“The Führer is very agitated,” Joesef Goebbels wrote in his diary on August 7, 1936. “I am almost unable to control myself,” the Nazi Propaganda Minister went on. But Goebbels wasn’t on the receiving end of one of Hitler’s notoriously cantankerous outbursts for no reason; they had been watching a football match.
Buoyed by Germany’s convincing 9-0 win against Luxembourg in the opening round of the 1936 Olympics football tournament, the Nazi leadership were persuaded to watch their country’s quarter-final against Norway. Senior officials, including Goebbels, Rudolf Hess and Hermann Göring, watched alongside the Führer himself and 55,000 spectators at the Poststadion in Moabit.
Much to the crowd’s surprise, 26-year-old forward Magnar Isaksen gave Norway the lead after only seven minutes. “The German spectators can hardly believe their own eyes,” cried the Norwegian commentator Peder Christian Andersen when Isaksen scored a second goal just before full-time. “And all this happening in the heart of Hitler’s Germany.” Before the final whistle, the Führer reportedly leapt from his seat, red with rage and left the ground, never to return to a football match again.
The Postadion Today
Anyone who looks through the latticed fencing separating the Poststadion from the neighbouring Fritz-Schloß-Park today would find it hard to believe that such a momentous match happened there. The ground shows no trace of its former significance and is now home to Berliner AK 07, who play in Germany’s fifth division.
Football was but one of several sports and physical pursuits that the Nazis tried to use to advance their brand of fascism.
Originally built in 1929 as the sports complex for the German postal service (Reichspost), the Poststadion hosted its first international football match in December 1933, when around 30,000 spectators watched Germany beat Poland 1-0 in a friendly. The following year, it hosted the German Championship final between Schalke 04 and 1. FC Nürnberg. The stadium wasn’t only a football venue; in 1935, legendary German boxer Max Schmeling defeated Paulino Uzcudun there in front of a packed house.
Football Under the Nazis
Like most areas of public life, sport was brought under Nazi control after Hitler’s rise to power in January 1933 – and football was no exception. The regime took over the German Football Association (DFB) in July of the same year, consolidating its control of the game. “Football was but one of several sports and physical pursuits that the Nazis tried to use to advance their brand of fascism,” Dr. Kevin Simpson, lecturer at John Brown University and author of Soccer Under the Swastika, explains. “The mass appeal of sport was well-suited to a political era in which peak physical fitness was embraced as a pathway to national greatness on the battlefield.”
Football’s popularity with the working class meant it could reach an audience like few other pursuits, so the Nazis made every effort to tie themselves to the game. The national team donned swastika-adorned home shirts from 1934, while the stadium in Stuttgart, which also hosted international matches, was renamed the Adolf-Hitler-Kampfbahn.
“Even though Hitler had a negative view of football, he and the propaganda minister Goebbels saw the successes of the Italian Fascists in their use of football and advancing their ideology,” Simpson says. After FIFA chose Italy to host the 1934 World Cup, Mussolini invested in state-of-the-art stadiums and even subsidised travel for overseas supporters, ensuring the tournament received favourable coverage in the foreign press.
1936 Summer Olympics
When the Nazis were awarded the 1936 Summer Olympics, Hitler saw a similar opportunity to manipulate sports to his own political ends, and it became the focal point of Nazi propaganda efforts. The 1932 Games in Los Angeles had been the first to surpass one million spectators, while the Berlin Olympics drew three million and was the first major sporting event to be broadcast over the radio.
The Berlin Games were brilliantly stage-managed. Signs of Jewish persecution were removed outside of the city.
“The Olympics were a way for the Nazis to find validation for their movement on the international stage,” Simpson says. “The Berlin Games were brilliantly stage-managed. Signs of Jewish persecution were removed outside of the city.” Foreign athletes were handed brochures displaying ‘unmolested Jews’ eating in Berlin cafés. While presenting an image of a tolerant society, the Nazis opened Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp on the outskirts of the city where tens of thousands of people would be systematically murdered.
Football, which had emerged as a global phenomenon by the mid-1930s, was reinstated to the programme after its absence in Los Angeles. The Poststadion was selected as a host stadium alongside Albert Speer’s newly designed colossus, the Olympiastadion, where Jesse Owens famously won gold in the 200 metres. Despite a surprise third-place finish at the 1934 World Cup, the German team were by no means the favourites going into the tournament. Italy had emphatically won their home World Cup and Austria’s ‘Wunderteam’ were seen as the best in the world.
They were still expected to beat Norway, who hadn’t even entered the tournament. The Norwegian team was made up of amateurs. Odd Frantzen, a 23-year-old dockworker from Bergen who had never played an international match, was caught drinking beer in his room in the Olympic village by Norwegian coach Asbjørn Halvorsen. The game carried an extra weight for the German team and not just because of Hitler’s presence. The Norwegian Olympic delegation had refused to give the Hitler salute at the opening ceremony. ‘If ever a match was worth winning, it was this one,’ read a match report in the Hamburger Tageblatt.
The German team disappointed the home crowd, failing to even register a shot in the first half. The 2-0 defeat was described by the reporter as ‘the most painful day in German football history’. The loss undermined the regime’s aim of showcasing German athletic superiority. It was made worse by the fact that both Norwegian goals were scored by a player with a Jewish-sounding name. Norway went on to finish third in the tournament, losing to eventual champions Italy in the semi-final.
In spite of the disappointing result, the 1936 Games were undoubtedly a propaganda success for the Nazis. Fears of a boycott from the US and the Netherlands did not materialise and Germany finished top of the medal table. The defeat to Norway was an embarrassment for the regime and carried implications for German football. Coach Otto Nerz was sacked soon afterwards and the Nazi regime tightened its control over the game, putting youth football in control of the Hitler Youth and eventually dissolving the DFB itself in 1940.
The Breslau-Elf
The national team experienced a brief renaissance under new coach Sepp Herberger. The so-called ‘Breslau-Elf’ were boosted by an influx of Austrian players into the German side after the Anschluss. Their success was short-lived, however, and the side was knocked out by Switzerland in the first round of the 1938 World Cup. “Once the war began, football lost any value to the Nazis,” Simpson explains. “The team was slipping in quality and put simply, football was no longer a top priority.”
In 1942, Germany lost 3-2 to Sweden on Hitler’s birthday, infuriating Goebbels. As the Nazi Secretary of Foreign Affairs noted, “because winning a football match is more important to people than the capture of a city in the East, such an event must be prohibited for the sake of national mood.” The ball rolled on long into the war with international matches often played as a way of asserting dominance over newly occupied territories. Germany’s final international match during wartime took place in November 1942 against Slovakia, four months into the Battle of Stalingrad.
Once the war began, football lost any value to the Nazis.
Damaged by Allied bombing in 1945, the Poststadion required extensive renovation after the war. It began hosting football matches again in 1952 when Tennis Borussia Berlin played a friendly against Rapid Vienna. As well as football, the Poststadion hosted everything from the Berlin gymnastics festival to model aircraft competitions. Hertha BSC played their home matches at the ground from 1986 to 1989 during the club’s time in the lower leagues, but the Olympiastadion was predominantly chosen to host major sporting events in West Berlin.
Restored in 2003 and again in 2010, the Poststadion now forms part of a larger sporting complex in Moabit. Alongside the ground, the SportPark Poststadion includes several artificial pitches, a tennis court and even a wellness centre, but not far from the massage tables lurk the ghosts of Berlin’s Nazi past.
