The post -war order in football was determined by officials who had even benefited in National Socialism. Only now, eighty years after the war, does a critical awareness of its entanglements grow.
In the Müngersdorf sports park, in the west of Cologne, the cruel past does not immediately catch your eye. Ten minute walk from the RheinEnergieStadion, the place where the 1st FC Köln plays its home games, leads a narrow sand path to a former barrack camp of the National Socialists. A sculpture and several information boards are reminiscent of the approximately 3,500 mostly Jewish prisoners who were deported from here to the extermination camp.
In the area, allotments are lined up, behind it sports fields. “People were cried here”says Thorben Müller and looks into a semicircle of interested listeners, including football fans. The prospective historian is an employee of the Nazi documentation center in Cologne. Again and again he gives tours in the Müngersdorf sports park. “The prisoners in the camp have probably heard the cheers in the stadium”says Müller. “Joy and terror were so close.”
On May 8, the unconditional surrender of the National Socialists marks the age of eight. Football now plays a growing role in the transfer of knowledge. Historical tours such as on that in Cologne are also about continuities, i.e. personalities who were influential before 1945 and also afterwards. And it is about the displacement of the story that has taken decades – sometimes to this day.
The DFB President had used forced laborers
Thorben Müller shows on his Tablet Old photos and newspaper articles. On the western edge of the sports park, he holds with the group on Peco-Bauwens-Allee. The Cologne Bauwens, born in 1886, was a successful referee in the 1920s and 1930s. After the Second World War, Bauwens was president of the re-founded German Football Association (DFB) for twelve years. Despite his role in National Socialism.
Thorben Müller explains that Bauwens had used forced laborers as a building contractor. Some of them are said to have been detained in the deportation camp near the stadium.
After the war it was not an issue. In 1954 Germany became world champion. DFB boss Bauwens gave a speech in the Löwenbräukeller in Munich, where Hitler once spoke. Bauwens now raved from “Healthy Germans”the “Faithful to your country” stand, and from one “Leadership principle in the good sense of the word”. An editor of the Bavarian Radio, who was spoken by Bauwens, felt reminded of the vocabulary from National Socialism. The broadcaster blinded himself.
Peco Bauwens, DFB President from 1950 to 1962
The then Federal President Theodor Heuss criticized Bauwens for his speech, but there was no broad public debate. Bauwens later received the Federal Cross of Merit and was elected honorary president of the DFB.
No denazification football
Peco Bauwens is an example of many. During the “denazification” from 1945, the victorious powers wanted to push back the National Socialist influence in German society: in politics and judiciary, in culture and the media. By the end of 1949, more than 2.5 million Germans were classified in the saying chamber process in the three western occupation zones. Around 54 percent were considered “fellow runners”. The procedure was terminated around 35 percent. And only 1.4 percent of the accused were classified as “main culprit” and “burdened”.
Hundreds of thousands of former members of NSDAP and SS were able to make a career in the Federal Republic. In the Bundestag, former National Socialists held a quarter of all members of MPs until 1965. In the Federal Criminal Police Office, more than two thirds of the managers were former members of the SS in the 1950s. Was the football more burdened in comparison or rather less?
“When we look at culture, business or science: there has been little denazification everywhere”says sports historian Henry Wahlig. “But the worst two or three or five percent of Nazis were exchanged. However, nobody is known to me in football who had to live with serious consequences due to his crimes. The sport gave up apolitical after the war and got through with it for a long time.”
Henry Wahlig is responsible for the cultural program in the German Football Museum in Dortmund. He gives historical tours there, and he also shows his guests the Tschammer Cup, named after the former Reichsportführer Hans von Tschammer and East. This challenge cup, engraved with a swastika, was awarded to the German Cup winner during National Socialism.
After the war, then in the DFB Cup, this trophy was further awarded until 1964. Without a swastika, but with a DFB badge, explains Henry Wahlig: “The colleagues in the football museum once took out the exhibit and replaced the DFB emblem. And in fact there is still the swastika underneath. This is a symbol for the time: We continue to play as before and do not work at first.”
More than half of the officials in the NSDAP
But there has been a lot of awareness in football since the beginning of the millennium. The DFB commissioned a historical study on the “Football under the swastika”. Since 2005, the association has been awarding a prize to clubs that campaign for memory work. This award was named after Julius Hirsch, a Jewish international who was murdered by the Nazis in 1943. In addition, dozens of fan groups keep the memory of the victims high. They lay stumbling blocks, visit concentration camp memorials and research players and members of their clubs.
The Jewish victims were in focus in the memory work of football for a long time, but gradually clubs and associations also look at Nazi perpetrators and profiteers from their ranks. On behalf of the DFB Culture Foundation, the historian Pascal Trees will research the biographies of around 100 officials until early 2026, which were influential after the war in the DFB. Trees estimates that more than half of the officials examined was in the NSDAP. For comparison: In 1943, a total of eleven percent of the NSDAP population included.
Why was the proportion of football so much higher? “The officials were usually quite bourgeois existence”says Pascal Trees, employee of the Institute for Contemporary History in Munich. Among the associations were lawyers, civil servants and teachers who could possibly promote opportunities for advancement with party membership. Trees: “But only a few officials joined the NSDAP before 1933.”
When a club boss quotes from “my fight”
In 1950, however, not only old Nazis sat on the board of the re-founded DFB. There was – at least for a short time – also Martin Stock, a Jewish survivor of the Holocaust. And Arthur Weber, a persecuted communist. But there have been former NSDAP members in the top offices for years. Just like Hermann Gösmann, DFB President between 1962 and 1975. His political past? Nobody interested at the time.
Hermann Gösmann, DFB President between 1962 and 1975
The lawyer Hermann Gösmann, born in 1904, joined the NSDAP in 1937, and at times he was active there as a block keeper. There are photos that Gösmann show with party badges. At that time he was also President of VfL Osnabrück. There, says historian Trees, Gösmann quoted from the chapter “Volk und Breed” in an anniversary script from Hitler’s “Mein Kampf”.
The DFB President Peco Bauwens and Hermann Gösmann – before their association – were one of the profiteers of National Socialism. To date, there is no differentiated information on the DFB homepage. But that should change after the publication of the Pascal Trees 2026 study. And the German Football Museum in Dortmund also wants to redesign the permanent exhibition and clarify more about National Socialism. This is late, but it may not be too late eighty years after the end of the war.