I’m sure this old newspaper clipping from 1934 has nothing to do with current events. Nothing at all.
German Football Club Banned For 12 Months.’
BERLIN Sunday
The Karlsruhe Football Club has been prohibited from playing during 1934 because the team failed to give the Nazi salute when entering the field to play against a French club from Nancy at Metz in December.
The failure of the team to give the salute is alleged to be due to the Frenchmen threatening that they would not play and the Germans would receive no compensation if the salute was given because it was feared that the spectators would riot.
All sports clubs were forbidden to take part in French engagements until the incident had been settled.
Don’t ignore the clear distinction between refusing to salute and refusing to stand!
Treumpland, Treumpland über alles,
Über alles in der Welt…..
Also, it’s soccer, not real Amurican Foobawl. Completely different thing.
The countries are also completely different. That’s a right-wing state with little regard for democracy that hates non-white people.
To be fair, as far as the article says, the Karlsruhe team were refusing to salute because the team from Nancy wouldn’t play against them otherwise. That’s not exactly taking a moral stand against the Nazi state. I wouldn’t be at all surprised to find out that many of the players did see it as a moral stand, and that the article is minimising that aspect, but that’s not what it says.
#3 PZ Yes soccer (football) the nearest thing we have to a global game, and increasingly with a women’s presence. My grandma played women’s football between the wars it was massive in the uk, played in front of huge crowds. The F A eventually stopped it because as amateurs the women couldn’t keep the gate money and gave it to striking miners. It is good to see it’s getting really popular again
The historic situation is very likely a quite different than the NFL ban. This was not a moral act of defiance by a soccer team.
The source of the 1934 article appears to be a report by the Berlin reporter of “the Daily Telegraph”, versions of which were widely published by newspapers world-wide on January 8 and 9 1934.
According to the reporter a football team from Karlsruhe was prohibited from playing abroad in 1934 because they did not use the ‘Hitlergruss’ in a game in France. Its not that they had a principled problem, but that they figured that “yelling ‘heil hitler’ on French soil would make them unpopular”. As a result they had the predicament that being tactful abroad gets them into trouble nationally. It was not an act of defiance.
There are obviously errors and inconsistencies in the reporting: The team was not banned from playing, only from playing abroad. And there is ambiguity about the team ‘Karlsruhe Football Club’. Karlsruhe had two teams in 1933: ‘KFC Phoenix’ and ‘VfB Muehlburg’. I could not yet find any reference to the incident in other sources other than from the Daily Telegraph. I found no reference in German language newspapers, nor in other (german-language) historical resources that chronicle the soccer club history.
Behind a paywall:
https://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/search/results/1934-01-01/1934-01-10?basicsearch=%2bkarlsruhe&freesearch=karlsruhe&contenttype=article&retrievecountrycounts=false&sortorder=score
Free (but in Dutch):
https://www.delpher.nl/nl/kranten/view?coll=ddd&query=karlsruhe&cql%5B%5D=%28date+_gte_+%2201-12-1933%22%29&cql%5B%5D=%28date+_lte_+%2220-01-1934%22%29&facets%5Btype%5D%5B%5D=artikel&facets%5Bspatial%5D%5B%5D=Landelijk&redirect=true&page=1&maxperpage=50&identifier=ddd%3A010662152%3Ampeg21%3Aa0048&resultsidentifier=ddd%3A010662152%3Ampeg21%3Aa0048
While we are on the subject of football and non Democratic states ,Beria ,Stalin’s head of the secret police had the manager of a rival football team arrested during WW2 .
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/20518141
This is the story according to the BBC .
#7 neuzelaar:
Not really the point is it? It’s the fact that enforced ceremony existed, and exists to this day in the NFL.
How is that not a principled stance? Be it for selfish reasons or altruistic ones?
There was at least one player banned from playing for not showing the salute: Walter Pahl of the VfB Dobberzin (source in German)
The linked book also quotes one player saying that the salute had to be maintained during the entire national anthem
Pretty strained analogy if you ask me. An action by a government versus an action by a private enterprise? When the current administration starts jailing and fining professors for disrespect (as was described in the article directly below the one shown in the OP) then I’ll reconsider. But the NFL action has nothing to do with respect for the flag or the government and more to do with respect for the $$ that they’re afraid of losing if their fans start boycotting games.
Even the wretched Taliban did better than the Trump administration. In 2000, a Pakistani soccer team visiting Kandahar was assaulted by religious fanatics for baring their legs; they were kept in jail overnight and had their heads shaved. (That last part is especially weird since shaving their faces was another “crime.”)The regional Governor was incensed, and the central Kabul government offered an apology, stressing that guests should be treated well. I suspect that the perps were inhumanely treated by Kabul but I cannot exactly recall or quickly find the reference.
Point being: Even the Taliban … but why am I so surprised?
Thanks, and: I invite readers to see the article below the index article; people jailed for disrespecting Naziism.
Immortalized on snopes. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/german-football-club-banned-failing-give-nazi-salute/ The speed at which information is disseminated on the internet is crazy.