Bulgarian edition Novinata published a material dedicated to the "death match".
Books have been written about this football match in the USSR and heroic films have been made. However, even so, many questions remain about the authenticity of this event.
On 9 August 1942, in Nazi-occupied Kiev, a football match took place between teams of German pilots and former players of Dynamo Kiev. The Soviet players were asked to lose under threat of death, but they showed courage and defeated their opponent. For this audacity they were executed.
This is how Soviet propaganda presented the story of this sporting encounter, which was called a "death match" in the USSR. However, the truth turns out to be somewhat different...
Games with the enemy
Shortly after the capture of Kiev, the Germans resumed sports events in the city with the participation of local athletes. In this way they sought to create a semblance of normal life. Competitors received additional food rations.
One of the football teams was set up in Bakery No. 1 by its Czech director Josef Kordic. Several former players of Dynamo (Kiev) and other clubs worked at his enterprise, and a number of other athletes were purposefully recruited from prisoner-of-war camps.
This team with the name "Start" began to brilliantly smash opponents. Among the defeated were teams of German railway workers, artillerymen and Hungarian infantrymen.
On 5 August 1942 the Soviet players defeated the team of anti-aircraft gunners, pilots and mechanics of Kiev airport "Flakelf" with the score 5:1. A rematch was scheduled for 9 August, which eventually became known as the "death match".
The fateful match?
"We were in uniform like the USSR national team - red jerseys and gerts, white shorts," player Makar Goncharenko told later. - "Rumours that we had it specially prepared for the match with Zenit pilots and players are nonsense. We just didn't have another one."
The Soviet version of events claims that before the match, a German officer entered the Start locker room and demanded to lose because otherwise the Soviet players would be punished. However, there is no documentary evidence of this episode.
The referee of the match was a Wehrmacht Oberleutnant named Erwin, but no fouls were recorded in favour of the German team.
The match turned out to be a stubborn one and ended with the score 5:3 in favour of Start. The teams took a group photo, then the Soviet players headed to the locker room to celebrate the victory.
After the match, the Kiev city commissioner Friedrich Rogausch imposed a ban on matches between the Soviet and German teams. However, no sanctions were applied to the Start players. They continued to work at the bakery, and on 16 August they defeated a team of state employees and workers from the Ruch factory 8-0.
However, on 18 August the arrests of Start players began. Only former Dynamo players were detained, including Alexander Tkachenko, who did not take part in the "death match". There were ten people in total. Former Lokomotiv Kyiv players were either not charged or released.
The main reason for the arrest is believed to be that these players belonged to the Dynamo football club, which was then under the jurisdiction of the NKVD. The Gestapo believed that the Soviet footballers were employees of the state security agencies and performed in Kiev either intelligence tasks or subversive activities - mixed broken glass with flour, which was supplied to German units.
One of those arrested, Makar Goncharenko, later said: "We beat Rukh, 8-0. It was on the 16th of August. And then Zhorka Shvetsov (the organiser of Rukh) complained that we were breaking the regime, leading a free life, promoting Soviet sport. He sank us. The Germans checked the pre-war posters to find out who from "Start" played for Dynamo Kiev and sent us to the camp".
Nikolai Korotkikh was indeed an NKVD officer in the early 1930s. He never made it out of the Gestapo prison alive.
Alexander Tkachenko was shot dead while trying to escape. Another eight people were sent to Syretsky concentration camp.
In the winter of 1943, there was an incident in which the commandant's dog was wounded. As punishment, the Nazis shot a group of prisoners, including three football players.
Four others managed to escape as the Red Army approached, and Pavel Komarov was taken away to work in Germany. After the end of hostilities, he moved to Canada.
Myth
Thus, of the fifteen participants in the "death match", four died, and their deaths were in no way related to the result of the match against Flakelf on 9 August 1942. All the other players survived the war safely.
The legend of the heroic match was born in 1946 and in the following years grew with artistic details. Books and films have been written about the "death match" in the USSR.
In 1965, the dead participants of the "death match" were posthumously awarded medals "For Bravery", and survivors - medals "Combat Merit". Georgi Timofeev and Lev Gundarev were not rewarded in any way - during the occupation they served in the police and after the end of the war they received up to ten years in camps.
However, even in Soviet times, not everyone agreed with the heroic interpretation of these events. For example, in 1971, KGB Major Udin wrote in a report to Colonel-General Fedorchuk, chairman of the State Security Committee of Ukraine, that the footballers "during the trials for the Motherland" remained in the occupied territory and supported "the initiative of traitors to the Motherland on the part of representatives of the city administration" to set up football clubs.
"In the presence of such data," Udin notes, "everything that has been done so far in terms of glorifying former Dynamo Kyiv players in the press and cinema seems to me to be a serious mistake."
Boris EGOROV, Novinata.bg
