Sport im Abseits: Die Geschichte der jüdischen Sportbewegung im nationalsozialistischen Deutschland by Henry Wahlig (review)

In his new monograph, Henry Wahlig presents, as his subtitle specifies, the history of the Jewish sports movement in Nazi Germany. Sports, he makes clear, played an ambiguous role for Jews in the Third Reich. On the one hand, German Jews were promptly and visibly excluded from sports organizations and activities. On the other, sports provided them with much needed opportunities for social activity and were one of the "most important bastions of self-assertion" (p. 225). Wahlig provides a chronologically structured account of this dichotomy, organized around the 1936 Olympics in Berlin as a turning point, and focusing on the period from 1933 to 1938.

After a lengthy introduction (which reveals the work's origin as a German dissertation) and a short overview of the pre-1933 period, the book's third chapter chronicles the exclusion of Jewish members from the mainstream bürgerlich sports clubs and associations. Wahlig's research affirms previous findings¹ of an early Selbst-Gleichschaltung (self-coordination, i.e., with the official Nazi ideology). The swift actions of most clubs and associations against their Jewish members both antedated and exceeded decrees from the political leadership in Berlin and the Reich Sports Leader (Reichssportführer).

In his fourth chapter, by far the most extensive, Wahlig traces discrimination against Jewish sportsmen and sportswomen during the period 1933–1936 and looks at the history of the Deutscher Makkabikreis (German Maccabee Circle) and the Reichsbund jüdischer Frontsoldaten (RjF, Reich Federation of Jewish Front Soldiers). Wahlig shows that the exclusion of Jews was primarily effected through initiatives of local authorities, who limited Jews' access to municipal sports fields. Even where Jewish sporting activities still were permitted, local authorities often "moved" them to the outskirts of cities and towns, out of public view. Wahlig refers to this tactic as "an early form of ghettoization" (p. 222). Antisemitic fears of "contagion" led to the widespread banning of Jews from public swimming pools. Wahlig shows how the processes of discrimination occurred on the local level, neither responding to nor requiring a nationwide decree.

In this situation, the Deutsche Makkabikreis and the RjF (and its Sportbund Schild [Sports Confederation Shield]) became the new organizational homes for Jewish sporting activities of all kinds. These two associations differed fundamentally in their overall outlook, the Zionism of the former contrasting starkly with the latter's assimilationism. This difference shaped their policies. Wahlig explores this topic in chapter five, which looks at the relationship between the two organizations. Unfortunately, the chapter is too brief to substantiate fully its main argument that "sport after 1933 was a 'playing field' on which conflicts between Zionist and assimilationist Jews were played out in a particularly acute and emotional manner" (p. 141). Chapter six, an analysis of the Olympic Games from the Jewish perspective, is more successful overall. The tensions between Zionist and assimilationist positions are clearly visible: Zionist newspapers and publications in Germany focused on Makkabi athletes from other countries rather than on the only remaining German Jewish hope for the Olympics, the high-jumper Gretel Bergmann, whose athletic affiliation was with the Schild Sportbund.² Bergmann was eventually barred from participating with the German national team, despite meeting the qualification standards. Other Jewish athletes had been unable to qualify at all because the Nazi regime had rigged the qualifying competition against them, as Wahlig shows.

In chapter seven, the author turns to the period after the Olympic Games, when the situation worsened considerably—the "mantle of protection" (p. 163) that had been provided by the Olympics and related international attention was gone. A 1937 Gestapo ban on Jewish sporting events was followed by new strictures for Jewish sports clubs tantamount to their "complete disenfranchisement" (p. 165). The clubs also suffered from an increasing lack of access to sports infrastructure and decreasing membership numbers due to emigration. By the beginning of 1939, Wahlig contends, Jewish sport clubs...