http://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic. ... r&start=15
on which they claimed that a number of Ukrainian soccer players were executed by the German occupiers for daring to defeat a German team at a public match in August 1942.
At the time I wrote that the episode sounded like an urban myth, and now at last I have found what is most likely to be the truth.
That likely truth is found in the book "Harvest of Despair: Life and Death in Ukraine Under Nazi Rule", by Karel C Berkhoff, published in 2004 by the Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
Berkhoff's book is neither pro-German nor pro-Soviet, and obviously the Harvard University Press would not publish an apologia for the German occupation.
Here is the relevant passage in the book, in the chapter "Popular Culture" (pp. 202-203):
So it would appear that the urban legend of heroic Soviet soccer-players defying the Gestapo was born out of a number of facts that were grotesquely distorted for propaganda purposes.Sports played a small role in people's lives. Initially, Melnykites [ = supporters of one of the two factions into which the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists was split] in Kiev created the Sich, a sporting organisation that was used to stimulate Ukrainian nationalism. The German authorities quickly suppressed it. As for individual sports, some boxing matches are known to have taken place in Kiev in July and August 1942, but swimming in the Dnieper River in Kiev was banned from September 4, 1942. The only sport that received permission to undergo some organisaed development was football. In one Left Bank district, there were regular football games between Ukrainians and Germa soldiers even though the district commissar [= the local representative of the German civilian administration] told the local [Wehrmacht] commander angrily that German-Ukrainian sporting events were not allowed.
In 1942, several football teams competed in the Zenit stadium at 24 Kerosynna Street in Kiev. The team called Rukh was apparently the successor to the Sich and perhaps included Schuma [= members of the Ukrainian auxiliary police recruited by the German occupiers]. Start and Almaz, two other teams, were made up of players who worked at the bread and the jewelry factories. From June 1942, Start played four matches against German teams (antiaircraft gunners, pilots and railroad employees) and three against Hungarian teams, thereby attracting German, Hungarian and Kievan spectators. Natives and Hungarians paid five karbovantsi for each occasion. Start played its ninth and final match on Sunday, August 16, when it routed Rukh eight to zero. Two days ater, the [German] Security Police arrrested eight Start players and accused them of being NKVD agents. The charge was not entirely groundless, for many Start players had been in Soviet Ukraine's leading soccer team, Dynamo Kiev, which Ukraine's NKVD had sponsored (other People's Commissariats sponsored other teams): and during the German invasion, at least one of the players had worked for the NKVD as a car mechanic. Twenty-four days later, all but one of the arrested were sent to Syrets concentration camp near Babi Yar, where four of them eventually were shot. The other three Start players escaped, two thanks to police guards at a shoe factory where they were working, who deliberately looked the other way.
Berkhoof's quoted sources:
1. NDB (= Naukovo-dovidkova bibloioteka tsentral'nykh derzhavnykh arkhiviv Ukrainy = Scholarly Reference Library of the Central State Archives of Ukraine, Kiev), collection "Afishy ta plakaty okupatsiinoho periodu", 297-298sa, 300-301sa, 303-306sa, 729-732sa;
2. Nove Ukrains'ke Slovo (= the Reichskommissariat's one daily newspaper, originally published by Melnykites in Zhytomyr, later taken over by the German occupation authorities ), August 18,1942, 4;
3. TsDAHOU (= Tsentral'nyi derzhavnyi arkhiv hromads'kykh ob''iednan' Ukrainy = Central State Archives of Civic Organisations of Ukraine, Kiev), f. 166 (Komisiia z pytan' istorii velykoi vitchyznianoi viiny pry akademii nauk URSR. Obshchaia chast'), op. 3, 246/9-14: Sviridovskii;
4. D M Malakov, ed., Kyiv 1941-1943; Fotoal'bom (Kiev, 2000), 173;
5. Oleksander Skotsen', Z futbolom u svit: Spomyny (Toronto, 1985), 258, 277-280.
Those facts are:
- There was a soccer team called "Start", containing many former members of the team "Dynamo Kiev".
- The team "Start" did play a series of matches against teams consisting of German and Hungarian personnel.
- At the last match played by "Start", on 16 August 1942, it convincingly defeated the opposing team.
- Eight members of "Start" were arrested by the German Security Police two days after that last match, and taken to Syrets concentration camp.
- Four of those arrested were eventually shot.
The elements of falsification are:
- The last match played by "Start", which it won 8-0, was against a German team. In fact, it was against another Ukrainian team, "Rukh".
(It may well be that "Start" was linked in the public mind with the Soviet system, given that many of its players were from the NKVD-sponsored "Dynamo Kiev", while "Rukh" was linked with the anti-Soviet Ukrainian nationalists, so that the match was interpreted as a victory of Communism over Ukranian nationalism, and that that "victory" was transmuted in Soviet propaganda into a victory over the German occupiers).
- The eight members of "Start" were arrested because they won the last match. In fact they were arrested for being NKVD agents, a charge that may have been true given the NKVD sponsorship of "Dynamo Kiev".
It is to be hoped that the facts outlined in the book by Berkhoff will put an end to the fable of the heroic Dynamo soccer-players.