Ajax the Dutch the War Read online

  Heil Hitler.

  But whatever Nazis and Italian Fascists thought about soccer, they failed to persuade people to give it up for grenade-throwing, and soon they stopped trying. The Fascists made a few Italian clubs drop their British names (AC Milan became Milano, and Internazionale was renamed Ambrosiana) and then embraced the game. By the time the Nazis seized power, on January 30, 1933, they were beginning to do the same.

  Much has been written about how the dictators tried to manipulate soccer for their own purposes. Of course they tried, but that does not mean they succeeded. Soccer is a slippery tool. Raking through soccer of the 1930s spotting attempts to make propaganda is easy, but it is more interesting to study the decade’s big matches for what they reveal about the feelings between the countries that would soon go to war. For all the tension in Europe at the time, citizens of different countries hardly ever met. The plane carrying the German team to Glasgow in 1936, for instance, was the first German aircraft of any kind to land at Renfrew Airport. The isolation of the era gave international soccer matches a piquancy they have never had since.

  On the rainy Saturday afternoon of March 19, 1933, Germany played a friendly game against France in Berlin. It was only the second match between the two countries in history, and the first German soccer international of the Nazi era.

  There had been some consternation in Europe when the warmongering, anti-Semitic demagogue Hitler seized power in Berlin. The French had considered boycotting the coming exhibition game on moral grounds and were worried that their players and fans would be attacked in Berlin. But the Germans persuaded them everything would be fine. So it proved: supporters arriving at the train station were greeted with music, and the SA thugs outside the ground occupied themselves with rattling collection tins. Prices for terrace places were cut to 70 pfennigs, and eight thousand “unemployment tickets” were given out free. There was a sell-out crowd of fifty thousand, including Hermann Göring, and other people watched from a nearby oak tree.

  The match passed off peacefully. After ten minutes Germany’s Fischer thought he had scored, but the English referee Crew spotted that the shot had passed through a hole in the side netting, and mended the net with the help of French defenders. On the French bench the reserves smoked cigarettes.

  Germany soon took a 3–1 lead, but in the second half they played so slowly that the crowd began chanting, “Tempo, Tempo!” and in the last ten minutes the French recovered to draw 3–3. The German keeper, Hans Jakob, was widely blamed for France’s first and third goals, but the whole team had disappointed. “Soon Germany’s international matches will be the best way to eradicate the love of the leather in soccer fans,” commented the Munich magazine Fußball, which devoted almost its entire issue of March 21 to the match. Civilized, literate, and cosmopolitan, a relic from an older Germany, Fußball is one of my main sources for this account.

  Soccer itself was the least interesting aspect of the match. The press at the time realized there was much else to say. It noted that the German crowd was well behaved and not even very partisan. The French paper Le Journal remarked on the “rather unenthusiastic masses, who hardly gave their own team more applause [than France] when it entered the field.” Paris Soir, France’s best-selling evening daily, praised the respect with which the crowd listened to the “Marseillaise,” saying that the “Deutschland über Alles” anthem might have been treated differently at Colombes or Vincennes in Paris. Fußball said it was a shame an advertising plane over the ground had drowned out both anthems, “because it ’s not every day that you hear the ‘Marseillaise’ while the Reich and Swastika flags flutter in the wind.”

  So friendly was the mood that in a speech at the post-match banquet Jules Rimet, president of the French FA and inventor of the World Cup, promised to correct false impressions of Nazi Germany in France. In March 1933 no one, perhaps not even Hitler, could foresee the full horrors to come.

  The mainstream German press was only just starting to be subjugated by the Nazis, and after the match it does not seem to have banged on about racial superiority. Quite the contrary: the 12-Uhr-Blatt commented that if Germany could not produce a good team, it might be worth “letting good teachers, who have earned their reputation on international soil, hold training course after course.” Fußball even risked the odd dig at the Nazis: “Hans Albers, the star of stage and screen, arrives and arouses more attention than the political leaders in their uniforms beside him,” noted the writer F. Richard in his diary of the day.

  Only with hindsight is it possible to see the spirit of the “New Order” seeping into Fußball. The cover picture shows the German captain Hergert spattered in mud, and perhaps in blood too, glowering into the photographer’s lens like a Great War soldier or ancient Teutonic warrior. And the main match report complains of the absence of a Führer, or leader, in the German team. German soccer required “a renewal by men!” added a Dr C. E. Laenge.

  Yet the atmosphere around the game seems to have been more pleasant and calm than it might be for the same fixture today. In part, this was because the Nazis spent their early years charming foreign countries. This effort peaked at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, from which the future Fifa president João Havelange returned with the best impressions of Nazi Germany. “Everyone seemed happy, was my impression,” he later told the author David Yallop. “There were no shortages, everyone was polite.”

  It is usually argued that the Nazis tried to use sport to demonstrate “racial” superiority, but often they used it just to make friends. For much of the 1930s they were obsessed with what the rest of the world thought about them. As long as Hitler was too weak to make war, he wanted foreigners to think he had no such intention. He needed time to rearm.

  German soccer diplomacy must have assisted him. Millions of Europeans in the 1930s probably thought harder about the German soccer team than they did about the SS. In the weeks after the pogroms of Reichskristallnacht in 1938, when the Dutch were debating whether to allow Germany to visit Rotterdam for an international, Henri Polak, the Dutch diamond workers’Moses, guessed what his country’s soccer fans would say: “Sport is sport, and murder of the Jews is murder of the Jews.”

  Few people in Europe seem to have spent much time thinking about the threat of Nazism until late in the 1930s. There was a general suspicion of Hitler, but this was insufficient to create much popular support for rearmament in Germany’s neighboring countries. It took years for most people to understand that Germany was about to unleash a war. There were many reasons for their quiescence, but one of them was probably the friendly sports matches that Germany was always playing against its neighbors. Certainly Paris Soir was sufficiently impressed by the sporting diplomacy of the dictators to berate its own government for not taking games seriously enough.

  The other reason for the friendly mood at Germany–France was the contemporary obsession with “fair play.” (Like many Europeans, the Germans used the English phrase.) Soccer had reached the Continent late, and with its Victorian wrapping intact. An Anglophile school of thought in 1930s’ Europe even regarded sportsmanship as more important than winning matches.

  To fair-play extremists, it was ungentlemanly even to support a particular side. Many of them were discomfited by the new phenomenon of vast crowds coming to internationals hoping to see their country win. F. Richard of Fußball lamented:Tens of thousands go to internationals who never otherwise attend a football match.

  Why do these tens of thousands not attend our league matches, not even the international matches of our clubs?

  Because they have not yet been raised to see good football.

  I would much rather that we had our record attendances at the big club matches, as they do in England, and not at internationals whose quality is often very questionable.

  In England not an international match can approach the Cup final or even the matches of the league leaders.

  In Berlin the stadium was filled to the last place, when France met Germany.

  Herr Richard would turn out to have the temper of the times against him.

  If the Nazis had been slow to see the point of soccer, they instinctively understood international sport. It was a way of both making friends and showing off the vigor of the “new Germany.” In a speech in 1937 the Reichssportführer Hans von Tschammer und Osten said that “under no circumstances” did Hitler want to forfeit international sport, as it was “the fastest and most sustained means of confounding political troublemakers and rabble-rousers” who were out to blacken Nazi Germany’s name.

  The country was not ready yet to beat others at war, and it could not even reliably do so at soccer, but the latter problem was the easier to fix. With ever more Germans playing soccer, it was only a matter of time before the vast country produced a decent team. To speed things up, the Nazis ordered clubs and employees to release players for the national team whether they wanted to or not. The German team soon became a concept to millions. From 1933 to 1942 it played about twice as many internationals a year as it had in the Weimar period—seventeen matches in 1935 alone. The increase was even sharper for sport as a whole: in 1933 German sports teams competed in sixty-three international matches or contests; five years later the figure had nearly trebled.

  Two memoirs published on cheap paper soon after the war memorably evoked German soccer of the 1930s. Paul Janes, the German full-back and captain for much of the 1930s, wrote Ein Leben für den Fußball (A Life for Football ) in 1948, and a year later Hans Jakob, the keeper accused of the two mistakes against France, produced Durch ganz Europa von Tor zu Tor (Through all of Europe from Goal to Goal). Though both books bear the mark of the immediate postwar years, contriving almost to pretend that the Nazis never happened, both nonetheless give fascinating accounts of the Hitler era.
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  The books are written in a peculiar mix of soccer clichés and Nazi jargon, which the players (and their ghost-writers) had presumably assimilated subconsciously. This passage from Janes is a good example:Much had happened up to the autumn of the year 1933. . . . A whole new national team, sealed beside the Rhine at home, arises and in October, in a Duisburg stadium illuminated by the autumn sun, celebrates a triumphant 8–1 victory over Belgium. In frenzied enthusiasm the masses go along . . . we have recovered the faith in our national football team. . . . A new spirit began working in the hearts of the old and the new players.

  The tone was not entirely Janes’s fault. The German language itself had been contaminated. Yet the triumphant victories and the frenzied enthusiasm of masses were not his main points. Both his book and Jakob’s are chiefly concerned with establishing that the German team of the Nazi era was well liked abroad. Jakob in particular at times descends into simply listing endless friendly meetings with foreigners. A picture of unsmiling men in trilby hats watching the players emerge from a hotel is captioned Wherever we showed ourselves, hundreds of sports friends surrounded us, and in other pictures Jakob laughs with Peruvian soccer players at the Berlin Olympics, or throws his arm around the black American athlete Jesse Owens (“a unique sprinter”). The French, the English, the Spaniards were all wonderful people with passionate fans who applauded the German players. The keeper has had a happy career with “sports comrades” everywhere. (On the other hand, Jakob once said that eight German international players of his era were Nazi Party members.)

  Similarly, writing the afterword to Janes’s memoir, Sepp Herberger, German manager from 1937 to 1964, would claim that every match in which the full-back captained Germany was “ein Sieg des ‘fair play,’” a victory for fair play.

  Obviously this is how the Germans liked to remember things in the late 1940s, when they were the world’s pariahs. But Herberger, Janes, and Jakob did have a point—for most of the 1930s, Nazi Germany was far from being a pariah in Europe. Hitler’s early years in power were relatively quiet in terms of foreign policy. The German team was indeed welcomed throughout Europe by all but a few anti-fascist demonstrators.

  At least fourteen of these were arrested before the England–Germany game at White Hart Lane in London in December 1935. Yet by all accounts the match was otherwise a peaceful affair, with as many as ten thousand Germans in the crowd. Germany was thrashed 3–0, but Jakob recalls on the second page of his book: “After the game we received ovations and cheers as seldom before abroad. This was London, this was the people of the motherland of football.” Janes remembers the match with equal fondness (“in London, sportsmen shook hands”), and British press reports seem to bear out these happy recollections. “Whatever the result, all of us hope Germany will have a nice enjoyable match and find at the end of it that their education has been suitably enriched,” wrote Frank Throgood in the News Chronicle on December 4, 1935. According to the next day’s London Times,The afternoon was a great success for at least two reasons. First the game was played throughout in the friendliest of spirit; secondly . . . the sun came out . . .

  The ground seemed to be packed long before the teams came out and when they did the sight was an impressive one. Both teams were given a tremendous reception . . . the two national anthems were played, and the Germans gave their salute to both.

  The Sporting Life mentioned the demonstrators: “Greater than the game—a thoroughly enjoyable game—was the atmosphere of good fellowship in which it was played. . . . The huge crowd . . . was managed without a hitch . . . seven individuals tried to upset the serenity of the plans—they are now under lock and key.”

  A police officer told the News Chronicle “that in his twenty years’ experience of crowds he had never dealt with such an orderly and well-managed crowd as the visitors.”

  And at the post-match banquet, speakers from both nations condemned the demonstrators’ attempts to get the game canceled.

  The mixing of soccer with politics was then considered an exciting novelty. The News Chronicle even called the encounter “the most discussed match in the history of Association Football.” No continental countries had ever previously been interested enough in the sport for it to matter so much. Certainly Mussolini had done his best to help Italy win the previous year’s World Cup on home turf, but it is doubtful how many Italians noticed: the Giro d’Italia bicycle race overshadowed the early rounds, and the average crowd per game in the World Cup was only twenty-three thousand.

  In fact, the first modern sporting event whose political significance was generally understood was the Berlin Olympics of 1936. Enough has been said already about Hitler storming out of the stadium to avoid giving Jesse Owens his gold medal. Less well known is that Hitler also walked out of a soccer match. Apparently he had never seen the sport played until Albert Forster, the Gauleiter of Danzig, persuaded him to watch Germany thrash little Norway instead of going to see the rowing at Grünau. Goebbels, who watched the match with him, would write, “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.”

  But, to Forster’s mortification, Germany lost 2–0. “Not fully deserved,” Goebbels noted in his diary. The German forward Willy Simetsreiter would later blame the defeat on Hitler’s visit to the changing-room just before kick-off. None of the players had apparently met the legendary figure before, and after shaking his hand they were still “all muddled up” when the match began, Simetsreiter claimed. Hitler would never see a soccer match again. To him, as to most senior Nazis, motor racing and boxing remained the sports that mattered.

  Italy won the Olympic soccer gold by beating Austria 2–1 in the final. This was particularly impressive since the Italians, in the name of “fair play,” had selected a team of students in order to show up other countries who were said to be fielding covert professionals. Surviving footage of the final focuses on the Italian fans in the ground. There are soldiers, and a mustachioed figure holding his head in anguish who looks like a caricature of the hot-blooded Latin, but most remarkable is the young man in a T-shirt with the number 20 on the back, who seems to have parachuted in from another decade.

  “I’ve played for England before 110,000 screaming, yelling, heiling Germans at the Berlin Olympic Stadium, the day we humbled the pride of Nazidom on the world’s most luxurious ground,” reminisced the Arsenal and England captain Eddie Hapgood in his 1945 memoir Football Ambassador.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 Yugo-Slavia. I’ve eaten garlic until I’ve never wanted to eat another thing in my life. . . . 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.

  The England team’s salute before the match against Germany at Berlin’s Olympic Stadium on May 14, 1938, remains, for Britons, the nadir of England’s soccer history.

  Reading the Football Association’s minutes of the late 1930s in the comfort of the FA’s library at Soho Square, you get no sense of gathering war, or even of an outside world at all. The tone is placid throughout. Much space is taken up with mourning the deaths of ancient officials. The association’s president Sir Charles Clegg died in 1937 at the age of eighty-eight, after holding the post for forty-seven years. His successor, William Pickford, who had become a member of the FA in 1888, would die a year later.