German football hero who lost life at Auschwitz
Julius Hirsch among great names to be honoured in Stamford Bridge mural
Looking down from the mural on the West Stand at Stamford Bridge is the late Julius Hirsch, a great Germany international whose career began just a few years after the creation of Chelsea Football Club, and whose life story – once heard – is impossible to forget.
A left-sided goalscorer who made his international debut as a 19-year-old in an era when national team appearances were scarce, and the German game was years behind others in Europe, Hirsch was discovered by an Englishman, William Townley. He was a former England international and Blackburn Rovers FA Cup winner who became a famous coach in Germany – a reverse Jurgen Klopp if you will – and gave Hirsch his first game for his hometown club Karlsruher FV (KFV).
Then there was Edgar Chadwick, part of the Everton team who were league champions in 1891, whom the new Deutscher Fussball-Bund wanted to appoint as its first national team manager before the Dutch poached him instead. Hirsch scored four goals for Germany against Chadwick’s Holland in a 5-5 draw in Zwolle in March 1912. In the 1930s, Scot Jimmy Lawrence was appointed KFV manager although by then life was very different for Hirsch.
Hirsch was murdered at Auschwitz, declared dead as of May 8, 1945. He was the first Jew to play football for Germany – the only other being his friend, team-mate and business partner Gottfried Fuchs. Hirsch is on the right side of the Chelsea mural looking across at Arpad Weisz, the Hungary international who died in the same camp, and British prisoner-ofwar Ron Jones, “the Auschwitz goalkeeper” who survived and lived to 102. Chelsea’s anti-Semitism campaign coincides with Holocaust Memorial Day on Monday. Hirsch’s story is a crucial part of it.
We are indebted to his biographer Werner Skrentny, who pieced together the life of one of Germany’s first international stars, younger than those great Victorian-born England goalscorers Steve Bloomer and Vivian Woodward but just as significant. Skrentny deduces that a 15-year-old Hirsch would likely have been in the crowd at Karlsruher’s Englanderplatz in 1907 to see Oxford University play KFV, a game organised by Townley in a city that had become the centre of the 1900s German football boom.
Fuchs, three years older than Hirsch, made his KFV debut that day but it was not long before they were in the same side, part of an attacking trio with Fritz Forderer who won a national title in 1910. The club had been established by Jewish businessman Walther Bensemann, although the players were all unpaid amateurs who had full-time jobs, in
Hirsch’s case with a leather goods manufacturer.
He did, however, receive 10 Deutschmarks a day and complimentary second-class train travel as a Germany international. Hirsch won another championship with SpVgg Furth, a big team of the era. He played for Germany at the 1912
Olympics in Stockholm. He was just 22 when the First World War began.
Hirsch volunteered with the Royal Bavarian Landwehr Infantry Regiment No 12, 5th company. He was awarded an Iron Cross (second class) in 1919. So, too, was his brother Leopold, who was killed at Flanders in 1916. Another brother, Max, was originally turned down for service because of blindness in one eye but as the numbers dwindled he too was called up.
After the war, as his playing career ended, Julius, with Max and Fuchs, tried to convert the family textile business into a sports good company but Sigfa Sport failed and the brothers were forced to declare bankruptcy. The Dassler brothers, Adi and Rudoph, who created Adidas and Puma respectively, had better fortune. They joined the Nazi Party in 1933, the year of Adolf Hitler’s appointment as chancellor. In April that year, Skrentny says that Julius read in the Stuttgart Sportbericht newspaper that his club KFV had signed up to the DFB edict to expel all Jewish members.
The Jewish president of Bayern Munich, Kurt Landauer, was forced out, so too Jeno Konrad, the coach of FC Nuremberg, and many other prominent Jewish figures in football. Skrentny quotes Julius’s resignation letter to KFV. “I would like to say,” he wrote, “that in this brutal German nation, so hated around the world, there are decent patriotic people including German Jews who have demonstrated their good faith through their actions and their bloodshed”.
In the following years he suffered a breakdown and attempted to take his own life. He recovered, nursed by his wife Ellen, who was born a Christian, and with whom he agreed a strategy that they hoped would save their children’s lives. They divorced, the children reverted to Ellen’s maiden name and Julius moved out. Although the Hirsch children were eventually deported to the Therienstadt camp in what is now the Czech Republic, they and their mother survived the war.
Hirsch was deported to Auschwitz aged 50 on March 1, 1943. He was accompanied to the station at
Karlsruhe by his daughter Esther, then 14, who wanted those last few moments with her father. It was the station from which, 32 years earlier, he had embarked for Zwolle as the teenage goalscorer from one of the city’s two great teams of the era, to represent his country’s new national team. Fuchs, also a decorated First World War hero, escaped Germany via England and lived in Canada as Godfrey Fuchs until his death, aged 82, in 1972.
The last of the forward line of the KFV title-winning team of 1910 was Forderer who became a teacher and coach in retirement. He also joined the Nazi Party in 1942 and his last job was managing a team made up of men in the 3rd SS-Totenkopf-Standarte, the guards at the Buchenwald camp near Weimar where 56,000 people were murdered. Skrentny notes that when Forderer became ill and eventually died in 1952, aged 64, he was sent medication from friends in
West Germany.
Not until 2005 did the DFB inaugurate a prize named in honour of Hirsch, awarded to those who encourage peace and understanding through football.
It took deca decades for his story, and those of the t Jews who played such a key role in the birth of one o of the greatest football n nations on earth, to be recognised. Now, 128 years y after his birth, birt Hirsch’s name adorns ado the side of a famous fam football stadium, stad for what he represents rep but also for, he would surely wish to be noted, his great achievements a on the pit pitch in a bygone age.
Hirsch left the same platform to Auschwitz that he had embarked from to play for the German national side