Breaking through the dark clouds of history
When Real Madrid beat Eintracht Frankfurt 7-3 in the 1960 European Cup Final, the German club’s president was Rudolf Gramlich. He had played for the club in the 1930s and been capped 22 times by the national side.
What went unreported was the fact that he had been an active member of the Nazi party and the notorious SS. A full admission had to wait until January this year, on the eve of the 75th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp.
Frankfurt’s current supremo, Peter Fischer, set out Gramlich’s grisly past as the club stripped him, posthumously, of the title of honorary president.
But how many more Gramlichs were rehabilitated through their post-war efforts to construct a newly democratised West Germany from Hitler’s wreckage? No one knows and, for a long time, no one cared to look. It was too awkward, too painful.
When the DFB published a centenary history in 2000 which glossed over the 1930s, the outcry prompted it to commission a study by university lecturer Nils Havermann, whose Fussball underm
Hakenkreuz (Football Under the Swastika) was the first of a series of studies delving deeper and deeper into the mire.
Havermann’s work did not escape criticism for telling the “who, what and when” of Nazi infiltration and control but not the “why”; the reasoning and morality, or lack of it.
During the Nazi era, a policeman, Felix Linnemann was president of the DFB, from 1925 until 1945. According now to the DFB: “[Linnemann] as head of the Hanover Criminal Police Control Centre, was directly involved in the rounding up of Sinti and Roma, which was the preliminary stage for their deportation to Auschwitz.
“Several hundred people, due to an instruction signed by Linnemann, were deported to the extermination camp and killed there.”
A leading referee in the inter-war years, Peter “Peco” Bauwens was second in significance after Linemann. He joined the Nazi Party in 1933 but was later expelled because his wife was Jewish.
Bauwens tried to engineer a German takeover of FIFA. He was a friend of its German general-secretary, Ivo Schricker, but their relationship cooled after Schricker rebuffed Bauwens’ proposals to increase Germany’s places on the executive committee and in voting power.
After the war Bauwens became president of the recreated DFB and survived controversy over what was labelled a “Sieg Heil speech” at a dinner to celebrate the 1954 World Cup victory. He retired in 1960 and that may have been the point at which German football decided to draw a line under the past.
That line may have held but it could not hold for ever.