Last champions of the Third Reich

Helmut Schön could feel it in the summer air. All of Germany could. As the 28-year-old soccer star donned the red shirt and black shorts of the Dresden Sporting Club he had played for since he was 17 years old, pincers continued to close around his country.

Germany was on the defensive in the second Great War. The final defeat inched nearer. Two weeks earlier, the 156,000 Allied troops on nearly 5,000 amphibious vehicles had landed in Normandy, France and began fighting their way east through occupied Europe. While Schön laced up his leather boots in the bowels of Berlin's Olympic Stadium on the afternoon of Sunday June 18, 1944, thousands of predominantly American, British, and Canadian men forced German warriors from strongholds across France.

In the port city of Cherbourg, roughly 200 miles from Paris, raids by United States P-47 Thunderbolt planes killed or wounded 800 of Schön's countrymen. In the nearby Brittany capital of Rennes, Marauder and Havoc bombers blew up rail yards. In Washington D.C., Representative Clarence Cannon, the chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, told American officials, "There is a general belief that the German armies will collapse not later than the first or second week of September, and perhaps much sooner." In Algiers, General Charles De Gaulle presided over a ceremonial session observing the fourth anniversary of the French resistance. More than 2.3 million Soviets troops were poised to fight west through Eastern Europe. The reign of Adolf Hitler, Joseph Goebbels, and the National Socialist German Workers' Party was not over, but the tide had turned. In less than a year, Germany would be defeated and the war in Europe would come to an end.

Schön and his teammates, in Berlin to contest the final of the 1944 national soccer championship, didn't know the specific details of the battles but they understood that war was approaching Germany's beating heart. The notion of defeat had begun to take hold a year earlier when Goebbels, Propaganda Minister for the Nazi Party, asked his fellow countrymen to commit to "total war," a sign of growing desperation. By the summer of 1944, Germany's citizens understood they were in for a defensive struggle, the outcome of which did not look positive.

As Schön prepared to lead his club on to the field, Olympic Stadium – a massive monolith that seated up to 100,000 screaming fans – remained an important symbol, the only place left in the crumbling empire that could hold the match and provide a measure of symbolism for the country's leadership, linking it to a time when the future of the Third Reich seemed limitless. Hitler had opened the 1936 Games with a rousing speech in the hulking structure designed for the event by the architect brothers Werner and Walter March. Now, for propaganda purposes, the government needed to have the final played in the same place it had been held since 1936, for even as the iron grasp of the Third Reich loosened around Europe, Nazi ideals still held strong inside the stadium's 40-foot tall limestone walls. The grand setting allowed an alternative narrative to exist, a fantasy, one where things were not as bad as they seemed.

Amid the relative quiet that preceded the chaos of the game, Schön peered around the concrete room under the stands that served as a changing area for the players. The space doubled as one of the places where the players, and the fans, would retreat to should the bombers arrive. The high-scoring forward, who would go on to become one of the West Germany's most successful national team coaches, watched his Dresden teammates suit up to defend the championship they won the previous season. His boyhood idol Richard Hofmann, the stout striker with a square head and no right ear, slowly pulled on his gear. Willibald Kreß, a six-foot tall veteran goalkeeper nearing the end of his career, was there as well. He and Schön, who came from a staunchly anti-Nazi family, were close friends. They both refused to join the political party. The SS had pursued them as well, but they also said "no" to the storm troopers. Although their status as sporting heroes provided some protection, the defiant pair still lived in fear of the military draft. For them, the war could come in an instant.

Midfielder Herbert Pohl, who lost his left arm to a bomb on the Russian front in 1943, had played with Schön at Dresden since 1937 and again joined the star in battle. A year earlier, with both arms, Pohl helped his club win the championship. Now, as more able-bodied players were forced into military service, Pohl faced little competition for his spot on the team, but a one-armed man on the field provided a constant reminder of Germany’s increasingly dire situation.

It was not supposed to be the last major match of the Third Reich.

The contest between Dresden's red and black-clad men and Hamburg’s blue and white took place in front of an army’s worth of spectators who were unaware they were witnessing the end; it was not supposed to be the last major match of the Third Reich. The new season was set to begin a few weeks later and another final – this one for the Tschammer Cup, a separate nationwide tournament – was due to be contested in July. However, as the German army suffered defeat after defeat, government officials soon called every able body, even famous footballers and the infirm, to the front lines. The match on June 18, 1944 would be the final important game of the wartime era, the fifth German final of the war, and the last national championship of the Third Reich.

The Nazis and Soccer

Adolf Hitler did not approve of soccer for one compelling reason: He could not control the outcome. The Chancellor discovered this fact at the only match he is known with certainty to have attended. After dispatching Luxemburg 9-0 in the opening round of the 1936 Olympic Games, Germany was a heavy favorite over Norway in the quarterfinals. But on August 7, 55,000 spectators including Hitler, Goebbels, and other high-ranking Nazi party officials, watched the hosts fall 2-0 at Berlin’s Poststadion while other competitions took place in the Olympic Stadium. A prime opportunity to evince German superiority had been squandered. "The Führer is agitated. I'm almost unable to control myself. A dramatic and nerve-racking fight," Goebbels, the Minister of Propaganda, wrote in his diary. Two days later, American Jesse Owens won his fourth gold medal of the Games.

Despite his disdain for the sport, Hitler could not remove the game from the fabric of the German cultural experience. "Football, it seems, would not yield entirely to the Nazi Party. The game retained its insufferable tendency to upset the smooth acclimation of power," David Goldblatt writes in "The Ball Is Round," a history of the sport. Still, the Führer's government tried to bend soccer to its will, reorganizing the league and banning Jews and Marxists from playing and participating in any official capacity in 1933. Bayern Munich president Kurt Landauer was forced to resign his position while Walther Bensemann – a fellow Jew and the founder of Der Kicker Fußball, which remains the country's most important soccer publication – emigrated to Montreux, Switzerland where he soon passed away poor and alone.

Yet, as the tide of World War II turned against the Nazis in 1943 and Goebbels made his plea for "total war," the government suspended international sporting events, but local competitions and the national championship tournament continued. The existence of soccer, even in a neutered state, was vital for keeping up appearances. "I think that the longer the war carried on, the more important it became to keep playing," says Hesse, the author of "Tor," the only English-language history of German soccer. "You can't keep organized football going, saying this will all be over soon and we're going to win the war, and then suddenly stop the games. That would be like admitting that things were not going according to plan. That's the main reason why the powers that be had everyone play for as long as possible."

And so, amid destroyed cities, burning towns, and the ever-present threat of Allied invasion, the games continued in 1944. Dresden and Hamburg steamed toward the final.

The First Half

With Hitler plotting war strategy at his summer home in the Bavarian Alps, arguing with and then overruling Field Marshal Erwin Rommel over the deployment of troops in the losing battle for Cherbourg, Schön and his teammates prepared to take the field to a roar from the crowd of military men in dress uniforms and citizens eager for a game. The stadium decorations consisted almost entirely of flags from the Third Reich and the government's National League for Physical Education. A 247-foot tall tower stood just outside the walls of the stadium, its Olympic bell adorned with a German eagle holding the five Olympic rings with two swastikas cast into its rim. From the top of the structure, one could gaze over the entire capital city; turning around, one could watch the storm troopers marching around the track, then see 22 men lining up to do battle on the pitch.

Women and children, dressed in the finest clothes they could manage during the strained time, sat among men sporting formal jackets and ties despite the summer heat. Tickets, which cost one reichsmark for the semifinal between Dresden and Nuremberg and three for the 1943 final, were affordable to most German fans, likely the rough equivalent of what it cost to attend the American World Series at the time. The troops sat in their own dedicated sections. Spectators filled the lower bowl and spilled over into the upper ring of seating as well. Hundreds of thousands more listened on the radio. Even as ashes fell in cities around Germany and German-occupied Europe, a shrill whistle signaled kickoff and doubled as proof that the country had hope.

Hamburg entered as the favorite since Dresden's backline had performed poorly in the semifinal against FC Nurnberg, but it soon became clear the Air Force team could not beat the acrobatic, active Kreß, the "first golden boy of German football." Schön respected his friend's bold playing style. "[Willibald] wasn't the type to stick to the goal line, but was in the truest sense of the word the ruler of the goal area. He had an unmistakable flair for influencing the development of the play so that he could always have a sure and safe way of breaking up the attack. Willibald understood that the practical role of the goalie was to be the 11th field player," the forward said of his teammate.

The teams battled back and forth in the opening stanza until Rudi Voigtmann broke the deadlock in the 20th minute. The 23-year-old Dresden forward from Zwickau in Saxony collected a pass from a teammate and streaked toward the net. Believing he was offside, the opposition abruptly stopped playing. However, no whistle came. Willy Jürissen, the well-coiffed netminder with the white goalie gloves and the comb he kept in his back pocket even when he was playing, had no chance. 1-0 DSC. That was still the score when the ref blew his whistle to close out the first 45 minutes.

The Second Half

In less than an hour, the fans and players would have to return to the reality of Germany at war. But now, the game was on, and it remained close. Soccer was the main event. Dresden attacked as the second period started, but Hamburg captain Reinhold Münzenberg, a defender who played more for the national team between 1930 and 1939 than anyone else did, marshaled his troops in response. The Luftwaffe Eagle sat prominently on the chest of his LSV uniform as he urged his men to maintain their formation. It was, briefly, a valiant defensive effort by a team being overrun.

Soon, however, Hamburg conceded again. Fritz Machate, a center forward in his third stint with Dresden, created the chance in the 50th minute. His relentless pace and attacking play wore out midfielder Heinrich Gärtner, who could only concede a corner. Machate took the ensuing kick and placed it into the perfect spot for Heinrich Schaffer. The 26-year-old from Teplitz easily beat Jürissen.

The End and the Beginning Again

Players from both teams attended a banquet after the match and then the squads disbanded as the participants returned to their roles in the war effort. Kreß went back to maintaining rockets in nearby Pila. Other players resumed their assigned tasks. Even Schön, who had a reoccurring knee injury that had helped keep him from the battlefield, was finally pulled into service and became a grenadier. "I learned useful things such as driving a car and giving the Nazi salute to superiors. I didn't have what it took to be a hero, what was needed for the hero's death, which is how dying was then described," he wrote in his autobiography. When Dresden burned the following February, he returned to his beloved city to search for his wife, Annelies, and his father. Miraculously, both survived the attack during which more than 1,200 British Royal Air Force and United States Army Air Force bombers dropped nearly 4,000 tons of bombs, starting a massive firestorm the leveled the previously untouched city. Tens of thousands of citizens died.

The next soccer season started as scheduled almost immediately following the 1944 national championship, but it was terminated after only a few games. By late summer – as Allied forces closed in on Paris and the Russians were overrunning the Ukraine – Nazi officials suspended play for good. Apart from the occasional one-off game, soccer succumbed to the war. On April 29, 1945, Hamburg defeated Altona, another club from the city, 4-2 in the last official German soccer match of World War II. A day later, Hitler shot himself in a Berlin bunker. On May 7, General Alfred Jodl signed unconditional surrender documents. Germany was defeated.

After the war, German soccer found success on the world stage faster than anticipated.

Although none of the heroes of the 1944 national championship are alive today, at war's end they continued playing and, later, working in soccer. They coached clubs, nurtured talent, and aided the rebuilding effort. Most Germans tried to forget the war years, but the players of Hamburg and Dresden remembered the last final. In his autobiography, Schön recalled the final important match. "What did it mean during those days?" he wrote. "The Allied forces had landed in France, in Belarus the Russians began their largest offensive. Didn't we feel fear? This question, people tend to forget, didn't present itself to Germans. The map of Europe still led us to believe in strength. Norway and Denmark, Italy, Greece, Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary – they were all 'firmly in German hands.' No one realized how quickly it could all tumble down."

Nearly 70 years after the war tumbled down on Nazi Germany, the Olympic Stadium still stands on the same ground. While the structure got a facelift prior to the 1974 Olympics and another before the 2006 World Cup, architects took pains to preserve its limestone facade. From the outside, it still resembles the structure that hosted the last championship of the Third Reich when Dresden defeated Hamburg.