Introduction to SALUTE! The Inside Story of England’s Own Goal at Berlin’s Olympiastadion

22/04/2024  -  11.18

John Leonard

Dawn breaks on an autumnal morning. An anxious teenager boards his passenger train bound for the Channel coast. He makes one more check of his paperwork. All is in order. His carriage shakes violently as the steam engine roars to life. He is Jewish. Men in Nazi uniform step back from the platform edge, leaving him alone. A station porter’s whistle blows. The train’s engine sounds its whistle. Slowly but surely the wheels grind on the tracks as it trundles out of the Berlin Zoologischer Garten station in an enveloping cloud of steam. Quite whether the young passenger will be enveloped into the welcome arms of the English people a few hours later is open to question.

The teenager is going to a football match in London. He has no intention of returning to Germany. It is October 1938. His train journey is the beginning of an unlikely ride to freedom. The adventure’s seed was planted months earlier as he took his place in Berlin’s Olympiastadion. A vast congregation filled the terraces, more of a political and quasi-religious gathering than a football crowd. All, almost all, cheered to the heavens as an English football team made the Nazi salute. Hours later, one of those proud Englishmen agreed to help the teenage football fan escape the Nazis. He secured his visa for the UK. He saved his life.

Quite how he did so is one of the more curious but uplifting episodes in the tale of a shameful day in English sporting history. Proud Englishmen giving the Nazi salute in an Olympic stadium before a game of international football? Well, just how do you address Adolf Hitler? How do footballers respond to the playing of Nazi Germany’s national anthem at the Olympiastadion in Berlin? ‘Don’t bother, don’t worry,’ might be the glib answer for the 21st century. At the very least, just deploy the good old fashioned British stiff upper lip. But, back in the 1930s, this quandary posed something of a diplomatic and political headache for the British government and UK sport bodies, not least the Football Association. All of them were anxious to avoid upsetting the Nazis. Nobody wanted to mention the prospect of war. Nobody dared contemplate another global calamity. The traumas of the Great War still lived fresh in the collective memory and psyche of the British people. 

As for an alternative to war? Well apparently, sport is war minus the shooting – a classic Orwellian phrase. George Orwell, cared little for organised sport, especially international competition. In an article for the socialist Tribune magazine on 14 December 1945 he wrote, ‘At the international level sport is frankly mimic warfare. But the significant thing is not the behaviour of the players but the attitude of the spectators: and, behind the spectators, of the nations who work themselves into furies over these absurd contests, and seriously believe – at any rate for short periods – that running, jumping and kicking a ball are tests of national virtue.’

According to Orwell, modern sport was a cult, one not seen since Roman times and tied up in dangerous nationalism. ‘Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence: in other words, it is war minus the shooting,’ Orwell commented. For him, the infamous 1936 Olympics in Berlin or ‘Hitler’s Games’ served as a ‘concrete example’ of international sporting contests leading to ‘orgies of hatred’. Forget any pretence of them as jamborees, celebrating not only sport; ignore boasts of them acting as showcases, promoting international goodwill, friendship and global unity. 

The question of how to address Hitler had been resolved comfortably at the opening ceremony of those 1936 Berlin Olympics. Just eyes right, keep calm and carry on with a quick march was the tactic employed by the British contingent as they paraded before Germany’s leader. Perhaps in hindsight the England football team should have followed suit when they turned up in the very same stadium some two years later. Hitler was not even there, preferring to stay in his Bavarian Alpine lair rather than watch football. 

There are two iconic images in sport featuring a salute. One is of American athletes Tommie Smith and John Carlos making their civil rights protest at the 1968 Mexico Olympics. The 200m gold and bronze medallists were supported by Australian silver medallist Peter Norman. All three were punished by the sporting establishment, only later being hailed as heroes. Sadly, the other is of England’s footballers covering themselves in shame some 30 years earlier.

The futility of pretending sport never mixes with politics is illustrated by the sight of 11 England international footballers making the Nazi salute. It was done supposedly to help stop bullets being fired in war. It failed. Instead, those players lived for the rest of their lives with shame and embarrassment.

Quite how and why the English players brought shame on their nation is a matter of conjecture, a fraught saga of blame and counter-blame. Only in the aftermath of war did they offer their excuses, some not until decades later. Most agreed: they were, as a nod to a phrase used since the Victorian era, English lions led by the donkeys running the Football Association. As for the FA, it held the British government responsible. Ministers intent on appeasement denied any official involvement. The evidence points to the contrary.

To the Nazi’s propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, England’s Nazi salute in the Olympic Stadium, Berlin, on 14 May 1938 was a triumph. For the British, it was merely passed off as an act of diplomatic courtesy. The British political establishment did try to use sport as propaganda. They just did so badly. Fascist dictators did so clinically: not just Hitler, albeit with promptings from Goebbels, but also Benito Mussolini.

The origins of this fraught tale can be traced to the origins of a game created by Victorian public schoolboys. Englishmen invented association football, promoted the game among their Celtic neighbours, then declared themselves masters of the world game. Amid growing nationalism in Europe, trouble was quite possibly inevitable. Austria, then Italy as World Cup holders, disagreed with the notion that the English were masters of the game they had invented. Oddly, other countries, including Germany, often agreed. 

English, indeed British, prestige mattered on the infamous weekend in May 1938. England took on Germany. Aston Villa FC, freshly promoted to the old First Division, went with them to play a series of games against a ‘greater Germany’– a forced amalgamation of Germany and one of the leading footballing countries of the day, Austria. The Anschluss when Hitler gobbled up the land of his birth on behalf of Germany had taken place just weeks earlier.

England’s footballers of the 1930s just did as they were told. They were powerless working-class lads. They served as pawns in diplomatic chess games. Quite oddly the upper-class devotees of field sports ended up as chess pieces for hapless ministers and diplomats at the British foreign office. Their diplomatic efforts even led to the head of the Luftwaffe being invited to the Grand National at Aintree. Apparently, Hermann Göring presented a security risk but a jolly good chap might give him a bed for the night.

Remarkably, the 1930s had begun with England’s footballers making a fascist salute, not in Berlin, but Rome for the benefit of Mussolini. Then, in 1935, Nazi Germany was invited to play England at White Hart Lane, home to a club with a tradition of Jewish support, Tottenham Hotspur. After that, came the infamous Nazi salute by England footballers in Berlin.

Henry Rose, a doyen of British sports journalists who lost his life in the Munich air disaster of February 1958 while travelling with Manchester United, lamented his lasting impression of the game. It was not the football on offer, nor the magnificence of Berlin’s Olympiastadion. No, it was the sight of 11 professional footballers from England lining up to give the Nazi salute.

Amid the controversy, there is an inspirational story of hope and redemption. Just who was the anxious football-mad teenager setting out on a train from Berlin in October 1938? He was ostensibly off to watch England play the Rest of Europe at Highbury. One of the England players, Bert Sproston, tried to persuade the FA to help him rescue this teenage German-Jewish refugee. 
Here is the story of the build-up to this day of eternal shame for a group of English footballers, their infamous Nazi salute, the excuses. Just how and why did England score a political own goal at Berlin’s Olympiastadion?

Salute! The Inside Story of England’s Own Goal at Berlin’s Olympiastadion by John Leonard is available from Pitch Publishing on 13 May 2024. It is a gripping account of events culminating in the most infamous moment in English football history: England’s players making the Nazi salute in Berlin. How a group of working-class lads unwittingly became victims of cynical and clinically administered Nazi propaganda and botched British diplomacy.

Biography

John Leonard is a news and sports journalist/author of almost four decades experience, spending most of his career at Independent Television News (ITN) as a Programme Editor for both ITV News and five news. John has worked as part of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) Newsroom media team. His earlier works include ‘Flight to Bogotá, England Football Rebel, Neil Franklin’, nominated and longlisted for the UK Sports Book Awards, Football Book of the Year, 2021. A life-long Stoke City FC fan, he enjoyed an ill-starred brief sporting career as an athlete with Staffordshire Moorlands AC.