The Long Read: Football vs Fascism in the 1930s
As the world slid towards war in the 1930s, football was as much a part of the British policy of appeasement of anything else.
The spread of fascism across Central Europe never quite stretched as far as these shores, but the growth of international football gave a new outlet for those who understood the potential propaganda value of the sport, and how the Football Association reacted to this, spoke volumes about the political barometer of the times.
The Weimar Republic was formed by the abdication of Kaiser Wilhelm II as the leader of Germany on 9th November 1918. It endured five years of crisis, though financial collapse was inevitable upon losing the Great War, because Germany had decided to fund its participation entirely by borrowing, suspending its gold standard in the process.
Specifically, hyperinflation took hold. In 1914, a loaf of bread in Germany cost the equivalent of 13 pfennigs. Two years later, it cost 19 pfennigs. And by 1919, that same loaf was 26 pfennigs, doubling the pre-war price in five years. Bad, yes, but not alarming. But one year later, though... A loaf of bread in Germany cost 1 mark and 20 pfennigs, and by the end of 1923 it cost 3 billion marks.
The economy eventually re-stabilised with the issue of a new currency guaranteed by gold bonds, and the Weimar Republic spent its loan money from the American government sensibly, even showing signs of recovery during the second half of the decade before events elsewhere overtook it. Under the Dawes Plan, the German economy boomed in the late 1920s, paying reparations and increasing domestic production.
Germany's economy, however, was hit hard in 1929, when Congress discontinued the Dawes Plan loans, and by the effect of the stock market crash in October of that year. With loans to help rebuild the German economy now stopped, unemployment soared, especially in larger cities.
The Weimar Republic bore the brunt of public anger at the state of the economy and politics veered towards extremes. Successive elections, however, didn't seem able to break a state of parliamentary deadlock. In late 1932, though, a letter signed by leading industrialists was sent to the ailing President Hindenburg, urging him to appoint his rival in that year's presidential election to the chancellorship as leader of a government independent from parliamentary parties.
Adolf Hitler was sworn in as the Chancellor of Germany on the 30th January 1933, but he wasn't Europe's first fascist leader. He was predated by 11 years by Benito Mussolini, and Mussolini certainly understood the potential value of sport to an authoritarian government. He turned Italy's hosting of the 1934 World Cup into a showcase for the rebirth of Italian power, drawing on athletic imagery of the Roman Empire.
Throughout the tournament, Italy appeared to have a greater say in the running of things than even FIFA themselves. Mussolini dictated which referees would oversee each match and once on the field their behaviour immediately led to talk of corruption. The referees of two of Italy's matches were suspended by their home countries because of the poor standard of their officiating.
A referee who was reported to have headed the ball to an Italian player during the semi-final against Austria was brought back for the final and invited alone to meet Mussolini before the match. During the game, the Italians' aggressive style of play went unpunished and the home team ended up lifting the trophy.
The four home nations of England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland were not at that time members of FIFA, so beating them in the World Cup was impossible. But the British had been successful in maintaining the illusion that they were still the best in the world regardless. They picked and chose who they played. And they played against each other a lot.
Beating the British at their own game, as it was still considered by many at the time, was excellent publicity, in no small part because the British were not the best in the world to anything like the extent to which they claimed, meaning that beating them wasn't a pipe dream for anything like a reasonably sized European team. Persuading an English club team, or better still the England national team, to visit could be both highly lucrative and very good publicity.
Touring club sides from the United Kingdom retained an air of glamour about them as well. Derby County were one of the strongest sides in English football of the era. They'd finished the 1933-34 season in fourth place in the First Division table, and a year earlier they'd reached the semi-finals of the FA Cup, losing narrowly to Manchester City. Four years earlier, they'd finished as runners-up in the First Division to Sheffield Wednesday.
When the invitation came to participate in a four-match tour of Germany at the end of the season, there was little reason for anyone to believe that there was anything untoward going on. The team and officials travelled by boat to Ostend in Belgium before continuing their journey by bus.
Advice from the Foreign Office before the club left had been that the players should give a Nazi salute before the start of each match of the Tour. After all, the political situation was sensitive across Europe following the Great Depression, and no one wanted to upset the new Chancellor of Germany now, did they?
But as soon as the players arrived in Germany, it became clear that there was something unusual going on. As outside-left Dave Holford would later explain:
Everywhere we went, the swastika was flying. If you said good morning, they'd reply with Heil Hitler. If you went into a cafe and said good morning, they'd reply with Heil Hitler. It was a country where everything had a military overtone. Even then, it occurred to us that this was a nation preparing for war.
There were four matches planned for the tour, to be held in Cologne, Dusseldorf, Frankfurt and Dortmund, with each set of opponents playing under the name of a Germany XI.
The Derby County players, however, had seen for themselves the cult that seemed to be building up around this new German leader, and were uncomfortable at the thought of playing into his publicity machine. Full-back and captain George Collin later explained what happened.
We told the manager, George Joby, that we didn't want to do it. He spoke with the directors, but they said that the British ambassador had insisted we must. He said that the Foreign Office were afraid of causing an international incident if we refused. It would be a snub to Hitler at a time when international relations were so delicate. So we did as we were told, all except our goalkeeper, Jack Kirby, that is.
Jack Kirby had been born in 1910 and started out playing in the Leicestershire Senior League for amateur club Newhall United while working in the mines before signing professional forms with Derby County in 1929. By 1934, he was an established goalkeeper with the team, but he was also a man of conviction and, despite the pressure from the directors of the club to try to avoid some form of diplomatic incident, he flat refused to take part when the time came for their first match in Frankfurt.
When the time came, wrote captain George Collin later, “he just kept his arm down and almost turned his back on the dignitaries.” At the time, nobody really noticed and nothing was said. It was only years later, with hindsight, that we can see what he was doing and the photograph. He's a lot better known for it now.
Looking at a picture of the Derby team lined up before a match on that tour now, what's more striking than anything else isn't so much the lack of salute, but the player pointedly turning his back on the German dignitaries. not saluting could have been covered up as an oversight lost in a melee of pre-match preparation but turning his back in such a manner seems like an unmistakable snub that no one could accidentally miss.
The sky didn't cave in. There's no record of Kirby being sanctioned over his behaviour and no diplomatic incident appears to have been caused. He stayed on the books at Derby County until August 1938, when he took over as the player-manager of Southern League Club Folkestone. The outbreak of war just over a year later curtailed his managerial ambitions, though, and Jack Kirby died in 1950, at the age of just 49.
The year after Kirby refused to salute, however, fascism came to England when Germany travelled to London to play an international friendly. But ignorance of Adolf Hitler and the state of Germany was becoming rapidly inexcusable by the end of 1935.
This was the year during which he ignored the Versailles Treaty and announced that Germany would rearm, before introducing the Nuremberg Laws, which made it illegal for Jews and non-Jews to have any form of relationship, a clear milestone on the path that ended at the gas chambers.
The decision to play the match caused a considerable amount of controversy at the time. The TUC called for it to be postponed and stated that German supporters should be banned from entering the country. London's Jewish community was understandably totally against the fixture, which was to be played, somewhat extraordinarily, at Tottenham Hotspur's White Hart Lane. Newspapers, as yellow in their journalism then as they are now, poured further fuel on the fire with a series of sensationalist articles about the match, and in particular, its build-up.
Secure in the knowledge that the FA weren't going to be calling it off, the TUC busied itself with how to make its presence felt in the days and weeks building up to the match. There was talk of demonstrations, or even a walkout during a Tottenham game, for which the TUC was criticised for adding to the increasingly tense atmosphere surrounding it all.
About 10,000 German supporters travelled to London in the end. Some laid a wreath at the Cenotaph. All, it was reported, were immaculately turned out and well behaved. With the Olympic Games to be held in Berlin a few months later, the German supporters had been instructed to be on their best behaviour, though it would be a little unfair on those that travelled to say that they were only behaving themselves because they were under orders to. The team itself, meanwhile, requested not to talk about politics. On the day of the match itself, there was no widespread disorder.
Leaflets printed in German were handed out by demonstrators outside the ground, and there were minor scuffles between pro-Nazi sympathisers and union members. But the game was played without trouble in front of a crowd of 60,000, with England winning 3-0.
Everybody had got what they wanted from it. The FA had reasserted English dominance over another pesky Central European upstart with ideas above its station. The Germans had shown that they weren't monsters. At the FA's dinner in London that evening, they all toasted the health of Adolf Hitler.
The game had been thrust into the middle of the tense political situation at the end of 1935, and found itself back there with the return fixture. England travelled to Berlin to play Germany in May 1938, just two months after the German invasion of Austria and four months before they took the Sudetenland.
England had followed the Germany match of December 1935 with a poor run of form, winning just two of their next eight matches before bouncing back to form with six straight wins. Just over a month before their trip to Berlin, though, they'd been beaten at Wembley by Scotland.
Germany crashed out of the Olympic Games in Berlin early on, but they still had cause to believe that they could give England a game. Their form had improved considerably over the previous couple of years, and the annexation of Austria had granted them access to the best players from one of the best teams in the world at that time.
And they were serious. Serious about football and serious about this match in particular. The German squad was given two weeks to prepare in a secluded training camp in the Black Forest, while the match itself was to be played out at the Olympic Stadium, which held 120,000 people. 400,000 people applied for tickets.
On the day of the match, Stanley Rous, the chairman of the FA, visited the England team to inform them that they would be expected to give the Nazi salute before the match as a sign of goodwill to their hosts. It didn't go down very well with the players, with captain Eddie Hapgood telling Rous what he could do with his Nazi salute, which involved, as Stanley Matthews would later succinctly put it in his autobiography, “putting it where the sun doesn't shine”. Only the intervention of Neville Henderson, the British ambassador in Berlin, managed to calm the players down.
Once out on the pitch, the teams lined up for the national anthems in front of a capacity crowd which contained Hermann Goering, Rudolf Hess and Josef Goebbels. But not Hitler, who had just returned from a trip to Italy and consequently missed the match. England won comfortably, 6-3.
The reaction at home was not particularly one of outrage; quite the opposite, on the part of the powers that be. The Foreign Office informed the FA that the government considered its pre-match request to have been fulfilled. The FA, for their part, awarded a canteen of cutlery to each of the players.
The press, meanwhile, focused on the match itself rather than the salute, which was reported matter-of-factly rather than as anything to comment upon. The German football team had been put in its place, and that was the most important thing of all. There was criticism, of course, but there is little indication of any widespread outrage. If the aim of it all was to normalise fascism, there's plenty of evidence to suggest that it had worked.
On 30th September 1938, an aeroplane touched down at Heston Aerodrome, just to the west of London, containing the British Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain. He was carrying a piece of paper which, he claimed, signified peace for our time. Hitler, who had annexed Austria earlier in the year, had vowed to invade Czechoslovakia on the 1st October 1938 in order to occupy the German-speaking Sudetenland. a move toward the creation of a Greater Germany.
Just two days before the deadline, he agreed to meet in Munich with Chamberlain, Benito Mussolini and the French President Edouard Deladier in order to discuss a diplomatic resolution to the crisis. The four leaders, without any input whatsoever from Czechoslovakia, agreed to cede the Sudetenland to Hitler, whilst Chamberlain separately drafted a non-aggression pact between Britain and Germany that Hitler signed.
More than 80 years on, the image of the England team lined up with their arms aloft retains its capacity to shock, but context is necessary when considering it. Firstly, we have to consider that the perspective of Nazism in the 21st century is very different to that of 1938 as a result of what happened after this moment. Tensions were high at that particular time, but the full horrors of fascism were yet to come.
None of this, of course, is to underplay the anti-Semitism that had been a fundamental part of that ideology since its very beginning. The Battle of Cable Street had come two years earlier, after all, and it was Jewish groups and trade unions who led the protests against the Nazis at White Hart Lane in 1935.
But the general atmosphere of the time was fearful of war, and understandably so. Anybody over the age of 30 could remember the Great War, and there was a gaping hole in society where 700,000 people should have been as a result of that. Furthermore, people knew that the available weaponry was considerably more fearful than it had been just two decades earlier.
We forget this, quite plausibly because it was carried out by our side, but the Second World War was only definitively ended by an atomic bomb. No one knew in 1938 that this particular terror would be unleashed upon the world within a decade, but by then concerns were growing that something terrible might be coming, and that total war this time might not know when to stop.
Chamberlain's return was not universally well received, though, with 15,000 people protesting against the Munich Agreement on the same day in Trafalgar Square. But generally speaking, there was considerable relief that war had been averted, with consideration for Czechoslovakia largely being ignored. And then Germany invaded the rest of Czechoslovakia five months after the Munich Treaty was signed, anyway.
That the FA should have reacted in the way that they did is not surprising. They were always likely to echo the government policy of the time, and the government policy of the time was appeasement. And Stanley Rous himself, of course, would go on to cause a boycott of the 1966 World Cup by almost all African and Asian teams over his stance regarding the readmission of apartheid South Africa to FIFA. It doesn't feel as though he would have been an explicit anti-Nazi campaigner during the 1930s.
Hitler was leveraged into power by the influential and powerful industrial sector, which did very nicely indeed out of his decision to unilaterally jettison the Treaty of Versailles upon assuming his position. Re-arming was very good indeed for, for example, the Krupp family and their industrial complex. The establishment always looks after itself first, whatever its political persuasion.
And it should be remembered that the majority of memories came from players after the full horror of the Nazi atrocities became public, too. It's not a criticism of the players of the era to say that the subsequent knowledge may have warped their recollections of that time.
If the atmosphere surrounding it all was more ambivalent than has subsequently been recalled, that wouldn't be surprising. But it is, when stopping to criticise the England players, also worth remembering that most, if not all, of the team of 1938 will have gone on to fight actual Nazis in the actual Second World War.
Where there was active resistance to fascism in England in the 1930s, it came primarily from the working class, in terms of those who saw off the British Union of Fascists in 1936, and the players who did resist the creeping normalisation of fascism into the sporting world of the time.
The reaction of the England players in giving that salute in the first place, however, is also a reflection of the more subservient nature of the relation between players and administrators of the time. Yet even in this stultifying environment, and more than five years before war would finally engulf Europe, Derby County's Jack Kirby saw it for what it was and said no.
No amount of appeasement could ultimately ever have quelled the Nazis, and less than a year after Chamberlain returned to London with Hitler's signature, Germany invaded Poland, and Britain in turn declared war. To say that those who'd had reservations, from Jack Kirby and the Jewish community and trade unions of London to England's footballers in 1938 were right, would be an apocalyptic understatement. Between 70 and 85 million people died in the Second World War, around 3% of the entire population of the world at the time.
To blame the global conflict in its entirety on one political party in one country would be somewhat absurd. Stalin's non-aggression pact with Germany gave Hitler the confidence to attack Germany's neighbours in the first place, while the Japanese invasion of China predated the outbreak of war in Europe by two years, and the start of the Spanish Civil War predated it by three. But Hitler's Germany was the key that unlocked the Second World War, a fight from 20 years earlier that had ended close to stalemate but was treated by one side as an overwhelming victory.
A war was expected in Britain as soon as Germany invaded Czechoslovakia in March 1939. As Tommy Lawton, who would go on to become one of the most famous players of his age, said in his 1948 book Football Is My Business:
Then came the war, and with it, the end of my career, or so I felt. Surely there couldn't be room for a professional footballer in a world gone crazy. I, of course, being a young fit man of approaching 20, would go into the services. Meanwhile, in the leisure time I had left, I wound up my personal affairs, cursed Hitler and all his rats, and occasionally sat down to think about what had been and what might have been.
The abandonment of the 1939-40 season, the loss of six years from an already time-limited career for professional footballers, even the deaths of scores of professional footballers whilst serving their country, though, were just single atoms dropped into a global ocean of catastrophe.
That gap in the record books marks a period of human abnormality, a point at which this ritual had to be suspended. And even then, the football carried on, in the War Cup and in other necessarily makeshift competitions made up of necessarily makeshift teams, an attempt to give a veneer of normality amongst the chaos. Football's attempts at appeasement had failed, but so had everybody else's. Those salutes had all been for nothing. With the benefit of hindsight, we can now see that this was always how it was going to end up.