Chelsea Nazis and Bayern Munich – the Jewish club
CAN Chelsea do it? Can the Blues defeat Bayern Munich on their own ground and win the Champions League? Will the British press resort to type and remind one and all that Bayern are German, and thus descendants of the Nazi spirit? Sure, the tabloid hacks are driving BMWs and wearing Hugo Boss clothes, but this is football. The Sun says “NEO-NAZI soccer thugs in Germany are plotting to ambush Chelsea fans”. No, not those British neo-Nazi thugs who support Chelsea, the ones who sing songs about Auschwitz and the Holocaust to Spurs fans, and attack Anton Ferdinand for being black. No. And not those new Chelsea fans called Henry, Camilla and Chuck, either. The German ones.
The tabloids love to talk the threat of Nazi-inspired violence. It’s is if – as if! – the jingoistic sods can’t wait for some to happen.
PS – Bayern is no sink of racism. Kurt Landauer, a Bavarian Jew, was the club’s president from 1919. A Jew named Richard Dombi managed Bayern to its first championship in 1932. Dietrich Schulze-Marmeling, a German historian, noted: “Bayern Munich was like a little island in a sea of antisemitism.” Things changed in 1933, when Jews were banned from football. But unlike 1860 Munich, Bayern did not collaborate with the Nazis. On Kristallnacht 1938, Landauer was seized and imprisoned in Dachau.
(The Nazis saw football as Jewish plot. A Guido von Mengden wrote in the NS-Sport journal, a Nazi party publication: “For years now, this poison [football] has been disseminated among the people with typical Jewish sleight of hand.”)
Landauer’s ordeal in Dachau lasted 33 days, after which time he was released on account of having seen action for Germany in the First World War. He fled to Switzerland. In 1947, he returned to be Bayern Munich’s club president once more. Yeah, Bayern wanted him back. Indeed, in 1943, some of the club’s players went to Switzerland to meet him – and that really cheesed off the Nazis.
So, about those Nazis running riot in Germany…
Lead photo: In 2010, the Daily Star spotted the new Germany kit and yelled “Return of ze black shirts”. Black shirts worn by the SS and the, erm, British Union of Fascists, the headquarters of which were in a former teachers’ training college on Kings Road. You know, in Chelsea…
Meanwhile, away from a few Nazi-mad knobs in the media and their bedrooms, everyone else is just up for a good time:
Posted: 19th, May 2012 | In: Sports Comments (6) | TrackBack | Permalink
