What Sports Europe Doesn’t Remember (VIDEO)

The Second World War and the tragic events of the 20th century had a huge impact on the history of football. Many outstanding football players, coaches and sports managers ended up in concentration camps, others were forced to hide or emigrate due to political and racial persecution. But football continued to be an impetus for resistance to evil during the Holocaust and occupation. Forbes Life publishes several notes from the collection “Football. War. Holocaust”, which is published by the Russian publishing house “NLO”.

“This publication, based on publications in Russian and foreign media, shows the fates of outstanding football players, coaches and sports managers from many European countries who became victims of the Nazi genocide of Jews during World War II, or saved them from persecution,” says one of the editors of the collection, professor at the Russian State University for the Humanities, co-chairman of the Holocaust Center Ilya Altman. “The well-known stories regarding the “death match” in Kyiv, the games in the ruined Stalingrad and the tournament for the Shah of Iran Cup are supplemented with new factual material. A separate section of the book is devoted to memorial and educational projects to combat racism and xenophobia in football using the history of the Holocaust as an example.”

Football in the Terezin concentration camp

The city of Terezín is located sixty kilometers from Prague. It is famous for its fortress, built in 1780 and named following Empress Maria Theresa. During the First World War, it was used as a prison, where Gavrilo Princip, who shot Archduke Franz Ferdinand, served his sentence.

Since 1941, the fortress has been turned into a concentration camp (many researchers call it a “ghetto”), where Jews from all occupied territories were brought en masse. Half-breed Jews and those who had military awards for participating in the First World War, as well as close relatives of those killed at the front, were sent here from Germany. Scientists, politicians, writers, musicians, journalists, and actors ended up in the camp. Terezin was something of a model camp. Jews were allowed to publish magazines, stage plays, and organize exhibitions. They were also allowed to play football in Terezin. The football league created here held the camp championship for three seasons. During this time, 35 teams played in the league, and a hundred matches were held. Both amateurs and professional athletes played football. For example, Paul Mahrer played for the Czechoslovakian national football team at the 1924 Olympics, conquered the USA. In 1930, he returned to his native country, and then ended up in Terezin. Mahrer was one of the oldest players in the Jewish death league: he was in his fifties. The names of the clubs were interesting. Some of them told you where the players were from: Rapid, FC Vienna, Fortuna Köln. Others told you what the players did in the camp during regular time: Clothes Warehouse, Pioneer Leaders. Of course, there was no football field in the fortress, so they had to play right in the barracks yard. They simply put markings on the bare ground. As a prize for winning the Terezin league, the winners were given more rations than the other prisoners. The league was judged by professional referees, and the results of the matches were covered in the newspapers.

Crowds watched the football. If you didn’t know it was happening in a concentration camp, it might have seemed like ordinary, normal life. Perhaps, in the midst of all the horror, football gave some hope, a sense that life went on. Football ended following the visit of representatives of the Red Cross in August 1944. Especially for them, the Nazis forced the prisoners to play an exhibition match. Surprisingly, despite the 35,000 dead in the camp, the delegates did not sound the alarm. And literally a month following the visit of the delegation of the International Red Cross, many of the football players were deported to Auschwitz.

This was the end of the football league of the Terezin concentration camp. Only a small fragment of a film shot by a prisoner of the camp, the famous director Kurt Gerron, has survived – “Theresienstadt – a self-governing Jewish camp”, which captured this match. In 2012, a film regarding football in Terezin was made, which included these shots. “The people you see in this film were gone within four to six weeks following it was filmed,” comments one of those who took part in the filming of the now modern documentary.

“The Jew Who Conquered Europe”

The Vienna football club Hakoah (German: Sportklub Hakoah Wien) was founded in 1909 by the Jewish community of Vienna. In 1920, the club won the right to play in the Austrian Premier League for the first time and became the champion of the country in 1925. The team was considered the most popular club in the world with five thousand season ticket holders. It was one of the first clubs in the world to begin touring other countries and continents. In 1923, the team played an exhibition match once morest English West Ham United in front of sixty thousand spectators, which ended in a 1:1 draw. The Englishmen agreed to hold the return match in Britain. The match ended in a sensation – the visitors won with a score of 5:1.

Hakoah became the first foreign team to win on English soil. The leading player of Vienna Hakoah during its heyday was a Hungarian-born player, a player of its national team in the early 1920s and captain of the team at the 1924 Olympics in Paris, one of the best defenders in the world Bela Guttmann. His biographer David Bolchover called the book regarding this outstanding player and coach “The Greatest Comeback: From Genocide to Football Glory”.

Guttmann played for Hakoah during the championship season, played successfully in New York, where he began his coaching career. Returning to Austria, he took over Hakoah. Guttmann was the last coach of this Viennese club in 1938, when following the Anschluss the Nazis ceased to exist, forcing the coach to flee to Hungary. He was the coach of the Újpest club, which won the Mitropa Cup in 1939. After Germany occupied Hungary in the spring of 1944, the Nazis deported more than 450 thousand Jews to death camps. The legendary footballer and coach B. Guttmann survived this time, hiding in the attic above the apartment of his future son-in-law on the outskirts of Budapest. He later escaped from a labor camp to avoid deportation. His father, sister, nephew and other relatives were killed during the Holocaust. After the war, B. Guttmann won trophies as a coach in Hungary and Brazil, and in 1961 and 1962 he won the European Cup twice in a row with Portugal’s Benfica. Biographers of Béla Guttmann note that he never spoke regarding his war experiences in interviews and rarely mentioned the anti-Semitism he faced throughout his career as a player and coach.

“Best defense is attack”

Hugo Meisl (1881-1937) entered the history of Austrian football first as a football referee. In 1907, he became a FIFA referee, having worked at sixteen international matches, including the 1912 Olympics, ending his career as a football referee in 1926. In the same year and until his death, he held the post of General Secretary of the Austrian Football Association. In this position, Hugo began to implement his many ideas in football. One of them was the transfer of football players to professionals. It was he who organized the first international match between the football teams of Austria and Hungary. And in the 1930s, he successfully implemented the plan to create the Mitropa Cup, the first European football competition, the predecessor of the Champions League. He managed to do everything. From 1919 to 1937, Meisl worked as the head coach of the Austrian national team, one of the best in Europe in the early 1930s, nicknamed the “wunderteam”. The tactics of this team are best described by the words of H. Meisl, which became the motto of the Austrians’ game: “The best defense is an attack.” At the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, the Austrians, led by Meisl, won silver medals, losing to the Italians in the final. The following year, the famous coach and manager died at the age of 56. Death saved him from the Holocaust.