Soccer under the Swastika by Kevin E. Simpson

Author:Kevin E. Simpson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2012-03-15T04:00:00+00:00

The yard referred to by Miklós Nyiszli in his memoir is located behind Crematorium II, and on the east side of Crematorium III, in the camp known as “B2f,” where there was a sports ground that enabled the kapos and the Vorarbeiter (labor foremen) to pass the time and, to some observers, work off the excess calories they had confiscated from the thousands of people attempting to survive by the slimmest of margins within the killing center.[15] As information about the camps around Auschwitz gradually seeped into the world’s consciousness, Allied planes began to target the industrial sites adjacent to Birkenau. A number of the aerial photographs taken of the Birkenau death camp reveal the staggering size of the camp, but none of these reveals any sports fields. Yet it is not likely that such areas would have needed to be more than simple flat spaces for “sports” events to take place. Probably the best aerial picture, taken by the Allies on August 25, 1944, shows the yards behind Crematorium II and the east side of Crematorium III, the site of the most widely discussed football matches at Auschwitz. Adam Cyra, historian at the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum, said this main football pitch was intentionally set up to the right of the Birkenau train ramp: “For people who were about to die, the vision of prisoners playing football against the Kapos was meant to be reassuring.”[16]

Primo Levi further is widely acknowledged as having popularized this account of the SK versus SS match from Nyiszli’s memoir, and he doubts that such a match ever took place with any class of prisoner as this would violate the racial codes of the camp. But from testimonies of the few who played there, we know such matches did take place. Levi also believes that only these “crematorium ravens”[17] could enter the field of play as near equals of the SS men. Despite their seemingly shared complicity in the killing at Birkenau, these football matches at the doorstep of death, at least for a fleeting moment, reduced the distance between perpetrator and victim.

Yet the very existence of the Sonderkommando meant that, in the Nazi worldview, the Jewish workers of the Sonderkommando were “dirtied with their own blood” and, like the biblical Cain, had killed their own brothers.[18] But closer scrutiny, benefiting from subsequent revelations about soccer in Auschwitz, exposes the truth that such competitions were yet another means by which the Nazi elite expressed their utter contempt for the prisoners. Because there were several other football matches in Auschwitz-Birkenau pitting the SS against different Jewish prisoner groups (e.g., Terezín transfers, new Hungarian arrivals, and gypsy teams), none of which would have been a part of this “grey zone,” these matches meant perpetuation of the racial domination built into the very structure of the operations of the camps. And because the SS were always victorious, the illusion of racial superiority was maintained. More than mere entertainment, the soccer matches at Auschwitz existed as sacraments of degradation and domination for the SS.

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