The genesis of this book is the culmination of two kinds of inspiration. The first comes from playing and watching soccer from my earliest days through college. The other inspiration is the countless survivors of the catastrophe of the Holocaust, many of whom I met only recently as they have moved into their twilight years. Having the privilege to hear their stories moved me to write this book.
I am indebted to many people who contributed their expertise, time, and passions. Among the dozens of Holocaust scholars and teachers, survivors and perpetrators, and other witnesses I have encountered, a smaller number stand out for deserved praise. Each has offered guidance and primary source material, often going well beyond initial requests. Deserved thanks to Guido Abuys and Bas Kortholt at the Camp Westerbork Memorial Centre (the Netherlands); Marjan Dejevij at the Verzetsmuseum—the Dutch Resistance Museum; Christian Dürr, archivist and curator at KZ-Gedenkstätte Mauthausen Memorial Museum (Austria); and Markwart Herzog, master networker to German colleagues and sport historian from Schwaben Akademie Irsee (Germany). Many thanks to Albert Knoll at KZ-Gedenkstätte Dachau Memorial Museum; Aleksandra Kobielec, archivist at the Muzeum Gross-Rosen (Rogoźnica, Poland); Sven Löhr from the KZ-Buchenwald Memorial Foundation (Germany); Reimer Möller, archivist from the KZ-Gedenkstätte Neuengamme (Germany); and Eva Němcová, who worked diligently to provide rare photos, artwork, and testimonies from Ghetto Theresienstadt. She also serves as editor of the documentation department along with Martina Šiknerová at Památník Terezín (Czech Republic).
Thanks to Lorenz Peiffer, consultant to the Deutscher Fußball-Bund and sport science professor at Leibniz Universität in Hannover (Germany); Piotr Setkiewicz, director of the Centre for Research and archivist Adam Cyra from the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum (Poland); Klaus Tätzler from the KZ-Gedenkstätte Bergen-Belsen Memorial Museum (Germany); Olliver Tietz, director of the Deutscher Fußball-Bund (DFB) Kulturstiftung (Culture Foundation); Jim Tobias from the Nuremberg Institute for Holocaust Studies (Germany); and Ken Waltzer, emeritus director of the Jewish Studies Program at Michigan State University.
A special note of gratitude to the gifted writer and journalist Simon Kuper. Our shared interest in soccer at the intersection of history brought him to write the foreword for this book. His immediate and enthusiastic acceptance of my request is forever appreciated.
Deepest thanks to longtime friend, newsman, and surprisingly passionate newcomer to the game Les Linebarger for his invaluable comments on earlier drafts of the manuscript, offered always with a keen eye for audience and storytelling. My fascination with this oft-depressing topic was first nurtured by close friend and colleague JonDavid Wyneken. His reviews and historical insights added much needed perspective to a psychologist coming into this field as a one-time novice. Oded Breda at the Beit Terezín, the Theresienstadt Martyrs’ Remembrance Association (Israel), helped revise the chapter on Terezín, offering important corrections and firsthand knowledge of the victim experience as the nephew of a prisoner-player murdered at Auschwitz. Faculty colleague and German-born artist Peter Pohle translated key German-language sources on players beholden to the Third Reich. Our fascinating conversations of his youth growing up behind the Berlin Wall helped deepen my understanding of life in postwar Germany. Another colleague at John Brown University, Simone Schroder, offered her eager and indispensable assistance as an acquisition librarian. My editor, Christen Karniski, also guided this first-time project to completion with patience and care.
I reviewed hundreds of pages of testimony, perpetrator reports, and original documents in the search for these hidden stories of soccer during the Holocaust. One fellowship laid the groundwork for these stories. The summer 2009 Silberman Seminar for University Faculty at the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, led by Peter Hayes of Northwestern University, opened up this field to me in a dynamic and powerful way. Professor Hayes will always hold a special place in my memory as a model scholar and dynamic teacher. Much of this book was influenced directly by my time spent among the vast archival resources of the USHMM and Yad Vashem (Israel).
I am indebted to my university and various Holocaust foundations for the travel support that took me to almost all of the European museums, memorials, and camps discussed in this book. There is something profoundly humbling about standing on the sites where so many suffered, to walk about in remote mass killing sites in eastern Poland that are now overgrown and largely forgotten.
My sincere gratitude to the gifted translators who so ably converted rare and recently uncovered testimonies, many of which were likely translated into English for the first time. These translators include Roswitha Cesarotto (German), Kasina Entzi (Dutch), Lydia and Naomi Koebele (Czech), and Kasia Vincent (Polish). Thanks to my students, who continue to inspire my teaching on the Holocaust. One such student, research assistant Courtney Padgett, was of great help as well.
To my children, Grace and Eli, I am grateful for your curiosity about this topic and for tolerating my fanatical absorption in completing this work. Footballers themselves, they endured my indoctrination in the beautiful game years ago. You are my travel buddies and my hope that the next generation will take seriously the call to “Never Forget.” My deepest thanks and admiration to my wife, Stefanie, who unfailingly encourages my passions, tolerates long absences, and makes time and space for me to wander the world, all while keeping our home front running along flawlessly as I retreated into long-passed decades.
More than seventy years after the end of the Second World War, the importance of this subject was made strikingly evident to me one beautiful summer day in the nation’s capital. On Wednesday, June 10, 2009, I made my way past the staff security checkpoint for entry into the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. As a faculty fellow participating in a two-week seminar, I had been enjoying stimulating readings and engaging discussions when it came time to break for lunch. But the peace and calm of the solemn museum were shattered in an instant with the sound of gunshots. An elderly man had approached the front entrance when museum guard Stephen Tyrone Johns pulled the heavy glass door open for him. Officer Johns also helped us many mornings, offering a friendly greeting as we arrived for our work. On this tragic day, this kindness extended to a stranger was returned with violence when the visitor pulled a gun from beneath his coat and shot Officer Johns. In our basement meeting room, we hunkered down under tables in terror. The shooter, an avowed anti-Semite, white supremacist, and Holocaust denier, murdered Officer Johns in a rage-filled spasm of hate. Intending to strike fear into visitors, the gunman instead inspired defiance as visiting crowds grew significantly when the museum reopened two days later.
A note on the text: I use the terms football and soccer interchangeably here. Soccer is actually British in origin, a nineteenth-century slang term for “association football,” shortened like rugger from rugby football. The terms Holocaust and Shoah (Hebrew for “calamity” or “catastrophe”) are also equivalent, offering the reader a reminder of the distinctly (but not exclusively) Jewish focus of the Nazi genocide.