Postcards of football stadiums go back more than a hundred years. In France, the stadium owned by the newspaper Le Matin was the subject of cards as early as 1910, when it was flooded by the Seine. In Germany, the inauguration of Deutsches Stadion in 1913, scheduled to host the 1916 Olympic Games, was a particularly popular postcard motif. Although the use of postcards as a means of communication ceased in the inter-war period and postcards as holiday souvenirs have now become a marginal practice, football stadium postcards continue to be published every year, circulated in one way or another, and collected. The history of the stadium postcard has slipped under the radar of researchers. And the contemporary phenomenon, though modest, deserves investigation. Who still publishes stadium postcards? How do they circulate (in shops, online, at flea markets, etc.)? Who is still collecting them, and what is the likely future of this practice?
This article deals with a topic in German-French sports and military history that has been neglected by historians to date: On 5 August 1942, members of the Francs-Tireurs et Partisans – Main d’Œuvre Immigrée, FTP-MOI), a subgroup of the communist resistance composed by foreigners, carried out a hand grenade attack on approximately 50 German Luftwaffe soldiers who were undergoing running training at the Jean Bouin Stadium in Paris, among them the soccer internationals Albert Sing and Hans Fiederer. The latter was so seriously injured that one of his legs had to be amputated, abruptly ending his playing career and setting him on the path of a decades-long, immensely successful career as a sports journalist from April 1943 onwards. The article reconstructs the course of the attack, the retaliatory shooting of 88 hostages on 11 August 1942, on Mont Valérien, which the German occupiers declared a ‘punitive measure’, and the execution of the four resistance fighters involved in the attack on 9 March 1943. They came from Romania and were communists who had dedicated themselves to the armed struggle against fascism, wherever they lived: in Romania, Spain, or France. The media, controlled by censorship, remained silent about the attack or spread false reports. In addition, the political context of the soldiers’ sports organized by the German occupiers in Paris and its functions for troop morale and mass entertainment are discussed. Here, the focus is on the famous Paris Soldiers’ Soccer Eleven (Pariser Soldatenelf), which included Fiederer and Sing and numerous other German internationals.
‘He refused to return to his country.’ The escape of soccer players from the People’s Republic of Poland to the Federal Republic of Germany – The migration of Polish athletes before 1945 and after 1989 has already been discussed extensively in research literature. This article deals with another special chapter in the migration of Polish soccer players to Germany under the communist dictatorship. Illegal departures of soccer players from the People’s Republic of Poland were widespread, even if in most cases they received little attention in the mass media, except for the escape of the international Andrzej Rudy in 1988. The examples of sports emigrants presented in this text can be divided into two categories: refugees in the true sense of the word, who left their teams’ training camps abroad, and individuals who travelled to Western countries (or Yugoslavia) after obtaining legal travel permits and then refused to return to their country. The first cases of illegal emigration were recorded as early as the 1950s, and the last ones before the fall of the communist regime in the first months of 1989. Most often, athletes decided to emigrate illegally and settled in West Germany. Family reasons played an important role in such decisions; many refugees were able to prove German roots and therefore had privileged access to German citizenship. The flight intensified in the 1980s, which was related both to the deterioration of the economic situation in Poland and to the liberalization of passport regulations at the end of that decade. Above all, the attitude of the authorities of the People’s Republic of Poland towards illegal emigration changed over time. After the 1960s, the monitoring of refugees and their families by the State Security Service was largely discontinued; it was limited to the formal registration of persons ‘who refused to return to their country’.
One of the first lasting official acts of the Reich Sports Leader, Hans von Tschammer und Osten, was the establishment of the Hilfsfonds für den Deutschen Sport in October 1933. This institution, which was renamed Stiftung Deutsche Sporthilfe (German Sports Aid Foundation) in April 1936, has nevertheless not received any attention in sports history research to date. In fact, after 1933, the foundation proved to be one of the most important financing instruments for Reichssportführer (Reich Sports Leader) Hans von Tschammer und Osten. He used the foundation’s infrastructure and funds to build the organisational structures of National Socialist sport. Since this was contrary to the foundation’s statutes, the Reich Sports Leader was at a loss for explanation. The annual reports of the Reichsrechnungshof (Reich Court of Auditors) always pointed out the illegal use of the foundation’s funds. These reports, which sports history researchers have so far ignored, also reveal the precarious financing of Nazi sport in the early years of the Hitler regime. The files offer evidence for the corruption in the area of the Reich Sports Leader. At the same time, they provide an insight into the budget development of the Hohenlychen Sports Clinic, which benefited from foundation funds, particularly after the 1936 Olympic Games, and was increasingly influenced by the Schutzstaffel (SS).
In over 130 years of the International Olympic Committee’s (IOC) existence, it has had only ten presidents. It was led in unbroken succession by nine men until Kristy Coventry was elected as the first woman in 2025. ‘Founding father’ Pierre de Coubertin conceived that the office, like the IOC headquarters, should rotate according to the same principle as the host city of the Olympic Games. However, the plan failed after the first Olympiad. Since then, the rules for presidential elections have changed numerous times. Sometimes there was talk of a lifetime term, sometimes of ten years. For a long time, it has been limited to eight years with the possibility of re-election. In the early years, it was difficult to find a candidate at all, but the presidency has recently become an issue of power and prestige, including election campaigns and lobbying, just as in politics. Today, this office is one of the most prestigious and coveted positions in the world, but it also poses the highest demands. The president’s duty is, on the one hand, to lead the global Olympic Movement like a head of state, while, on the other, to meet the highest moral standards and maintain absolute independence.
