Kevin E. Simpson. Soccer under the Swastika: Stories of Survival and Resistance during the Holocaust. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2016. 368 pp. $40.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-4422-6162-4.
Reviewed by Daniel Logemann (FSU Jena, Historisches Institut, Europäisches Kolleg Jena)
Published on H-Poland (June, 2018)
Commissioned by Anna Muller (University of Michigan - Dearborn)
The title, Soccer under the Swastika, points to the wide scope of Kevin E. Simpson’s book, which is intended for a broad audience. The book deals with soccer during the reign of National Socialists, and as the subtitle suggests, it also delivers case studies from ghettos, concentration camps, and occupied territories. Readers will get many perspectives influenced by the author’s soccer enthusiasm rather than a dense analysis of soccer under National Socialism. Simpson’s writing style is compelling but unfortunately he tries to cover too many topics from all over occupied Europe.
The introduction presents soccer players from different backgrounds, three of them “German”: Julius Hirsch, a German Jew murdered in Auschwitz; Fritz Szepan who played on the German national team during the war (and whose family migrated to the Ruhr area from Polish territories); and Ernst (in Polish Ernest) Willimowski from Silesia, who played for Polish, Silesian, and German national teams. Instead of exploring such transnational perspectives and gaining a better inside look into multilayered histories, Simpson aims to cast “a penetrating light over the darkness that is the Holocaust by celebrating the survivors who played the beautiful game” (p. xxviii). Grouping all kinds of people and topics together, Simpson resigns from a scientific approach and shifts to moral evaluations. In addition, using the term “Holocaust” as a code for very different phenomena, he simplifies many problems regarding methodology and language.
The first two chapters examine the background of soccer under European dictatorships and especially National Socialism. The arguments that propaganda exploited soccer for politics and that Germany developed soccer as a fight corresponding to racist ideology could have been bound together more clearly with the Holocaust. Unfortunately, the chapters are a brainstorming of what happened in German cup matches; during world championships, which Benito Mussolini’s Italy won in 1934 and 1938; and in German film director Leni Riefenstahl’s sport films (to name only a few examples). As a result, the chapters do not show how such developments influenced soccer in camps and ghettos.
In his examination of the 1941 so-called death match in Kiev between a Ukrainian team comprising former Dynamo Kiev players and a German Flakhelfer team, Simpson does not research matters connected to the Holocaust but tries to reflect on Soviet myths regarding the match. His description repeats many questionable perspectives that do not belong in the standard of historical scholarship.[1] For example, he writes that the situation after the match was so dangerous that Ukrainians almost fled from the field. This scenario does not correspond with a photograph taken after the match in which German and Ukrainian players pose in harmony (an image that was not shown in Soviet times). Simpson, as this case shows, often does not use new literature and additionally does not document many of his findings with references.
The chapters focusing on soccer in concentration camps and ghettos integrate the history of soccer in occupied countries. Simpson dilutes the term “Holocaust” in his discussion, for example, when he states: “The Holocaust came to PSV Eindhoven when Frederik Jacques Philips, son of the cofounder of Philips, opened a factory inside Vught soon after the camp was established” (p. 190). Yet in the end, many Jews were deported from the Vught camp to the killing centers, and PSV was the club attached to the Philips factory. Besides using such cursory associations only as rhetorical devices, he also does not elaborate on the connections among soccer, occupation, repression, and the murder of Jews in a way that would shed light on the dynamics, processes, and connections during war.
Simpson aims to show the ambiguity of playing soccer during war. Soccer was an instrument in the German hands. The Germans determined the rules, yet players and spectators enjoyed the sport and some escaped brutal repression and threat of death. In many cases, rivalry between occupiers and the subjugated could be understood as a form of resistance. In addition, players in camps profited from extra food, safer living conditions, cigarettes distributed by German or prisoner functionaries, and so on. Simpson cites numerous survivors and players who describe soccer as a beautiful game that allowed participants to survive longer or to “stay human” (p. 272). It is these two words from a text of survivor and player Arnošt Lustig with which the book ends. Unfortunately instead of scrutinizing this statement further, Simpson takes it at face value and makes it his main thesis.
Simpson portrays the playing of soccer in concentration camps in the territory of Germany, occupied Poland, Austria (Mauthausen), the Netherlands (Westerbork), and Terezín. Especially for Austria, where soccer was condemned to be “Jewish,” and in the Netherlands, where league soccer continued more or less, Simpson gives a picture of the sport in occupied society. Indeed, an advantage of the text is how Simpson connects more general historical events to the concrete fate of soccer players. The book contains dozens of wonderful micro-histories about people and places. There is, for example, the quite incredible story of Jewish soccer player Ignaz Feldmann, which shows great history and history from below in one image. One of the initiators of soccer playing in Westerbork, Feldman was deported through Terezín and other camps to the Buchenwald subcamp Ohrdruf. Photographs (unfortunately not published in the reviewed book) depict him in conversation with General Dwight D. Eisenhower after liberation. Simpson also includes the story of a later FIFA referee who survived the camps because the SS chose him as a referee for camp soccer. However, by presenting these interesting stories one after another, the analytical sharpness gets lost; Simpson does not explain and challenge differences or similarities between theses micro-histories. He writes, for example: “Soccer in places like Mauthausen takes on profound meaning as a means of survival, certainly, but also as an attempt by individuals to reestablish order and restore some moral authority to one’s limited choices within the camp.” One could generally agree. Unfortunately, analyses of practices to understand the mechanism leading to such a reestablishment is missing. In the end, even after using terms like “ambiguity,” Simpson still shows pure moral outrage about the fact that “shockingly, in two of these death camps, Auschwitz and Majdanek, ... football ... entertained” (p. 131).
The tendency to descriptiveness, the mainstream, and moralization instead of analysis increases when he incorporates allusions. An eye-witness describes Terezín as “hell’s waiting room” whereas Simpson calls Westerbork “death’s waiting room” (pp. 233, 191). Such simplifications, even if deeply felt by survivors, do not help in grasping historical events. The same is true with claiming that Mauthausen was Austria’s Auschwitz. The book also reads as a Who’s Who of the Holocaust. Even if they have no connection to the topic, names like Anne Frank, Joseph Mengele, Oskar Schindler, Rudolf Höß, Primo Levi, and the Bielski brothers are dropped.
Simpson is unaware of the newest historical research. The assessment that the Wannsee conference “set in motion ... killing centers in Poland” has been largely refuted and Auschwitz I was not founded as a “detention center for Russian prisoners of war” (p. 137). Minor errors also sometimes irritate. Imre Kertész was never deported to Terezín, the Polish club Zagłębie is not from Lublin but from Lubin, and Dresden is not located exactly between Paris and Moscow. In times when the Polish government plans to penalize the use of such terms as “Poland’s killing centers” (p. 31) or “Polish killing fields” (title of chapter 6), historical awareness of who organized the Holocaust and where the camps were located should be more accurate, too.
Note
[1]. Compare Thomas Urban, “Der Mythos vom Kiewer Todesspiel,” in Vom Konflikt zur Konkurrenz: Deutsch-polnisch-ukrainische Fußballgeschichte, ed. Diethelm Blecking, Lorenz Pfeiffer, and Robert Traba (Göttingen: Verlag Die Werkstatt, 2014), 205‑221.
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Citation:
Daniel Logemann. Review of Simpson, Kevin E., Soccer under the Swastika: Stories of Survival and Resistance during the Holocaust.
H-Poland, H-Net Reviews.
June, 2018.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=50404
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