“In the actual act of deception, among all the preparations, the horror in the voice, expression, gestures, amid the striking scenery, the belief in themselves overcomes them. It is this that speaks so miraculously and convincingly to the onlookers.”—Friedrich Nietzsche, German philosopher and Nazi inspiration[1]
The 1930s in Europe were a decade of deception. The dictators—Hitler, Mussolini, and Franco—and their “discovery” of propaganda would forever change their societies. Football was the leading spectator sport in this era, becoming a national obsession in many European countries still struggling to rise from the devastations of the global economic depression. Attendance at domestic and international matches exploded despite this time of economic austerity. Weekends were given to watching and playing the game, and the emerging influence of radio and motion pictures would bring matches featuring the national team into the homes and workplaces of fans all across Western Europe.
The decade witnessed the rise of the important international match, almost always played in the capitals of European football—London, Rome, Paris, and Berlin. In both democratic and totalitarian states, football entertained and moved politics. But football penetrated the daily lives of citizens especially in the fascist states. No nation would match the success of the Italian regime in exploiting football, which started at the domestic level and reached a pinnacle with the national side. Known as the Azzurri, the Italian national squad reached dizzying heights in the first of the newly initiated World Cup competitions of the 1930s. Olympic competitions also became increasingly important to spectator and government alike. When the athletes arrived in Berlin in the summer of 1936 for the Olympic competitions, Nazi Germany was ready to maximize the political benefits of hosting the games.
Football also served as a measuring stick: a nation’s place in the global pecking order could be enhanced by wins over the game’s traditional powers. A win against the English, the “masters of the game,” would secure prestige for a new government. In the years that immediately followed the rise of the dictators, football under fascism became indistinguishable from other affairs of state. Before war would overwhelm the continent yet again, the English and the Germans would meet on the football pitch one last time as neutrals and the politics of appeasement in May 1938 would come to dominate. Football on the eve of war became more than just a game.
The widespread use of propaganda at the start of the twentieth century by all of the major Western powers shaped the popular understanding of the time. Adolf Hitler studied the tactics used by Germany’s adversaries during the Great War. Learning most from British and American propaganda, he believed this new political advantage was a primary cause for Germany’s defeat. Especially emblematic of the propaganda employed by the Allies was the atrocity story, the alleged cruelty performed by enemy soldiers on innocent civilians or captured soldiers.[2] Hitler viewed World War I as a war of persuasion. As he sat in a German prison cell in 1925 for trying to overthrow the government, the failed artist wrote his philosophical autobiography, Mein Kampf, a cynical, hate-filled treatise on how to manipulate the masses. As one of the most bought, least read books in Germany, Hitler’s manifesto anticipated the primary role propaganda would later play in the Third Reich. In it, he boldly proclaims propaganda to be “a truly terrible weapon in the hands of an expert.”[3]
Soon, Hitler would prove himself to be just such an expert. The Nazi use of mass persuasion is cemented in the popular imagination as destructive, cynical, and outright evil. The perils of propaganda in the Nazi era—in gaining popular support in their drive for political power, by fostering support in establishing a dictatorial state, in providing the rationale and impetus for war, and in the creation of a climate of indifference to the persecution and mass murder of the Jews of Europe and other so-called undesirables—have remained with observers long after the Nazis passed from the world scene. The Nazi assumption of power in Germany in January 1933 and the political reality that followed became the fulfillment of Hitler’s blueprint.
Print media would not compete with the fiery rhetoric emanating from Nazi podiums across the country in the late 1920s. Nazi propagandists, carefully trained in specially designed schools of persuasion, canvassed the country, fomenting discontent among the populace. These rallies, carefully staged and choreographed, employed music and fiery rhetoric, building to a crescendo at the end of each rally.
Even before their takeover of power, the National Socialists learned how to repeat the simplest ideas, thousands of times, to spread their political message. Nazi messaging sought to enforce conformity, stress unity, and emphasize the value of the collective over the individual. One of the more famous propaganda messages of the day was the slogan “Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer” (“one people, one empire, one leader”). One of the most provocative sporting images from the Nazi period that illustrates this misperception are the thousands of spectators at the opening of the 1936 Berlin Olympics raising their arms in the Hitler salute.
Propaganda would also trumpet the economic improvements under the Nazis, which stood out in stark contrast to the economic pain, hyperinflation, and record unemployment of the Weimar Republic. Nazi propaganda was a progressively influential and dangerous weapon as the regime moved to stifle democratic freedoms and exercise control over perceived threats through the coercive and often violent actions of the police-state authority.
In the new Germany, the exercise of propaganda and terror were closely linked; the security apparatus loomed large over opponents as paramilitary thugs roughed up opponents at rallies and engaged in street battles with the paramilitary organizations of rival socialist and communist parties. Nazi propaganda was particularly notorious for employing cryptic euphemisms such as “protective custody” (the arrest of political prisoners), “police action” (e.g., the invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939), or “special treatment” (deportations and executions). Once the propaganda apparatus was firmly established, the Nazis turned their attention to sport. They had to look no further than to their new ally on the Italian Peninsula, Benito Mussolini, and his National Fascist Party for a highly effective model of how to impose ideology on the whole realm of society.
Inspired by Mussolini’s fascist movement in the early 1920s, a political and cultural force that also lent itself to the corruption of sport, the National Socialists moved quickly to consolidate their power and bring all elements of German cultural life under the control of the regime. Enemies were quickly purged from almost every independent media source, resulting in the “Aryanization” of newspapers, businesses, and other media outlets. This forced coordination, better known by the term Gleichschaltung, meant that all elements of German society would be brought “in line” with Nazi policy and ideology.
All levels of sport, from youth programs to the highest international competitions, fell under Reich control. Nowhere was this more evident than in the newly created Ministry of Propaganda and Public Enlightenment. Headed by Joseph Goebbels, the ministry, with 1,300 staff at his disposal, worked in harmony with party ideologues to set the agenda for the nation.[4] The public face of Nazi messaging, Goebbels was fiercely loyal to Adolf Hitler and realized his greatest successes in organizing the electoral campaigns of 1930 and 1932, including the pioneering “Hitler over Germany” technique, a barnstorming-style tour of Germany in an airplane, a striking innovation for the day. Though the propaganda minister himself had little personal interest in athletics, it did not take him long to realize that sport, especially the popular obsession of football, could be used to his advantage.
Among the many tools at his disposal, Propaganda Minister Goebbels used radio as the primary means for carrying official propaganda. Many of the most important sporting contests of the day were broadcast by radio: football, boxing, and the 1936 Olympic Games held in Berlin. News emanating from the “wireless” was often seamlessly blended with entertainment programming featuring well-known celebrities and singers. One memorable propaganda poster of the era read, “All Germany hears their Führer with the people’s receiver.”[5]
With radio poised to give the Nazi dictatorship access to nearly every living room in Germany, Aryan ideals of struggle, superiority, and supremacy would now be opportunistically extended to sport. A warrior mindset, instilled in Germany’s football program, had not yet produced results. The warrior sport most admired by Adolf Hitler and the Nazi elite was boxing, but it was football that had captured the public imagination. But football in the late Weimar years mirrored the malaise in the country at that time. Such an unrefined style was in stark contrast to the technical beauty of other continental players from Austria and Hungary, ascendant at the time. Football would have to wait.
Totalitarian propaganda found its greatest aesthetic power through the cinema, where the Nazi command could offer the most authentic-looking images and thereby most persuasively misrepresent lies as the truth.[6] The Nazis were particularly enthralled with the use of film as an aid to the complete restructuring of German society. Motion picture would later prove to be a visually stunning medium for capturing the athletic excellence of Olympic competitors as well. Goebbels mastered the burgeoning film industry in Germany, using motion pictures and newsreels to document party rallies, speeches, and other events.
The eager volunteers in Hitler’s cultural redesign were numerous artists, writers, filmmakers, and musicians who all benefited from the patronage of the regime. And no singular artist from this era was more well known than filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl. Hitler saw in Riefenstahl a gifted filmmaker who could capture his vision of German beauty and the projection of political and military power. Once she was promised full creative license and an unlimited budget, Leni Riefenstahl set out to produce a documentary film that would forever link her with National Socialism.
The 1935 film, titled Triumph des Willens (Triumph of the Will), captured vividly the proceedings of the 1934 Nazi Party rally at Nuremberg, the spiritual home of the Nazis and the grandest stage for the pageantry for which the dictatorship became infamous. The film remains a remarkable cinematic achievement, one of the most acclaimed documentary films ever created and an exemplar of classic nationalistic triumphalism. The design of the rally grounds, notable for an elevated stage and grandstands done in a monumental classical form, was envisioned by Hitler’s official architect, Dr. Albert Speer.
Scenes of Aryan beauty are woven throughout the film, embodied in handsome young men exercising vigorously and preparing to become soldiers for the German people, all under the watchful eye of Adolf Hitler, dressed in full military uniform.[7] Sport does not feature directly in the film, but early in the film we see training exercises meant to resemble gymnastics and track and field events. The most intriguing of these quasi-sporting events required a twenty-kilometer walk and the completion of a two-hundred-meter obstacle course, both attempted as these exemplars of Aryan strength and vitality carried a ten-kilogram military pack. Two other events featured in the film, the final events of a type of militaristic biathlon: recruits shooting from two positions—prone and standing—and the hurling of a batonlike club resembling a grenade already in use by the German military.
Triumph was a box office success, but of more immediate use was the propaganda tool provided to the National Socialists to promote Nazi policy domestically and on an increasingly unstable world stage in the years to come. In this new age of motion pictures, German audiences flocked to the theater, more often to be entertained than lectured. Because movie audiences were attuned to escapist entertainment, propaganda films often appeared too heavy-handed.[8] Consequently, films about sport and other cultural endeavors proved highly popular. The Nazis would seize the grandest sporting stage of all in these days, the Olympic Games, and Leni Reifenstahl was there to document it in her inimitable artistic style.
As forerunners to the fascists in Germany and Spain, the Italians “perfected authoritarian football.”[9] After seizing power in their “March on Rome” in October 1922, Mussolini and his Fascist Party moved rapidly to solidify their power, and sport rapidly became an affair of state. The athlete in fascist Italy was seen as a soldier-citizen safeguarding the physical health of the nation. The Italian fascists invested heavily in sporting infrastructure, bringing cohesion, purposeful direction, and a robustness to Italian sport.
The bravado and political successes of the fascist state carried over to Italian football. Fascism embodied a masculine identity, and the national game, better known by the Italian name, calcio, came to embody “virility, violence, combat, and struggle.” The government undertook a massive reorganization of Italian first division football, which led to state control of the national team, a realignment of domestic leagues, the creation of a transfer market, and the invention of Serie A, the highest Italian league, which continues to this day. The regime transformed Sunday-afternoon football matches into rituals of unity, passion, and national identity.[10] These modernizations signified the rebirth of Italy and signaled to the world that the fascists were a rising force in both political and athletic spheres. Amid this assertion of newfound power and influence, Italian football would host the world’s best footballers in the 1934 World Cup, only the second-ever international tournament devoted solely to football and the first requiring qualification.
Italy hosting the 1934 World Cup would be equal to the Berlin Olympics in showcasing fascism’s achievements and enhancing national unity behind football. The fascists attended to many details in organizing the tournament. Visiting fans, especially from the established and successful footballing nations of Holland, France, and Switzerland, were offered travel subsidies of 70 percent to come to Italy, and local travel was further subsidized. Publicity in the buildup to the tournament included eye-catching modernist posters and saturation marketing. Italian promotion and propaganda were so effective that FIFA president Jules Rimet wryly commented that during the tournament it felt like Mussolini himself was the president of FIFA.[11]
Italian team trainer Vittorio Pozzo came to football from track and field, and he soon became one of the most powerful figures in European football before World War II, favoring the direct English style of play. In his nearly thirty-year career managing the Azzurri, Pozzo dominated the Italian game as an authoritarian father figure and war hero who possessed a soldierly vision of his players. Practice sessions were like military training exercises, and Pozzo was notorious for using war cemeteries as reminders to his players of the sacrifice and obligations owed to their forefathers.
Benito Mussolini attended many of the Italian matches in the 1934 World Cup, and the passion for the home team was so intense on match day that the crowd could be easily mistaken for those attending a fascist rally. In an act of pure hubris, Mussolini had an additional trophy commissioned—the Coppa del Duce—whose dimensions dwarfed the FIFA trophy by six times. Not content with having home-field advantage, Mussolini also involved himself in the selection of referees for many of the key matches.
After beating Spain in the quarterfinals, Italy played pretournament favorite Austria in the semifinals. This would be the same Austrian team that was victorious against Italy just two years earlier in the 1932 Olympics and who were known for their stylish play and individual brilliance. On the day of the semifinal, on a rain-soaked pitch at the San Siro stadium in Milan, the Austrians not only had to contend with a sodden field, but they also were up against a young Swedish official named Ivan Eklind who had been personally chosen by Il Duce.
Neutrals suspected Eklind had been bribed, and it was later verified that he and Mussolini had dined together the night before the match to “talk tactics.” Many remember that during the match the referee intercepted a pass by an Austrian player and headed the ball back to the Italians. Despite such controversy, the Italians and Austrians battled to extra time scoreless, and the Italians went through on a goal by the recently naturalized Argentine Enrique Guaita, a goal many still hold to be illegitimate as the Swedish referee denied an obvious offside call.
Their confidence growing after the 1–0 victory over the Austrians, Italy moved on to the final, set for the Stadio Nazionale PNF in Rome. On June 10, 1934, the entire nation of Italy paused to watch the Azzurri take on a young and talented but inexperienced Czechoslovakian side. Astoundingly, Eklind was again chosen to officiate the final match. Italy adopted an aggressive style of play that largely went unpunished, and after the Czechs had taken a late lead on a goal in the seventy-first minute, the Italians pushed for the equalizer, which came ten minutes later, scored by Argentine-born Raimundo Orsi. At the end of ninety minutes, with the score level at 1–1, the Italians managed the winning goal just five minutes into extra time. It was scored by Angelo Schiavo on a cross by Guaita, and Mussolini rose from his seat to applaud his champions.
The first World Cup trophy in the country’s history was earned. The victory of the Azzurri in Rome solidified the popularity of Mussolini, and the national press exploited the victory by the host Italians. In an article titled “Soldati dello sport” (Soldiers of Sport), journalist Bruno Roghi reflected on the blend of sport and politics in the 1934 World Cup:
They are rare, the rarest matches in which you see the metamorphosis of the players, no longer little coloured boys who go about their work, with the ball at their feet, but little, gallant soldiers that fight for an idea that is greater than them but who work for the divine unknown, that is the genius of the soldier on the charge. They are the matches, in other words, where not one squad of eleven men but a race shows itself with its feelings and instincts, its anger and its ecstasy, its character and attitude. The game that the Italians won at the stadium was this type of match.[12]
Political tensions intensified in Europe as the Azzurri departed Italy to defend their World Cup title in France in 1938. The Italians fielded a nearly completely different side from their World Cup–winning team of four years earlier (only four players remained, with Giuseppe Meazza the best known) but with the same manager at the helm, Vittorio Pozzo. In their opening match against Norway, Pozzo’s side was met by an estimated ten thousand political exiles and antifascist demonstrators (many of whom had fled their country after Mussolini’s takeover) raining down a furious protest from the terraces. Police wielding batons restrained the protesters, but Pozzo met the abuse by ordering his players to raise their arms in the fascist salute, responding to his command, “Team, be ready, salute!” The players repeated the gesture, defiantly, as the abuse continued. Italy would go on to win the match 2–1 in extra time.
Italy defeated France and Brazil to make it to the finals, where a supremely confident Hungarian team was waiting for them after their 5–1 demolition of Sweden in the semifinal. Italy took a 3–1 lead into halftime, and Hungary never mounted a sustained comeback as Italy finished off the game as 4–2 winners. The win helped diminish lingering resentments of the alleged corruption that came with the Italians’ hosting of the 1934 tournament. The World Cup would not be played again for another sixteen years as World War II would break out just a few months after the final.
In the years before Europe plunged into a world war, international matches like these from the World Cup took on added significance. Football’s emergence as the national game in an ever-increasing number of European countries was reinforced by the growth of cross-border contacts, as domestic cups and competitions were supplemented by international fixtures and tournaments. As the Nazi regime looked outside of its borders for legitimization of its government and its football, Italy was an enticing and supremely successful model of how to seize political victory on the field of play.
World War I adversary England, the acknowledged “masters of the game” and the nation against which all other national sides measured themselves, offered Nazi Germany the sternest test of their development as a footballing nation. Rivals on the battlefield and now rivals on the football pitch, England and Germany’s friendly matches in the 1930s would become a type of proxy battle in a contest for international stature. Fixtures featuring these teams were matches of power, prestige, and influence. Footballers were seen as emissaries in the national kit, sporting diplomats of a sort. And any match between Great Britain and Germany or Italy was interpreted as an epic struggle between fascism and liberal democracy.
Britain saw an equal opportunity to challenge fascism in clear and certain terms. British footballers were perfect messengers of British cultural values, foremost among them the celebrated ideal of “fair play.” Prominent officials in the British footballing establishment also believed that football could be a mechanism for peace. Sir Stanley Rous, the FA secretary for twenty-seven years, starting before World War II and serving through to 1961, famously claimed that football gives the world a much-needed international language. In Great Britain, isolationism and pacifism were subtly underneath such claims that international matches would be influential in securing peace and friendship among adversarial nations.
To the Nazis, though, sport was just another expression of the greater struggle. In both politics and sporting competition, the regime strived to glorify martial values, hardness, and self-discipline. Loyalty was especially prized in athletes. The government sought to inspire people, especially the youth, to join more forcefully in the creation of a new Germany. Sport naturally worked as a unifying force and as a subtle form of indoctrination, and when teamwork, camaraderie, and physical fitness were all glorified, the regime achieved its aims. In essence, athletes served as soldiers of sport. It was in this politically charged climate that the British FA extended an invitation to the German national team for a friendly match to be played in London on December 4, 1935. The match would be only the second meeting between the nations.
In England there was public outrage when the match with Germany was announced. The government policy in Britain was of détente with Nazi Germany, yet the government was unaware of the scheduling of the match until the English FA announced it publicly. Resisting the calls to cancel the planned match, the British government sought to stabilize their diplomatic relationship with Germany. British leaders were stridently opposed to using sport as a political weapon, standing by a long tradition of the independence of athletics from the geopolitical sphere. But one could not ignore the political implications of the match.
The highly touted game was played at White Hart Lane in North London, the home ground of Tottenham Hotspur, a club that historically has enjoyed strong support from Jewish residents in the immediate neighborhood. Some ten thousand German supporters were expected on match day, and worries were great that these supporters would be met with violent clashes. Police and British government officials envisioned racist, chanting, swastika-festooned Brownshirts marching through the capital. After arriving in London for the match, German manager Otto Nerz worked hard to distance the team from the government, claiming boldly that the DFB (the German football association) was a private association having nothing to do with the Nazi government. Straining credibility, the managing secretary of the DFB further claimed that the team was there to compete in London as ambassadors of sport. The German footballers were under strict instructions to respond “Keine politische Fragen”[13] (no political questions) to reporters’ questions about the political undertones of the match.
When you watch newsreel accounts of the match and the preparations, there is a steady, cold rain falling on the thousands of German sightseers as they move their way across London. Shuttled by dozens of buses, the visiting German fans stopped traffic in the West End by sheer force of numbers, and even the steady rain could not dampen their enthusiasm. The number of police assigned to the match was tripled, and the German media devoted considerable attention to the game. In the end, fears of violence by the visiting fans proved unfounded. British authorities met the logistical challenge for transporting the German fans to the match. In an ironic turn, many of the German-speaking tour guides were provided by Jewish organizations in London. There is a good probability that many of these translators had earlier fled to London as the persecutions in Germany intensified after 1933.
With the most prominent members of the German Olympic planning delegation in attendance with Reichssportführer Tschammer und Osten, there could be no doubt about the political importance of the match to the German government. Arriving well ahead of kickoff, the crowd was orderly, and the home supporters were provided with a rousing rendition of the “Horst Wessel Lied,” the Nazi anthem typically sung at annual Nazi party celebrations. The swastika flew over the stadium that day, though at half mast in respect for Princess Victoria, who had died the day before. Yet the provocations expected by match organizers never materialized. Outside of White Hart Lane, protests by Jewish groups and trade unionists proved little distraction to those gathered for the game. That almost one-third of the supporters who usually gathered on Saturday afternoons to watch Tottenham Hotspur were Jewish also mattered little to the singing crowd. Captains for the match were Eddie Hapgood for England and Fritz Szepan for Germany. England wore their new blue kits while Germany donned white shirts.
The German players gave the Nazi salute during the playing of the national anthems, but no Nazi insignia appeared on the German match kits, as a concession to the hosts. The rain stopped in time for kickoff, but the pitch, unable to shed the water, became a muddy bog. Surviving film clips show the German goalkeeper, in baggy, knee-length shorts, punching a ball from his goalmouth, barely able to jump because of heavy, muddied boots. Conditions likely affected the Germans more as they played in a defensive, tentative style. In a match celebrated by both sides as the epitome of “fair play,” the visiting German squad was beaten soundly, losing 3–0 in front of fifty-four thousand spectators and a much larger audience listening at home on radio. Middlesborough’s George Camsell tallied a brace, while Arsenal player Cliff Bastin, the London club’s all-time top scorer until 1997, added the third goal. The “Übermensch” had been comprehensively beaten.
The mutual admiration of both teams served primarily to bolster the image of the Third Reich in Britain. At the celebration banquet that followed the game, Reichssportführer Tschammer und Osten spoke of the “blue sky of friendship between the two Nordic countries.”[14] The British government later came under harsh scrutiny for suggesting violence would attend the match. At the same dinner, a spokesman for an Anglo-German advocacy group, Lord Mount Temple, rebuffed fears that Nazified football represented anything other than a sporting affair when he claimed, “The Germans have always been our good friends. They always fought fair in the war, and I hope we did the same. If another war comes . . . well, I hope the partners will be changed.”[15]
What was expected to be a “grudge match” turned into a diplomatic coup as both teams exchanged gifts and pleasantries afterward. The trade unionists who had protested the match for months were roundly condemned for “bringing politics” into the sporting contest. Ultimately, though, the protestors would be proved right as the persecution was unrelenting back in Germany and the Nazi state moved closer and closer to initiating war in Europe. The British government’s hesitation to challenge the blatant manipulations of the Nazis, paired with passivity in the face of rising German military strength, seemingly emboldened the Germans in the diplomatic sphere to carry on through with the infamous 1938 Munich Accords, when Neville Chamberlain acquiesced to German demands for the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia. This match between England and Germany is often explained in historical accounts as yet another example of appeasement of the Nazi regime. Whatever propaganda victory was achieved in the match by the Nazi state was dwarfed by the 1936 Berlin Olympics, the quadrennial festival of sport and the first monumental example of political theater and ideological manipulation on the international sporting stage.
Events inside Germany in the lead-up to the 1936 Summer Games forced a response from the international community. Beginning in the spring of 1933, mere weeks after the Nazis had seized power, thousands of Jewish athletes were banned from competing and thrown out of their courts, pools, tracks, and training centers. Elite athletes, especially those training for the upcoming Olympic Games, were most devastated. As the Nazis consolidated their power, the Sturmabteilung (“storm troopers,” the SA), the foot soldiers of the Nazi Party, enforced boycotts of Jewish-owned shops and businesses while concentration camps were built at a rapid pace to hold political prisoners and gypsies. Jewish books were thrown onto raging pyres, and intermarriage was banned. These persecutions became widely known outside Germany, and the purges of Jewish athletes were in clear violation of Olympic rules. But calls for a boycott, a significant and definite threat to the Nazis, fell to the wayside under cynical Nazi promises of peace and harmony.
On the first day of August 1936, the Berlin games opened with the arrival of the Olympic flame, carried by a blond-haired runner who was carefully selected to embody the Aryan ideal. Hitler and his entourage, including Dr. Theodor Lewald, president of Germany’s Olympic Committee, and Carl Diem, secretary general of the Organizing Committee of the Berlin Olympic Games, accompanied by members of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), walked into the Olympic Stadium amid a chorus of three thousand Germans singing the national anthem, “Deutschland Über Alles,” immediately followed by the Nazi anthem, the “Horst Wessel Lied.” Over the course of the next seventeen days, the world watched with amazement the athletic excellence of international competition intertwined with political manipulation. The five Olympic rings representing global cooperation and peace were now brazenly linked with the Nazi swastika, the symbol of Aryan superiority and racial domination. After Adolf Hitler opened the games with a short speech, chants of “Sieg heil!” filled the Olympic Stadium, and only the triumphs of a few African American track and field athletes a few days later would sidetrack the Nazi propaganda machine.
The 1936 Summer Olympic Games served as a vehicle to promote an image of the new Germany as a strong, robust nation brimming with Aryan ideals, while simultaneously boosting the esteem of German citizens. The games also gave legitimacy to the new regime both at home and abroad. An impressive Olympic village was created as part of the twenty million Reichsmarks (eight million dollars U.S. in 1936) invested by the government. The Nazis, desperate for an infusion of money, expected that the huge influx of tourists for the games would bring much-needed foreign currency into Germany.
By the start of the games, the Nazi government spent over forty million Reichsmarks building a state-of-the-art, 325-acre Olympics sports complex located in the western suburbs of Berlin. The centerpiece of the Reichssportsfeld was the massive Olympic Stadium, built of natural stone and seating 110,000 spectators. The impressive neoclassical structure included a special seating platform built for Hitler and other top Nazi officials. For the Nazis, international sport would be another weapon in the German arsenal. The Olympic motto, Citius, Altius, Fortius (Faster, Higher, Stronger), was now easily mistaken for the mobilization of the political machinery of the Nazi state.
Visitors, both athlete and tourist alike, were impressed with the modern facilities and the organization of the games. The games were a tool of Nazi “soft power” and sport as a means to win the hearts of the German people and the thousands of international visitors in attendance over the nearly three-week competition. A significant innovation of these games was the live radio broadcasts of the competitions, which were a perfect fit for the expertise the Nazi propaganda apparatus now enjoyed, and estimates are that three hundred million global listeners were tuned in to the broadcasts from Berlin. Broadcast of the Berlin Olympics included start-to-finish coverage of the events, with human-interest feature stories on individual athletes and an hour-long highlights show every evening at eight o’clock. On street corners in Berlin and other major German cities, people could listen to the competitions on loudspeakers. So compelling were the events that traffic slowed to a dead stop in some areas of Berlin.
Germany drew the largest assembled cadre of print journalists and photographers to date, including 800 reporters and 125 photojournalists from 59 countries, all of whom were carefully vetted by the Propaganda Ministry, which sought to control all flow of information. These “guests” of the Third Reich were provided comfortable, even generous accommodations and amenities. Foreign correspondents were given tours of the “successes” of the regime, which touted the economic and cultural rise of the Reich. True to form, a significant number of journalists, especially from the more isolationist-minded United States, often filed stories minimizing or negating early reports of mistreatment and violence against the Jews.
During the summer festival of sport, the security apparatus of the regime receded to the background as the SS, the SA, and the Hitler Youth were kept from public view and overt displays of militarism and racism were kept to a minimum. In an effort to minimize attention to German’s rearmament program, the military barracks used by the Wehrmacht and located in the northern section of the Olympic village were relabeled and refurbished as athlete housing. Even though machine-gun training by Wehrmacht storm troopers rattled the Olympic grounds at times, few would link the rising militarism of the Nazi state to these games.
Organizers also toned down the racist messaging. At the Winter Games, hosted a few months before in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, visitors found signs affixed to toilets warning, “Dogs and Jews not allowed.” Such indignities were not tolerated, though, and these barriers were soon lifted after IOC chief Baillet-Latour objected: “It is Olympia and we are masters there.”[16] Quickly learning from this episode, and at the direction of Goebbels, anti-Semitic signage was removed from well-traveled roadways and gathering points across Germany ahead of the Summer Games. Two days into the competitions, the Propaganda Ministry’s press office also instructed German newspapers to tone down any racial language on reporting the results of the Berlin games, decreeing, “The racial point of view should not in any form be part of the discussion of athletic results. Special care should be exercised not to offend Negro athletes.”[17]
Intent on seizing on the ceremony and ritual already deeply ingrained in the Olympic Games, the Nazi state did what it did best: it conjured up a tradition seemingly originating in antiquity. An innovation of the “Nazi Games” that continues to this day is the torch relay, the emblematic start to every Olympic Games since 1936. This reimagined (some say reinvented) tradition was orchestrated by German Olympic official Carl Diem, who first proposed it to the Propaganda Ministry some weeks earlier as an advertisement for the new Germany across southeast and central Europe. Diem envisioned the torch relay as an ancient symbol of purity, a “reawakening of the mythic cult surrounding Prometheus whose theft of fire from the gods for the betterment of mortals had been honored in antiquity by torchlight parades.”[18] In a curious side note, Diem mistakenly selected as his avatar an image from a relief, purportedly representing torchbearers crossing the finish line in an ancient competition, in the Palazzo Colonna in Rome, an ornate thirteenth-century residence that once hosted the poet Dante. But instead of runners, the figures are in fact putti, erotic lovers symbolizing something rather different.
Originating in the northern Peloponnesus, the torch relay created by the Nazis passed through seven countries on its nearly 3,100-kilometer journey to Germany. Each of the countries featured on the relay route would one day be occupied by German forces. In fact, maps produced for the event audaciously show the Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia as part of the German nation. This disputed territory would feature prominently in the political sphere just two years after the close of the games as European powers negotiated to avoid another war.
With the world gathered in Berlin for the start of the games, the final two runners of the relay, tasked with bringing the torch through the streets of central Berlin, were carefully chosen by an aesthetics committee of the regime. The first was Siegfried Eifrig, a tall, blond, and blue-eyed sprinter who nearly qualified for the German Olympic squad and who took hold of the torch at the beginning of the Unter den Linden, Berlin’s main boulevard. Eifrig passed by the Brandenburg Gate and some three hundred thousand people on the torch route. At the stadium grounds, Eifrig lit two urns that burned until the end of the Summer Games. From the urns, the flame was then transferred to Fritz Schilgen, who carried the torch on its final leg into the stadium. As the embodiment of the Aryan ideal, Schilgen also possessed a beautiful and graceful running style. Ascending the final flight of stairs, he lit the Olympic cauldron situated high above the grandstands in the Olympiastadion.[19] Schilgen’s lighting of the cauldron is dramatically captured in the film Olympia. The games were officially underway. While American sprinter Jesse Owens would become the undisputed hero of these Olympics, the football being played was almost equal to the drama witnessed on the track. And once again, nationalist sentiment, fascist politics, and sport all came together in a passionate, sometimes violent, and decidedly unexpected way.
With the return of football to the 1936 Berlin Olympics, the fledgling Hitlerian regime was poised to take full advantage of the mass appeal of the game to the thousands of spectators who would fill stadia in and around Berlin in August. Omitted from the 1932 Olympics under suspicion that amateur status was a mere pretense for most of the elite European players of the day, the more likely reason for the eight-year hiatus in Olympic soccer is that the inaugural World Cup had been staged in 1930 and the world governing body, FIFA, wanted to assert the preeminence of the new tournament over all other competitions. Before the start of the Berlin games, sixteen teams agreed to participate, with Great Britain and host nation Germany seeded as joint favorites. But neither team would advance past the second round in a tournament marked by controversy, political manipulation, and fascist pageantry.
Britain had not competed in the Olympics since a devastating early round 3–1 loss to unheralded Norway in the Antwerp games of 1920. Thereafter, the British decided to sit out all of the Olympic football competitions until Berlin, upholding the virtue of “pure amateurism.” Germany, unheralded in European football in the decade immediately after the Great War, witnessed a surge of success under the guidance of manager Dr. Otto Nerz. Under the supervision of the Nazi movement, the reorganization of the club system in Germany included abolishment of worker- and church-run clubs and the removal of Jewish and gypsy athletes from all sports clubs. These purges would not officially take place until the close of the Berlin Olympics, a move that was meant to placate those calling for a boycott of the games earlier.
The fierce nationalistic passion of these Berlin games, embodied by fans and players alike, was on full display in the opening match between the United States and Italy. The Americans had sent a competitive team to Berlin, unlike in previous Olympics, and they were met by an Italian team primed for battle. Increasingly frustrated by the stalwart Americans in the first half of the match, the Italians resorted to increasingly violent tactics in the second, with numerous reports of punching, kicking, and shoving of their American opponents. In fact, the play was so rough that two Americans were taken from the field, unable to continue. One had been kicked in the stomach and the other suffered a torn ligament after a particularly vicious push out of bounds.
Toward the end of the match, the German referee ordered Italian striker Achille Piccini to leave the pitch after he punched an American player. Piccini refused to leave, and when the referee moved to enforce his decision the other Italian players immediately surrounded him, held his arms to his side, and covered his mouth and eyes with their hands.[20] Astonishingly, the referee let play continue, and Piccini remained in the game. Though the Americans protested, the Italians’ final result of 1–0 stood up after an American appeal was denied. Undaunted, the Italian Olympic side, amateurs to a man, lived up to the observation later made by Winston Churchill: “Italians lose wars as if they were games of football and lose games of football as if they were wars.”[21]
Expectations were also high in 1936 for the German side after their third-place finish over the highly regarded Austrians in the 1934 World Cup. Thus Germany’s debut in the Olympic tournament resulted in a 9–0 thrashing of Luxembourg a day after the contentious Italy–USA match. Impressed by such dominance, Adolf Hitler would be in attendance for the next German contest, a second-round encounter with Norway. Hitler was encouraged to attend his first football match by Albert Forster, a Gauleiter from Danzig (now Gdańsk, Poland, on the Baltic Sea), one of several regional administrators created after the Nazi takeover in 1933. The gathered crowd awaited what they thought would be another convincing German win.
Sitting with Hitler in the führer’s box was Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels, German air force chief Hermann Göring, and Hitler’s secretary, Rudolph Hess, the man to whom he dictated much of his manifesto Mein Kampf while in prison in 1925. Anticipation running wild, Goebbels later wrote in his diary: “The Führer is very excited. I can barely contain myself. A real bath of nerves. The crowd rages. A battle like never before. The game as mass suggestion.”[22] The excitement would not last long. Before a home crowd of some fifty-five thousand spectators, Hitler and Goebbels watched Norway hand the hosts a shocking 2–0 defeat. Norway scored only six minutes into the match, and again six minutes from the end. Hitler left the match furious and well before the final whistle had sounded. By most accounts, this was the last match Hitler ever attended. Goebbels remarked in his diary, morosely, “100,000 left the stadium in a depressed state.”[23] Hyperbole aside, Goebbels would return to football as a means of mass persuasion, albeit two years after the close of the games when Germany would once again take on the British on the eve of World War II.
The upsets on the Olympic football fields continued the following day as Great Britain was also bounced from the tournament, losing to Poland 5–4. The result was even more remarkable as the Poles played without their best player, Ernst Willimowski, left off of the Polish squad because he was unwilling to give up his binge-drinking habit. Remarkably, the British made the match close only after the Poles had surged ahead 5–1, coming back with three goals in the first nineteen minutes after the halftime interval.
Great Britain had labored in its opening match against China, a 2–0 win; before the second-round loss to Poland, the distractions could not have been greater for the team. Between matches, the unbreakable bond between the German state and sport was fully evident to the British squad. Called to a meeting some four hundred miles from Berlin, where most of the football matches were contested, the British footballers met the führer himself.
Taken to Hitler’s mountaintop retreat at Berchtesgaden, high in the Bavarian Alps and overlooking Salzburg, the squad was accompanied by Hitler’s personal bodyguard, the black-shirted unit of elite SS guards who were fiercely loyal to the dictator. Remaining photographs of the meeting reveal yet another propaganda victory for the Germans as each British footballer had to shake the hand of the dictator in front of the gathered press corps. Initially unaware of the damage that had been done, team officials shrugged off the meeting as an exercise in diplomacy on behalf of their country.
Even before play began in Berlin, the British players had refused to give the Nazi salute before any of their Olympic matches. This refusal may partially explain the handshake photo-op, but apparently there were limits to such requests. This “disobedience” was soon followed by a severe reaction from German diplomats, which set the stage for a capitulation to German demands in an act of appeasement that is still discussed to this day; the infamous Nazi salute offered by the British team before a friendly match staged in Berlin in May 1938. This match served as the last sporting contact between England and Germany, the two main protagonists on the world stage, before the outbreak of war in Europe.
The Olympic football tournament continued amid the political maneuverings of the Nazi regime. The play intensified, and the provocations and disagreements of the earlier USA–Italy match were mere skirmishes compared to what occurred in the second-round match between Peru and Austria. Coached by the English manager Jimmy Hogan, the Austrians faced a South American side that had demolished Finland 7–3. Just as the opening match against the United States had tested the Italians, the Austrians faced a similarly tough foe in Peru. In this quarterfinal match that brought with it international implications, Peru and Austria fought to a 2–2 draw at the end of full time after Austria had led 2–0 at the half.
After an initial fifteen-minute overtime in which neither team scored, tension built to an intense level. Likely enraged by the decision of the Italian referee to disallow three goals in the overtime session, a dozen or more Peruvian spectators poured onto the field, a number of them brandishing weapons, attacking the referee and a few of the Austrian players. The pitch invasion resulted in a leg injury to an Austrian player, and the match was abandoned in the second overtime, after the Peruvians had scored two late goals for a 4–2 victory.
What followed was an international dispute that continued well into the early twenty-first century. After hearing the result broadcast over international radio, locals in Lima, Peru, celebrated in sheer ecstasy. But at the same time the Peruvians were celebrating, the Austrians successfully filed an official protest with Olympic officials and with FIFA, who both conceded that the match needed to be replayed. In fact, to guarantee the safety of the players and an unbiased result, Olympic officials ordered that the rematch should be played in an empty stadium. In protest, the entire Olympic contingent from Peru left Germany on orders from the Peruvian president, Óscar Benavides, and they were joined in their protest by the Colombian Olympic team. The response in Lima was equally volatile, and angry mobs stormed the German consulate and pulled down Olympic flags wherever they were found in the Peruvian capital. The protests even affected commerce in Peru, where Peruvian dockworkers refused to load goods onto German ships. Newspapers in Peru claimed that replaying the match was a betrayal by the colonialist powers who reigned over the international game. In their eyes, all of South America had endured a great insult by the European powers that ran the Olympic Games.
Tensions further escalated when five other South American countries threatened to leave the Berlin games. Joseph Goebbels’s press office quickly made it known that the German government and the Berlin Olympic organizers had no influence over FIFA, the governing body that made the official decision to replay the match. In the end, Peru was a no-show for the rematch (rescheduled twice, ultimately), and the Austrians were declared the winners. In the semifinal match against Poland, the Austrians beat the Poles 3–1, setting up the final match against Italy, set for August 15.
In another match violently contested and featuring rough play, Italy emerged triumphant 2–1 over Austria, the final major tournament in which the Austrian nation would compete before their annexation by the Nazis in 1938. Scoreless at the half, the Italians managed to score late in the second, only to be pulled back eleven minutes later by the Austrians, who scored in the ninetieth minute to force extra time. After only two minutes of play in the extra period, the Italians scored the winning goal in front of a sellout crowd of more than ninety thousand fans. The celebrating players, with laurels on their heads, can be seen waving to jubilant Italian fans among thousands of spectators offering the Nazi salute at the awards ceremony. Even Italian dictator Benito Mussolini seized the moment to exorcise his long-held resentment against the Austrians for their influence in northern Italy by personally congratulating each of the Italian players on the team’s return to Rome. With football the most popular spectator sport at these Berlin Games, the Nazi regime did not miss the chance to capture the happenings on film. They turned once again to Leni Riefenstahl, a filmmaker they knew they could trust, to infuse the games with a Nazi aesthetic.
Among Leni Riefenstahl’s numerous directorial achievements is her sport film Olympia, a two-part chronicle of the Berlin Summer Olympic Games. Olympia stands out as Riefenstahl’s true masterpiece of groundbreaking filmmaking. She pioneered the use of many innovative techniques, the most notable being the use of rail-mounted and underwater cameras. Thirty-three camera operators shot nearly a million feet of footage, and over the course of eighteen months, Riefenstahl would painstakingly edit down the material to fit her artistic vision. The film, released in 1938, captured the resurgence of the new Germany, a country then on the march in Austria and Czechoslovakia, seeking territorial acquisition and the reversal of the punitive consequences of the Treaty of Versailles.
Olympia was a dynamic blend of sport, aesthetics, and propaganda that created a bridge from antiquity to the Nazified present. The prologue of the film is ethereal as ancient ruins emerge from a fog-enshrouded past and real athletes materialize from Greek sculptures. Whether intended or not, Riefenstahl’s tribute to the body beautiful aligned with National Socialism’s glorification of strength, purity of health, and physical perfection.[24] Part one of the film concentrates on track and field sports, and Jesse Owens stars. In the second part of the film, titled “Fest der Schönheit” (Festival of Beauty), many of the other team sports are presented in a highly stylized ballet of athletes moving through time and space, ending as daylight fades on the Olympic scene. The director briefly highlights gymnastics, yachting, boxing, distance running, field hockey, and aquatic events, all in rapid succession. Football also receives a stylized interpretation.
Yet in Riefenstahl’s three-and-a-half-hour film, only three minutes and ten seconds are dedicated to football, and only the final between Italy and Austria made the cut. Much of the time, her camera crews were too close to the play, and the editing is abrupt. The only field view the audience is offered is taken at ground level. Riefenstahl’s cameras focus almost exclusively on the movement of the ball, which by the nature of the game is unpredictable and dynamic.
Modern audiences likely find this section of the black-and-white documentary disorienting to watch. Tactics and team strategy seem unimportant to the filmmaker, and team play captured on film never reflects the players’ movements away from the ball. The only view of the spectators attending the final comes when we are shown cutaway shots after goals are scored. The viewer is later treated to a promising and unconventional view from behind the goal, but in this position the viewer cannot keep up with the play, especially in the goalmouth, where we see the Austrian keeper spill a ball that leads to Italy’s winning goal. Narration of the final match offers no information about the actual course of the tournament nor the final match, aside from the goals scored. In the service to her aesthetic aims, Riefenstahl isolates individual movements of the player and ball without giving a sense of the buildup of play. She also avoids the use of slow-motion photography, so effectively utilized in her dramatization of other sports during the Berlin games. One critic of Riefenstahl’s coverage of the 1936 Olympic soccer final realized, “There is no place for slow motion in presenting soccer because, for Riefenstahl, the ball’s roundness—the unpredictability of the game—violates the very idea of beauty, her ideology and aesthetic. If she had her way, the ball would have been as square and cubic as could be.”[25]
In the end, the lasting record of the football matches in Berlin was sacrificed to aesthetics. Clearly, Riefenstahl lacked an understanding of soccer as a team (verses individual) effort, which was rather reflective of the larger German attitude toward soccer at the time. German football, especially at the international level, was known for having disciplined players who played with a robust individuality; the difficulty came in translating that individual talent into team wins.[26] So brief is the section on football in the film, that the other qualities of Olympia leave a much greater impression.
In the final scene of the film, the viewer witnesses an empty Olympiastadion and an accompanying bell tower from high above, as pillars of light are cast upward into the sky, ringing the stadium. There is a closing close-up of the Olympic flame in the cauldron and laurels placed on the international banners of the participating countries. Then the Olympic flame is extinguished, and the calm and tranquility of the moment lingers, a brief respite for the international community before the calamity that would soon come.
While there is general agreement that the Berlin games were a masterstroke of propaganda for the Nazis because of the magnificent organization of the games, the debate continues about the role Riefenstahl’s Olympia might have played in advancing Nazi aims. Olympia has always stood in the very dark shadow of Triumph of the Will, which magnified the charisma of Adolf Hitler.
In Olympia, the blend of art and propaganda continued almost seamlessly. Riefenstahl never escaped the criticism that her work elevates fascism. Until her dying day, she denied any political aim to Olympia. Across Germany, Riefenstahl was celebrated, and the film was honored internationally with gold medals at major film festivals in Venice and Paris. Riefenstahl’s film would also earn special recognition from the International Olympic Committee for documenting the beauty and delight of sport. Olympia, celebrated enthusiastically as art, did what it set out to do: glorify athletic prowess through the interpretation of the beauty of the human form in competition. The debate continues on whether that aesthetic vision was forever corrupted.
Germany averaged fewer than four international matches a year in the quarter century before Hitler took power, but in the first nine years of his dictatorship they doubled as the regime saw Germany’s positive standing in the world increase. In 1935 alone, the national team contested seventeen matches, driven by the Nazis’ demand that domestic clubs and employers release their players for the national team. A 6–0 loss to neighboring Austria in 1931 showed how far the Germans needed to go before being consistently competitive. Clearly hampered by playing teams of professional players, Germany would rapidly ascend the pecking order of world football through dogged determination; the rise of the domestic game, which fed creative and innovative players to the national team; and a foreign policy that aggressively sought appeasement from the widely admired “masters of the game,” the English.
The Germans had long admired English football. Club teams touring Germany (at the same time the national side took on England in May 1938) drew record crowds of well over one hundred thousand. Because of their history as adversaries, a shared love for the game, and this one-sided admiration, no other international matchup compared to England versus Germany in the 1930s. In these tumultuous times, football ceased being just a game. Choosing Nazi Germany as an opponent gave implied support to an increasingly aggressive regime. And on May 14, 1938, the most politicized match ever played between the two nations produced probably the most infamous event in the history of English football.
The Germany–England match came at a crucial point in world politics. England, well aware of the implications of antagonizing the bellicose German regime, instead sought a “quiet and restrained” response, seeing the fixture as effective cultural propaganda that might possess a greater utility than more overt means, the kind on full display in Berlin.[27] Thus the upcoming match was interpreted by the British government, the FA, and the British media as vitally important. But skepticism remained about sport’s power to foster peace. Such skepticism did not escape the future prime minister of England either. With the 1936 Olympics as proof, Winston Churchill later observed, “sport, when it enters the international field in Olympic Games and other contests between countries, may breed ill-will rather than draw nations together.”[28]
Few Germans, officially or otherwise, spoke openly about beating England, a team made up of experienced professionals. Germany came into the match brimming with confidence. Since Hitler’s ascension to power, the national side had finished third in the 1934 World Cup and had won twenty-three while losing only three matches with three draws. Later in 1937, under the direction of new Reichstrainer Sepp Herberger, Die Mannschaft enjoyed a strong run of matches, with ten wins and a draw in their eleven matches that year, and they entered the England match on a sixteen-game unbeaten streak.
At political rallies and international sporting competitions, the Nazis wanted to project a picture of physical superiority, and against their old adversary, the battle was rejoined anew. German media were transfixed by the possibility that the host Germans would win this highly charged game. Interest from the public matched the media fervor; over 400,000 applicants sought the 110,000 tickets on offer.
After the Anschluss, the fabled Austrian Wunderteam, which had beaten England in 1936, had been absorbed into the German side. On the surface, the addition of the talented Austrians looked to create an unbeatable German side, but in competition the Anschluss-created team never really played in harmony, likely because of long-held animosities between the players, who just weeks earlier were heated rivals on the pitch. As was the case so often under German domination, resistance took hold.
Well aware of the importance of the match beyond the final score, England’s players were tasked with a serious dilemma a few minutes before kickoff. Under pressure from British diplomatic officials, the FA instructed the English players to offer the Nazi salute when greeting the gathered crowd. English star winger Stanley Matthews, the first winner of the Ballon d’Or as the European footballer of the year (at age forty-one) and the only player to be knighted while still playing, initially recalled, “The dressing room erupted. There was bedlam. All the England players were livid and totally opposed to this, myself included. Everyone was shouting at once. Eddie Hapgood, normally a respectful and devoted captain, wagged his finger at the official and told him what he could do with the Nazi salute, which involved putting it where the sun doesn’t shine.”[29]
Recollections of this prematch discussion have conflicted. Some players were indifferent to the request, while others claimed to be sickened by it. While there was clear resentment about the last-minute nature of the demand, many players feared they would never be selected for any future England matches if they refused.
Every sports team playing Germany in this era faced the same diplomatic dilemma. British football officials and diplomats alike rightly assumed that, as was the custom of the day, England would return the “three cheers” salute the German team offered as visitors to England a few years earlier. Going into the match, tensions ran dangerously high between the governments of Germany and England. Though not in attendance that day, Hitler was represented by his top leadership, who all occupied the führer’s box seats, including Propaganda Minister Goebbels, Reichsmarschall Göring, Hitler’s personal secretary Rudolf Hess, and Foreign Minister Ribbentrop. Reichssportsführer Tschammer und Osten and the British diplomat, Sir Neville Henderson, were also present.
For this high-stakes match, the English FA had demanded that no Austrian player should appear; in reality, one player did suit up—the SK Rapid Vienna striker Hans Presser—who ended up scoring in the match for the pan-German team. Conditions for the match were stifling as the weather in Berlin was unseasonably warm for the month of May. Kickoff was set for midafternoon, and as the teams readied themselves for battle, they were met by a blistering hot afternoon sun. Taking the match ball in hand, the Belgian referee, accompanied by linesmen from each of the competing countries, was ready for play, and the teams lined up for the introductions. In a gesture still shrouded in shame and controversy, moments before the opening whistle, the English players obliged the Nazi request and stood at attention with right arms raised in the Nazi salute. The salute was met with a raucous roar from the home crowd. English diplomatic officials were satisfied, stating that England footballers had done “good work” for crown and country. That the English players would repeat the fascist salute in Milan in a 1939 match against the world champion Italians rarely gets mentioned in historical accounts of football in this period.
Yet memory can be an elusive servant. Collective British recollection of “the salute” has been tainted by postwar understanding of the excesses and crimes of Nazism. England captain and Arsenal standout Eddie Hapgood would recall in his 2009 autobiography:
I’ve played for England before 100,000 screaming, yelling, heiling Germans at the Berlin Olympic Stadium, the day we humbled the prize of Nazidom on the world’s most luxurious ground. I’ve kicked a football into Mussolini’s lap in Rome, and experienced the worst refereeing of my life at Milan; I’ve been to Switzerland, Rumania, Hungary, Czecho-Slovakia, Holland, Austria, Belgium, Finland, France, Norway, Denmark, Sweden and Yugoslavia. . . . I’ve been in a shipwreck, a train crash, and inches short of a plane accident . . . but the worst moment of my life, and one I would not willingly go through again, was giving the Nazi salute in Berlin.[30]
But on the Monday following the match, the Times of London acknowledged, “[the] English team immediately made a good impression by raising their arms in the German salute.” Other mainstream newspapers also unvaryingly failed to comment critically on the gesture at the time, though the picture of the infamous salute appeared in print across the world. Other testimonies of the England players after the war tended to exaggerate the reluctance of the team. One other match featuring the English draws comparisons here. Italy, not yet formally allied with Germany, continued to play amid the rising political tensions in Europe, and the scheduled match between the Azzurri and England (a competitive 2–2 draw) set for the magnificent new San Siro Stadium in Milan in May 1939 saw the English salute to all four corners of the ground, again in the fascist style and to little controversy.
On the day, observers reported that the Germans looked rested and ready after careful preparations. In contrast, the English players looked a bit haggard, having just completed a long and arduous club season. Appearances would be deceptive because in the end the match proved to be disappointing for the Germans. Though the hosts managed to equalize after the first English goal by Arsenal left winger Cliff Bastin, they would never mount a comeback.
Players and home spectators alike were conciliatory, and the match itself was one-sided, in keeping with the relative strengths of each national team at that time. The highlight of the match was a goal scored by Len Goulden of then second-division West Ham United, a goal that Stanley Matthews described as the greatest he ever saw in football. Goulden scored with a left-footed volley from twenty-five yards out that apparently ripped the net from the crossbar. As he trotted back to midfield, arms raised in the air, he reportedly shouted, “Let ’em salute that one!”[31] The Germans would not overcome a sixteen-minute span in which England surged ahead with three quick goals. After the halftime interval, the teams traded goals, and at the final whistle the English had claimed a convincing 6–3 win. The home crowd of 105,000 left the Olympiastadion in Berlin with no doubt about who was the superior side.
The propaganda coup that was the May 1938 match against England further emboldened the Nazi regime. Goebbels thereafter became actively involved in scheduling matches and publicizing them to a watching world. But once again, sport would not be so easily manipulated. On the football pitch, a complete reversal of sporting fortune followed for Germany’s national soccer team. By the end of 1938, the blended German team posted no wins, losing five of seven matches with a negative twenty-two goal differential in that span.
“Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard for all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence: In other words, it is war minus the shooting.”—George Orwell, December 1945[32]
Football continued in the intervening war years, amid hardships, deprivations, and barbarism. During the decade of the dictators, the infusion of politics and propaganda allowed the Italians to reach the zenith of the game as world and Olympic champions while Germany and Spain struggled to convert a totalitarian mindset into consistently winning football. Across Europe, domestic leagues soldiered on, often as pale imitations of the national sport before the war. And international matches remained highly politicized affairs, though nations matched as enemy combatants on the battlefields of Europe and North Africa would not play each other directly until long after the war.
The corruption of sport in the 1930s would only intensify once the violence began in war-torn Europe. Football became embroiled in the life-and-death struggles faced by those who would dare stand in the way of Nazi aggression. As Hitler’s armies swept eastward on June 22, 1941, in Operation Barbarossa, rapidly conquering parts of the Soviet Union, the Ukrainian capital of Kiev held out as war raged on. Among the besieged city’s defenders were players from the 1939 Dynamo Kiev club side, among the very best in Europe at the dawn of the war. Following months of violent occupation in desperate living conditions, football began to be played again in war-torn Kiev in 1942. Led by a charismatic goalkeeper named Trusevich, a new team called FC Start was formed amid the rubble of occupied Kiev, and the squad dominated a series of matches against other makeshift Ukrainian and Nazi-allied teams. Undefeated, FC Start soon caught the attention of Nazi officials, who set up a pivotal final match against an elite team made up of well-trained German air force soldiers. Myth and reality came together in a “Match of Death” as these brave Ukrainian footballers became legends to football fans both past and present.
Friedrich W. Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984), 51.
Anthony R. Pratkanis and Elliot Aronson, Age of Propaganda: The Everyday Use and Abuse of Persuasion (New York: Freeman, Holt and Company, 2001), 318.
Ibid., 179.
Hilmar Hoffmann, The Triumph of Propaganda: Film and National Socialism (Providence, RI: Berghahn, 1996), 90.
Garth S. Jowett and Victoria O’Donnell, Propaganda and Persuasion, 6th ed. (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2014), 264.
Hoffmann, Triumph of Propaganda, 94.
Pratkanis and Aronson, Age of Propaganda, 323.
Jowett and O’Donnell, Propaganda and Persuasion, 265.
Goldblatt, Ball Is Round, 307.
Simon Martin, Football and Fascism: The National Game under Mussolini (New York: Berg, 2004), 76.
Ibid., 185.
Quoted in ibid., 190.
Quoted in Peter J. Beck, Scoring for Britain: International Football and International Politics, 1900–1939 (London: Routledge, 1999), 194.
Quoted in David C. Large, Nazi Games: The Olympics of 1936 (New York: W. W. Norton, 2007), 103.
Duff Hart-Davis, Hitler’s Games: The 1936 Olympics (London: Harper & Row, 1986), 89.
Quoted in Rob Steen, Floodlights and Touchlines: A History of Spectator Sports (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 350.
Quoted in Allen Guttmann, “Berlin 1936: The Most Controversial Olympics,” in National Identity and Global Sports Events: Culture, Politics, and Spectacle in the Olympics and the Football World Cup, ed. Alan Tomlinson and Christopher Young (Albany: SUNY Press, 2006), 45.
Large, Nazi Games, 5.
Ibid., 198.
Ibid., 275.
Tobias Jones, The Dark Heart of Italy (New York: North Point Press, 2004), 75.
Quoted in Goldblatt, Ball Is Round, 310.
Quoted in Steen, Floodlights and Touchlines, 358.
Large, Nazi Games, 309.
Lutz Koepnik, “0–1: Riefenstahl and the Beauty of Soccer,” in Riefenstahl Screened: An Anthology of New Criticism, ed. Neil Christian Pages, Mary Rhiel, Ingeborg Majer-O’Sickey (New York: Continuum, 2008), 64.
Ibid., 65.
Beck, Scoring for Britain, 9.
Winston Churchill, “Sport Is a Stimulant in Our Workaday World,” News of the World, September 4, 1938.
Quoted in Kuper, Ajax, 39.
Ibid., 17.
Eddie Hapgood, Football Ambassador: The Autobiography of an Arsenal Legend (London: GCR Books, 2009), 40.
George Orwell, “The Sporting Spirit,” Tribune, December 14, 1945, in Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus, eds., The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, vol. 4: In Front of Your Nose, 1945–1950 (London: Seeker & Warburg, 1968), 42.