Guest Lecture: Football under the Swastika Survival and Resistance During the Holocaust

Sport in the Nazi concentration camps and ghettos defies the modern imagination. Relying on long-forgotten memoirs and testimonies, Football under the Swastika reveals the surprisingly powerful role that the most popular wartime sport of football played during World War II. From the earliest days of the Nazi dictatorship, captives played football behind the walls and fences of the Nazi terror state. To these prisoners, the ‘beautiful game' was a glimmer of joy amid unrelenting hunger and torture, a show of resistance against the most heinous regime the world had ever seen. Drawing upon survivor accounts and captivating photos and archival film of these heroic individuals, Dr Kevin Simpson (USA) shares his research on wartime football tinged moral ambiguity and offers a reminder why sport matters as a deeply meaningful form of shared human expression.