Introduction

A tattered postcard, a cherished family heirloom, held the faded signatures of all of the winning members of the Karlsruhe FV soccer team, which won the 1912 regional championship of southern Germany. Five figures emerge from the front photo, looking dapper in their overcoats, full suits, and fedoras. One man carries a cane, ornamental no doubt, as he was an athlete in the prime of his life when the photo was taken. In the center of the photo is Gottfried Fuchs, the tallest of the five men, scorer of two goals in the 1912 final. To his left is his best friend and fellow striker for Karlsruhe, Julius Hirsch, who netted four goals in the team’s 7–2 victory.

The postcard, sent by Julius Hirsch, had returned from oblivion, hidden away in some attic or closet until nearly a century later, when descendants of Hirsch found the treasure. At the time, the love-struck Hirsch took extra care to address the postcard to his girlfriend’s employer and not to her parents’ home.

Both Gottfried Fuchs and Julius Hirsch were assimilated Jews, not unlike many other Germans who discovered their passion for the game of soccer in the waning days of imperial Germany. Fuchs became a national footballing hero who catapulted into the limelight when he scored ten goals in a 16–0 win against Russia in the 1912 Stockholm Olympics. Julius Hirsch debuted with the German national team at age eighteen in a match against Hungary and on the eve of World War I. Hirsch found his own fame as the first German player to score four goals in a single match, a feat he accomplished earlier in a thrilling 5–5 draw against the Netherlands. Fuchs and Hirsch were the first Jewish players ever to represent the German national team. There has not been a Jewish player since.

But Julius Hirsch suffered tremendously under the anti-Jewish measures of the new Nazi dictatorship in the 1930s, and he gradually slipped into an irredeemable decline. Fuchs would be exiled in the Nazi years, escaping eventually to Canada in 1937. Hirsch would not be so fortunate. A suicide attempt in late 1938 led to an extended disappearance from his family and two stints at a psychiatric hospital in France, totaling a year. The Nazis finally caught up with Julius Hirsch. Many years later, his daughter, Esther, remembered vividly the day of his deportation:

The final days of Julius Hirsch were hastened with his expulsion to the Nazi empire’s colonial east, to the extermination camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau. On the way, Hirsch managed to send Esther a short postcard in honor of her fifteenth birthday. Postmarked March 3, 1943, the last sign of life from Julius Hirsch must have been mailed while he was in transit. The inscription on the front of the note was brief and simple: “My dears, I’m fine and arrived safely. I’ll come to Upper Silesia, still in Germany. Greetings and kisses, Juller.”

Though no record exists of his arrival, Julius Hirsch likely met his end in Birkenau at the hands of his fellow German citizens, some of whom were undoubtedly the children of adoring fans from just a generation earlier. By the time Esther read her birthday card, “Juller” had been dead for about four days. Decades later, the German footballing community had entirely forgotten about Jewish players like Fuchs and Hirsch until a unique sort of postwar reckoning brought on by the awarding of the 2006 World Cup to Germany raised uncomfortable questions.

Early in twentieth-century Europe, soccer became a mass sensation and an instrument of international politics. The story of Soccer under the Swastika begins with the birth of the game in Germany and the emergence of powerhouse domestic teams in the southern and industrial western regions of the country. In the 1930s, soccer epitomized the struggles between political forces that swept the world into another world war. With the ascension of the Nazis to power in Germany, the Deutscher Fußball-Bund (DFB), the national football association, became forever tarnished by its association with fascism. Germany, the cultured nation of Goethe and Bach located in the heart of Europe, plunged into a fascist-led madness, the effects of which reverberate to this day.

The 1936 Berlin Olympic Games, the “birth” of the politicized spectacle of international sport, became the single greatest sporting feat of the Nazi regime, upon which Hitler lavished treasure and the attention of his propagandists. As the world turned a blind eye to Nazi persecution, the dictatorship secured badly needed prestige and legitimacy. Propaganda and sport came together like never before.

When the swastika flew alongside the Olympic flag, representing the best and brightest of amateur sport, Mussolini’s fascists embraced football passionately, and the Italians’ reward was the reflected glory of two World Cup championships won two years on either side of the “Nazi Olympics.” In the dishonest decade of the 1930s, Europe’s dictators made their “discovery” of propaganda and Germany shocked the world. In 1937, the BreslauElf, the best team Germany had ever fielded to date in international competition, thrashed Denmark 8–0 and went undefeated in eleven matches, winning ten of them. Strengthened with players from the dominant Schalke 04 football club, the BreslauElf would not sustain their brilliance and quickly faded in the politics of Nazi expansion. For the better part of the decade, Austria’s brilliant Wunderteam ruled the game, led by probably the best player of his generation, Matthias Sindelar, the genius footballer celebrated by Vienna’s fabled coffeehouse society.

Soccer remained an irresistible force when the Nazis turned to conquering Europe. In Germany, the game was curiously played in the Konzentrationslager, the KZ—the German concentration camps established all over the Third Reich from the very founding of the dictatorship. In one bizarre turn of fate, players who were once loyal teammates on club side Hamburg SV found themselves on either side of the concentration camp fence, one as an SS guard and the other a camp inmate, facing each other down as bitter adversaries.

When war came to Poland, labor camps and killing centers were quickly established and soccer emerged in the killing fields of the colonial east. Soccer was played on the expansive grounds of infamous sites such as Auschwitz-Birkenau and the remote labor camp called Gross-Rosen. One makeshift soccer pitch at Birkenau, used by privileged prisoners granted a reprieve from death, was in sight of the loading ramp where thousands made their final walk to the gas chambers. But of all the matches that were played at the extermination center at Auschwitz, the most unfathomable featured a team of SS guards versus the Sonderkommando—the “special work detail” of prisoners who manned the gas chambers and crematory ovens—in the courtyard of Auschwitz crematorium II. The worst of the Nazi labor camps featured soccer as well: the Mauthausen camp situated at the foot of the Alps, in the idyllic countryside of Austria. Prisoners avoided deadly work in Mauthausen’s quarries through the privilege of sport. The seemingly irresistible urge to play brought the game to many other labor camps across Germany and the eastern provinces.

The prize jewel in the Nazi empire, Ukraine, shared in this mania for football. Initially, Ukraine responded fiercely to Nazi invasion, but their humiliation was made complete on the battlefield by the overwhelming force of blitzkrieg warfare, and resistance took another form. Football in the capital of occupied Ukraine, Kiev, was led by a charismatic and brave goalkeeper named Nikolai Trusevich, who brought back a sense of dignity and a bright glimmer of self-determination in an otherwise brutal occupation.

Fabled football matches from this time of war and occupation continue to captivate. Contests pitting the occupied against the invaders, in which Ukraine’s best footballers—erstwhile soldiers in the war against fascism and men who also featured for the excellent prewar Dynamo Kiev side—were matched up against a select side from the Nazi Luftwaffe. A fascinating blend of legend and valiant resistance came together in a final contest now known to history as the “Match of Death.” The brutal aftermath of these matches involved imprisonment, torture, and for some, the ultimate penalty, death. Legend long held that all of the Ukrainian players were murdered at the infamous mass killing site at Babi Yar, a deep ravine located just outside of Kiev where tens of thousands were murdered. But the truth of the destinies of these heroic players has proven even more fascinating.

In Western Europe, nowhere was interest in football more fanatical and enthusiastic than in occupied Holland. While Poland and Ukraine suffered tremendously, the Netherlands relaxed under a largely peaceful occupation. Life often went on as if nothing had changed. Domestic football boomed in Holland and even in the transit camp at Westerbork, the oft-temporary point of departure for thousands sent to the East. While the deportations rolled on, so did the ball.

Soccer under the Swastika tells of the most unique ghetto-camp in all of Europe, where Jewish culture thrived and sport took on a prominent place in the daily lives of the imprisoned. One of the first nations to be subjugated under Nazi rule was Czechoslovakia, and in this country of deep German heritage and rich Slavic history, the passion for soccer drew thousands to watch league football in a ghetto called Theresienstadt (Terezín in Czech). Soccer in the ghetto was an inspiration to player and spectator alike. Prisoners dubbed their top league Liga Terezín, and thousands played wherever they found open spaces and courtyards behind ghetto walls. Residents of Terezín took to soccer with such fervor that their Nazi masters exploited the game by featuring it prominently in a notorious propaganda film created to hide Nazi crimes from the world. That Terezín was the antechamber to Auschwitz made such deceptions all the more diabolical.

The Second World War was the most lethal and costly war in human history, yet untold millions would die not only in battle but also as the result of murderous political policies of totalitarianism writ large. The rapid victories of the Wehrmacht, the German army, over all of its neighbors were swiftly followed by the arrest, deportation, and imprisonment of hundreds of thousands of additional prisoners. War and conquest delivered millions into German hands—Poles, Jews, their fellow Western Europeans.

In Eastern Europe, the Nazis set into practice their theories of racial superiority, collecting civilians and prisoners of war en masse for shipment to labor and detention camps. Laborers, even those at Auschwitz, had a chance to survive. Nazi victims would succumb to a death that was not possible without the war. The years between 1941 and 1942 were particularly lethal to those captive to the Third Reich, where mobile killing squads completed their murderous work by bullet and carbon monoxide gas, administered by the diesel engines of mobile vans brought to execution sites. Jews from every nation in Eastern Europe were shot on the edges of ditches and open pits.

The suffering and killing in the Nazi east was personal. Soldiers and police auxiliaries looked down the barrel of a gun at their victims, often while others held the person in place for the killing shot. Guards manned watchtowers as those below endured disease and starved to death. People were rounded up, placed on trains, and delivered to the gas chambers, often in a rush of angry commands and terror. Individuals were stripped of their belongings, separated from their loved ones, and sent to their wicked fates. This mass murder by bullets foreshadowed the industrial killing of the gas chambers.

Before it all ended, more than 95 percent of the Jews who would be killed between 1939 and 1945 lived outside Germany’s prewar borders.^[3] Hitler’s war of territorial expansion, to create lebensraum (living space) for empire-minded Germany, was paired with a crusade of racial purification that consumed the European continent. War and genocide eventually brought about the destruction of a people and a civilization that had lived in and flourished across Europe for centuries.

The cataclysm of war left a continent in ruins, and individuals were forced to reassemble their lives as best they could. The final stories of Soccer under the Swastika follow what happened after the liberation of the camps and the collapse of the Nazi empire. The surviving remnant of Jews took up residence in one of the few places left accepting of their presence—refugee camps in Germany, on land where survivors said, “Jewish blood stained the soil.” Called “displaced persons” camps, they were home to enthusiastic soccer players and fans who refused to bow to death and the supposed impossibility of rebuilding one’s life. In these places of rebirth, we also find reconciliation and remembrance. Less than a decade after the war ended, Germany rose from the ashes and an entire generation of Germans would point to Das Wunder von Bern (at the 1954 World Cup) as the moment when the nation would reclaim a small measure of dignity and a step out of the shadow of a very dark but recent past.

This introduction closes with a look at three extraordinary lives, each representing a key element of football during the Holocaust: the perpetrator, the occupied, and the Jewish victim. The first of the three biographical sketches examines the life of Schalke 04 midfielder Fritz Szepan.

Born the son of Polish immigrants in the industrial Ruhr region of western Germany, Szepan was a gifted footballer from his earliest days. Slow of foot but possessing an elegant, technically gifted style and intelligence, the commanding center-half captained both his Schalke 04 club team and the German national team in the 1934 and 1938 World Cup tournaments. Schalke 04 dominated domestic football during the Nazi era, winning six national championships by playing a one-touch style dubbed the Schalker Kreisel (“the spinning top”) that mesmerized opponents. The hardworking coal miners of the Ruhr adored Schalke. In turn, the Hitler dictatorship latched onto the successes of clubs like Schalke 04 as shining examples of the new Germany.

While all of Germany’s national team players were honorary members of the NSDAP (Nazi Party), Fritz Szepan joined voluntarily in May 1937, on the same day as his brother-in-law and Schalke 04 teammate, striker Ernst Kuzorra. Szepan later benefited from the Nazis’ criminal policy of “Aryanization” when he bought an undervalued textile business forcibly removed from its Jewish owners. And in the lead up to the sham elections held in neighboring Austria in spring 1938, Szepan found himself entwined with aggressive Nazi propaganda seeking to unite the two German-speaking nations. Though it is unlikely he wrote these words himself, this footballing hero of proletariat miners of Gelsenkirchen, his home city, endorsed the annexation of Austria into Hitler’s greater Reich by declaring, “The enthusiasm of the football fans in the stadiums of the Third Reich are a testimony of the health and strength of our race. An eternal thanks to the leader of all Germans who secured the future in the arena of sports and games. An enthusiastic ‘yes’ to our Führer Adolf Hitler!”^[4] The Jewish owners of the business Fritz Szepan bought were later deported to the ghetto in Riga, Latvia. Stripped of their livelihood, Sally Meyer and Julie Lichtmann were soon thereafter likely murdered by an Einsatzgruppen unit, one of the mobile death squads that roamed throughout Eastern Europe in the aftermath of the swift and decisive German military victories. Footballers like Fritz Szepan, who early on drew the favor of the Nazi Party, generally thrived in Germany until the fortunes of war brought the nation to ruin.

Other footballers found themselves caught in seemingly impossible circumstances when war engulfed Europe. Poland’s most controversial player, Ernst Willimowski, a striker who once scored four goals in a 6–5 loss to Brazil in the 1938 World Cup, fled Nazi occupation of his country quickly. Hailing from Upper Silesia in southern Poland, Willimowski claimed German citizenship, going on to wear the white shirt of the German national side, then adorned with the swastika.

Then a pariah to the country for whom he scored 112 goals in 86 club matches, Willimowski opportunistically seized the chance to resume his career and, by joining a police unit, also avoided the military draft. While Poles and Jews were dying by the tens of thousands, the red-haired Willimowski was scoring goals for his club side 1860 Munich, including the first goal in the 1942 Tschammer-Pokal, the newly created German cup. He also scored twice on his debut for the German national team in 1941, going on to tally thirteen goals in only eight matches. But the prolific Willimowski was more than a rank opportunist. When his mother was deported to Auschwitz in 1944 for consorting with a Russian Jew, he used his connections to free her.

Such ambiguities reveal the fluid nature of national identity in these times. The supremely gifted striker was a living contradiction; Willimowski identified as an ethnic German but rejected National Socialism. Yet he was still despised in Poland. Willimowski survived the war but would never return home, living out his days in Germany, his adopted country, which would one day forget that he even played for the national side. German identity saved the life of Ernst Willimowski. But Jews in Nazi Germany and the rest of Europe had to be even more resourceful to survive the coming onslaught. One Dutch Jewish footballer proved to be particularly resilient and extraordinarily lucky.

The door on the cattle car carrying Meijer Stad and his fellow salt miners slid open, and bright sunshine poured into the dark carriage that had carried the men two hours away from their work camp. Beautiful countryside with rolling pasturelands unfolded before the men had their eyes adjusted to the light. The prisoners expected to be unloaded at their next and latest destination, Buchenwald concentration camp, in southeastern Germany. Instead, the peaceful scene was shattered by machine gun fire. Meijer Stad jumped from the train in panicked terror, feeling a burning pain before blacking out.^[5]

The bodies of the executed were taken to Buchenwald for incineration, but nurses charged with the disposal of the dead were shocked to find Stad still alive. He had taken ten bullets in the arms, legs, and torso. One bullet had glanced off of his head. Swapping his wounded body for a corpse from the camp, a French prisoner, trained as a doctor, removed the bullets with a penknife and nurses treated his wounds with leftover rags.^[6]

The road that led the Dutch Resistance figure to this moment was a long and winding one. Meijer Stad grew up in the Jewish Quarter of Rotterdam. In his youth, he learned that he was a decent footballer but an even more exceptional runner. He made his debut for top-division soccer club Xerxes in The Hague shortly after the German invasion in 1940. At the same time, Stad had joined the Celebes track club, which recruited heavily from members of the Dutch Resistance.^[7] Refusing to wear the yellow star, Meijer Stad also took the name of his Christian stepfather, Bouwens, to evade capture as a Jew. In 1942, Stad went on to become the Dutch 3,000-meter champion, running against largely German competitors in Amsterdam’s Olympic Stadium. In the resistance, Meijer Stad smuggled contraband, hid refugees (including, by his telling, the grandnephews of Albert Einstein), helped kill Dutch collaborators, and, on one occasion, with a friend drowned a pair of drunken German soldiers in a canal.

“Bouwens” laid low for four years until the spring of 1944, when he was denounced by a jilted lover. Interrogated and beaten, Meijer Stad was shipped off to the Vught internment camp, where he again used sport to stay alive, joining a camp soccer team there. Before liberation day, Stad passed through the camps at Westerbork, Bergen-Belsen, and eventually Buchenwald, where he was finally freed. Meijer Stad’s astonishing story of survival includes one more intriguing footnote. After the war, Stad became a successful advertising man in Holland. At a conference in 1974, Stad met up with an Argentine wine dealer looking to place a highly gifted youth player with a Dutch club. This was the era of Total Football, and the world adored the way the Dutch played the game. Stad called upon his wide-ranging connections with the best football clubs in the Netherlands. But FC Dan Haag, Sparta, Feyenoord, and even Ajax all turned him down cold. It was the mistake of a lifetime. The young Argentine phenom was Diego Maradona.^[8]

For these three prominent and talented footballers, survival links their stories. Yet one might ask, why tell the story of soccer during the Holocaust? Admittedly, the study of this history is unyieldingly grim. The Holocaust was genocide on a scale never seen before—modern technology and bureaucratic efficiency driven by primitive impulses. It deserves our attention not as a remote or distant reality but as a means for understanding ourselves. For it was ordinary people who were situated at the center of this catastrophe. They are not an unknowable “other” removed by seventy years of time. Tragically, genocide continues to haunt the human story.

Soccer in the Nazi era reflected shared joys and ancient hatreds. Yet stories such as these rarely find their way into most historical accounts of the time. They are often deemed inconsequential. For almost every concentration camp in the Nazi system, these hidden stories of soccer as a pleasure pursuit, a means of survival, and a method of resistance appear in victim testimonies. Sepia-toned photographs call out from this past, showing inmates in tattered clothes chasing a football around a dusty assembly square. Many of these records, diaries, and memoirs have been forgotten or obscured by time as they languished in archives. This work recalls the voices of the victims and those who knew them, offering authenticated scenes of the most harrowing sites of torture and murder the world has ever seen. Soccer under the Swastika casts a penetrating light over the darkness that is the Holocaust by celebrating the survivors who played the beautiful game.

The sheer numbers of victims lost to the Holocaust numb our sensibilities. Worse yet, the incomprehensibility of these losses blunts our sense of the individuality of each victim.^[9] Amid the profound deprivation, suffering, and deaths of so many during the war, soccer shined as a humanitarian response to brutality. This work is a call to remember, especially, characters like Meijer Stad and Julius Hirsch, who would have faded into oblivion if not for the recent efforts of the German footballing community devoted to honoring Hirsch’s memory.

As modern-day world football struggles to combat racism and anti-Semitism in the terraces, the endurance of the human spirit embodied in the soccer players during this time offers insight for those committed to breaking down racial, ethnic, and religious barriers in the sport today. With the diminishing loss of firsthand memories of these events, time is of the essence in telling these stories of survival and resistance. This is the largely untold story of soccer in the most desperate of living situations, as Nazi genocide raged unrestrained.

Donn Risolo, Soccer Stories: Anecdotes, Oddities, Lore, and Amazing Feats (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2010), 89.

Werner Skretny, Julius Hirsch. Nationalspieler. Ermordet. Biografie eines jüdischen Fußballers (Göttingen: Verlag Die Werkstatt, 2012), 5. Translated into an abbreviated English book titled Gotti and Juller.

Doris Bergen, War and Genocide: A Concise History of the Holocaust (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2009), vii.

From the April 10, 1938, edition of the Völkischer Beobachter, translated from original cited in Frank Veröffentlicht Bajohr, “Fritz Szepan: Fußball-Idol und Nutznießer des NS-Regimes,” in Sportler im “Jahrhundert der Lager”: Profiteure, Widerständler und Opfer, ed. Diethelm Blecking and Lorenz Peiffer (Göttingen: Die Werkstatt, 2012), 110.

Simon Kuper, Ajax, the Dutch, the War: The Strange Tale of Soccer during Europe’s Darkest Hour (New York: Nation Books, 2012), 57.

Ibid., 64.

Ibid., 61.

Ibid., 65.

Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin (New York: Basic Books, 2010), xv.