. Michael Brenner and Gideon Reuveni (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006), 190.

10.

Ibid., 191.

11.

Königseder and Wetzel, Waiting for Hope, 168.

12.

See Arthur Heinrich, A Jew in German Football: The Three Lives of Martin Abraham Stock (Göttingen: Verlag Die Werkstaat, 2014).

13.

Landsberger Lager-Caitung, no. 41, July 26, 1946, 7.

14.

Quoted in Martin Gilbert, The Boys: Triumph over Adversity (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1996), 380.

15.

Grammes, “Sports in the DP Camps,” 202.

16.

Hesse-Lichtenberger, Tor!, 105.

Ibid.

Ibid., 107.

Ibid., 115.

Ibid., 125.

Goldblatt, Ball Is Round, 354.

22.

Kuper, Ajax, the Dutch, the War, 185.

23.

Martin Gilbert, The Holocaust: A History of the Jews of Europe during the Second World War (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1985), 828.

24.

De Wijze, Only My Life, 67.

25.

Originally from the essay “The Town Beyond the Wall,” quoted in Robert McAfee Brown, Elie Wiesel: Messenger to All Humanity (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1983), 71–72.

26.

Steiner, Fotbal Pod Zlutou Hvezdou, 89–90.

After the Catastrophe

Rebirth of German Footballin the Occupied Zones

Reconciling the Past

Remembrance of Survival and Resistance

The Legacy of Indifference

Rebirth of German Football
in the Occupied Zones