July 30, 2012 • 24 mins
After the Nazis invaded Kiev, a bakery owner asked some Ukrainian soccer players to form a team. Their team was pitted against occupying powers. Many say their crucial victory over the Germans led to their deaths. But how much of the story is true?
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm to win your chalk reboarding and I'm fared out.
And if you're even remotely a soccer fan, you probably
took in at least some of the UEFA European Football
(00:22):
Championship earlier this summer. It's a more commonly known to
a lot of people as the Euro twelve Championship, but
it's pretty much the world's biggest soccer tournament after the
World Cup. Did you watch some of it? I did
watch some of it. Well, I did the whole DVR thing,
which isn't the best way to watch it now with
Facebook and everything, everybody always reveals the scores. But I
did my best. But if like me, all you did
(00:45):
was tune in now and again to cheer for your
favorite team. You may not have heard about a little
pre tournament controversy involving euro co host the Ukraine and
a new movie called The Match. So just to give
you some background on the movie. It tells the legendary
story of a soccer match that took place in nineteen
forty two and not the occupied Kiev, between a team
(01:07):
of skilled Ukrainian players and a team of German players,
and according to the classic version of events that was
generally accepted for a very long time, the Ukrainian team
was warned that essentially it would be in their best
interest to lose the match, but they decided to not
give in to the threats and just to play good soccer,
(01:29):
which was a move that won them the match, but again,
according to legend, lost them their lives. Some say that
all eleven players were lined up and shot by German
troops after the match. Hence this became known as the
death match or match of Death, depending on what source
you're looking at. So, the movie The Match was supposed
(01:50):
to be released in April in the Ukraine, but the
Ukrainian film officials originally tried to block its release. They
ended up changing their minds though, but when the film
finally came out later that month, it was met with
anchor and protests from a lot of Ukrainians. So we're
gonna be talking about a little bit more about why
the film got that reaction later in the podcast. But
(02:11):
as you might have already guessed from the episodes title,
our main goal here is going to be to talk
about the deathmatch itself and all of the myths, all
of the markiness surrounding it. And because while the legendary
soccer game we just related to you is a dramatic story,
it makes for a pretty great story to tell. Honestly,
most people today except that a story is all it
(02:33):
really is. It's it's just a legend, at least in part.
I mean, it's generally accepted that a soccer game did
take place in between Ukrainians and Nazison occupied Kiev, but
the details are still up for debate. So we're going
to take a look at the story and try to
separate myth from fact like we sometimes do, and also
try to understand why this myth came to be in
(02:57):
the first place, how did it come about? But before
we get too much into the soccer, you'll need an
idea of what was going on in World War Two
at the time, at least as much as it relates
to the Ukraine. Yeah, So to give you some background
on these events, Hitler's troops invaded the Soviet Union on
June twenty sick and nineteen forty one in Operation Barbarossa,
(03:18):
and less than three months after that, on September nineteenth,
nineteen forty one, they made their way into the capital
of the Ukraine, which was Kiev. So that invasion was
followed up almost immediately by mass executions at a ravine
on the city's outskirts called bobby Are, and between September
twenty nine and September about thirty three thousand, seven hundred
(03:43):
and seventy one people were killed at that ravine, including
almost all of the Jews who lived in Kiev, men,
women and children, and in the following years who It
wasn't like things ended after that. In the following years,
thousands of more people were killed there as well. Yeah. Ultimately,
according to an article by James Rearden in the journal
Soccer and Society, more Ukrainians died in the war than
(04:06):
any other single nation, which is something that I didn't
know before. It was something like ten to fifteen million
people total. And that's largely because, as Reardon points out,
the Nazis viewed people of Slavic descent to be unter
mentioned or subhuman like the Jews. According to Defiance the
Story of FC Start, which is a short ESPN documentary
(04:27):
on the death Match, many Ukrainians were taken prisoner right
away and thrown into camps, where some of them soon
died of disease and starvation. But about six months into occupation,
a lot of these POWs were released and ended up
living like refugees on the streets of Kiev. They existed
off of food rations that were at times cut to
(04:48):
two hundred grams of bread per week, and this was
said to be about the size of about a matchbox,
so not very much at all, and so people had
to resort to eating things like dogs, rats, crow's bark,
and even kal dung. So we're gonna be starting our
story basically with one of these POWs among those who
were released in return to Kiev. According to an article
(05:11):
by Johnny Kay Lee in Soccer in Society, where a
few Ukrainian soccer players who had played for the local team,
the Dynamo Kiev before the Nazi invasion, and Lee points
out how soccer was really at its height kind of
that it gained popularity in the Soviet Union during the
nineteen thirties, maybe as a way to escape from the
(05:31):
harsh realities of being ruled by a totalitarian government. And
Russia had a couple of pretty well known teams, but
the Dynamo Kiev was considered one of the best of
these soccer teams in Europe. Yeah, Anti Dugan, the author
of Dynamo Triumph and Tragedy and Nazi Occupied Kiev said
in that ESPN documentary that we mentioned quote, the way
(05:53):
that Kiev played was revolutionary. They played tremendously attacking football.
At the time, all the low coals knew who the
players were, and they would talk about games for days
after their celebrity. Indeed, but of course Nazi occupation changed
all that, and the Dynamo Kiev players who were released
as POWs had to struggle like everybody else did. However,
(06:15):
one of them, Nikolaicha Savic, who had been the team's goalkeeper,
upon his return to the city managed to land a
job at the Kiev Bakery Number three, which, if you're
getting rations that our match book sized with the pretty
great opportunity. So how he got that opportunity had to
do with his soccer playing past. The Kiev born manager
of the bakery had been a huge Dynamo fan and
(06:38):
he recognized to Savitch and brought him on, hired him,
making sure that he had shelter and food and This manager,
whose uh name some sources list as eosph Cordic, also
had German ancestry, so he had a relatively privileged position
in the city. At this time. He managed to convince
the Kiev governor and the Reischkomi Star for the Ukraine
(07:00):
that there should be an amateur football tournament in the
city to raise the morale of the Germans. Of course,
that was how he presented it, so some organized development
of soccer teams was allowed to go on. Besides this,
According to Carol Berkhoff's book Harvest of Despair, Life and
Death in the Ukraine, under Nazi rule, organized sports were
pretty much suppressed because the Germans were afraid that sports
(07:23):
would encourage Ukrainian solidarity. So this was really almost a
coup that he was able to convince them to stage
this and go through with it. Yeah, in a way,
the bakery manager encouraged to save it, to put together
a team and save it. Managed to track down some
of his old teammates and some players from the Locomotive
Kiev team who were also given jobs at Bakery Number three.
(07:46):
They called their team FC Start, which Lee suggests may
have been symbolic of a new beginning. So by June
of ninety two, the soccer tournament that the bakery manager
was hoping for was finally organized, and it took play
at the Zenit Stadium in Kiev and reared and describes
it as a eurostyle competition where FC START played teams
(08:09):
representing the various occupying powers so Hungary, Romania, Italy, Germany
and nationalist Ukrainians. And from the beginning it was FC
Start that just dominated the tournament. So, for example, they
beat Hungry six to two, they beat the Romanian team
eleven to zero, and they just continued to steamroll everyone,
(08:30):
just go on undefeated throughout the summer. And that may
not be too surprising when you think of the team's makeup.
So FC START players were, after all, very skilled, professional
level athletes who had been competing at the highest levels
in their sport even before the Nazi invasion. Other teams
might have been made up more of mostly military military folks.
(08:51):
You know, they weren't professional soccer players. But at this
point the Ukrainian team was also malnourished, they were tired
from working hours, they didn't have proper equipment. They shouldn't
just think of them as a team of highly conditioned
professionals either FC starts wins, though especially considering the origins
of the teams, that they were winning again started to
(09:12):
really boost the morale of locals in Kiev. People would
pay high prices, maybe higher than they can necessarily afford,
for tickets to come out and see FC Start beat
these teams that represented occupying forces. According to Lee's article,
the Germans realized that this morale boosting was going on.
They started to to to sort of come to know
(09:33):
this that they were dealing with a type of resistance here,
that they and their allies were being humiliated basically by
what they considered to be a team of you know,
sub human Ukrainians. So they decided that it was time
to do something about it wasn't boosting their mora It
wasn't boosting their morale at all. So on August six,
(09:53):
a game was set up between FC Start and a
recently formed German team called fluck Elf. According to an
article in The New York Times by Drey Longman and
Andrew larn, the name flock Elf suggested that the German
team was made up mostly of people who manned anti
aircraft guns around Kiev. Flock Elf had apparently pummeled the
Ukrainian Nationalist team prior to this match, so they felt
(10:15):
that they were easily going to come in and dominate
FC Start too. But Start ended up winning five to one.
That was not a problem for Flock Elf. They just
scheduled a rematch for only three days later. And Lee
also notes, of course, that the Germans controlled the local newspapers,
so no reports about that original Ukrainian victory were getting out,
(10:36):
and they were probably hoping that FC Start would be
so tired. You know, we already mentioned they were malnourished
and um not in the best physical shape. They would
just be so tired from that previous match. And um,
they working, and they didn't get like a three day
vacation before the rematch exactly. They figured they would be
really tired from that match during the rematch, and um,
(11:00):
they were also planning on coming out with a possibly
reinforced team of their own, so they would be new
and improved while their opponents would be worn down and tired.
So the rematch, the one that would become known as
the Match of Death, took place on August nine, two,
and according to that New York Times story we mentioned,
there was said to be about two thousand spectators and
(11:20):
Zeena Stadium was surrounded by s S officers and police dogs,
though some say that that actually wasn't the case. Tickets
to the game where five rubles apiece, which according to
that ESPN documentary, would have been about half a person's
a monthly salary at the time. One of the Start players,
Makar Goncerenko, later said that an s S officer came
(11:41):
to the FC Start dressing room before the match started,
told them that he was their referee and then asked
them to follow the rules and to greet their opponents
in quote our fashion before the start of the match,
which meant that he wanted them to give the Nazi salute,
and they agreed to us in the moment. But when
they went out there, instead of shouting Kyle Hitler, they
(12:04):
were said to have yelled feats could Hurrah, which was
a Soviet slogan that means fitness culture hurrah. So, according
to the account of the game given by Gunturenko in
a nineteen oral history, it was a really rough match
and all of the calls went to the Germans. Drsavitch,
who was the goalkeeper, was said to be kicked in
(12:26):
the head and knocked out in the first half, and
in Gunturenko said that this led FC start to fall behind,
understandably losing it's it's best player like that. But in
n he changed his story and he said that rather
they were inspired by Rosavitch's injury and they were actually
(12:47):
winning at halftime. The latter story would tend to drive
better with the legend, at least as we related it
in the beginning of this podcast, the one in which
the s S officer slash referee comes into FC star
Its dressing room at halftime and warns them against winning
them right. Uh. The author that we mentioned, Dugan, told
The New York Times that he thought that this was
(13:09):
possible that the halftime ultimatum did take place, though in
Reardon's article he says that the referee was actually a
Ukrainian nationalist, that's what he his research came up with,
and not a member of the Gestapo, is some believe,
and that the ultimatum actually never took place. So, as
you might have guessed by now, pretty much everything about
how this game went down is up for debate. And
(13:30):
while we just said it was a rough match and
the Germans played dirty. Reared in whose research included interviewing
sons of two Start players and eyewitness and the Ukraine
Sports Museum curator, says that it was tough but a
fair match, and that both sides in fact played roughly,
not just the German side. And there's some examples of
that too, aren't there of of pretty bold moves? Say?
(13:55):
There are in Dugan's book, and eyewitness says that FC
Start player alexeac Alimenko made a saucy move at the
end to pretty much embarrass the Germans. Further, he dribbled
all the way down to the mouth of the Germans
goal and then instead of scoring, he kicked the ball
back up field, as if to say, I don't need
that goal. Yeah, exactly. So, regardless of the details, it's
(14:18):
generally accepted that FC Start went on to win the
match five to three. So we know there was a match,
we know they won to five to three, but then
all these other details. Yeah, we've given you various options
on still though, I mean, what you're probably most interested
in is the legend of what happened to the players
after the match, where they really taken out and shot.
(14:41):
That's the myth that we mentioned uh, and it was
taken pretty much as gospel for about fifty years, just
lined up and shot right after the match. And this
is obviously untrue since Contrenko lived on to tell the tale.
He died at age eighty six, But there have been
other versions of the story that trast quite sharply with
(15:01):
this has the players shaking hands, posing for a photo together,
and going home. That's what Reardon's eyewitness, who was sixteen
years old at the time of the match, told him.
Interesting though, there is a photo that supposedly shows players
on both teams standing together and smiling after the game,
but according to an article in The Guardian by Jonathan Wilson,
(15:23):
this photo was probably taken at an entirely different game
because the correct mix of people aren't pictured there, and
the Germans were reported to be wearing a completely different uniform,
so it's something else entirely another just bizarre aspect of
this another twice. In Gonzarenko's account, he said that the
players were all apprehensive afterward, but they just showered and
(15:44):
went home. By some accounts, FC START players were arrested
at the bakery on August tenth, the day after the rematch,
and Gestapo agents came hunting for them by name, came
in actually with a Dynamo Kiev poster. I've read and
matched him up and tried to match him up. But
by other accounts, the team played one more match on
August sixteen, which they won eight to zero, and then
(16:07):
they were arrested a couple of days later, on August eighteen.
There are also alternate reasons though, why they were arrested, though,
and at least one of these arrests had absolutely nothing
to do with soccer. So again, according to Reardon's article,
someone added ground glass to the bread that was coming
out of Bakery Number three and the bread that was
(16:27):
specifically intended for German officers. And according to the New
York Times story, the players might have also been suspected
of having ties to the n k v D, which
was the Soviet secret police, and at least one player
was said to have been killed for this reason, So
it might not have been They might not have gotten
in trouble because they were such fantastic soccer players, but
(16:48):
because they had all of these other ties and other
suspected activities going on. Right, Lee writes that these ten
players were sent to a labor camp at Surettes, and
about six months after the match, three players were shot
to death, and those were Trasavich Klemenco and Ivan Kuzmenko,
and Lie suggests that these players deaths actually didn't really
(17:09):
have much to do with the fact that they won
a soccer game, or at least they didn't have everything
to do with the fact that they won a soccer game.
He believes that their fates were just the same as
so many other Soviet people who died during this time,
and Gondurenco himself kind of agreed with the statement. He
said something sort of similar in the interview um. He said,
(17:30):
a desperate fight for survival started, which ended badly for
four players. Unfortunately, they did not die because they were
great footballers or great Dynamo players. They died like many
other Soviet people, because two totalitarian systems were fighting each
other and they were destined to become victims of that
grand scale massacre. The death of the Dynamo players is
(17:51):
not so very different from many other deaths. Dugan, however,
told The New York Times that he does believe the
Start players were killed on purpose, because it seems to
coincidental that it was three of the best players that
were shot first. So according to Lee, though at least
three players, including Concurenco, did manage to escape and to
hide out in Kiev until the city was liberated by
(18:13):
the Soviets in November ninety three. But it's not like
things started looking up for the soccer players from there
on either. After Stalin took control of the Soviet territories again,
anybody who had had contact with the Nazis during their
occupation was arrested and questioned as a suspected collaborator. And
because the sc start players had competed in these sports,
(18:36):
uh you know, a sports event with the occupiers competed
in games against them, that was considered pretty close contact,
pretty close collaboration. Eventually, though, word about the supposed deathmatch
started to get out and articles were published, and at
first Soviet authorities didn't really want to promote it because
it wasn't something that had been sponsored by them, But
(18:59):
eventually they really adopted this story. They spun it to
their own advantage, so it became something like Soviet propaganda
in a way. And this is probably why the more
extreme version of the Match of Death exists today, because
it did serve a purpose at the time, right According
to the New York Times article. This is probably also
why Gontranco story changed over time, because he was initially
(19:22):
afraid of being seen by the Soviet government as a
Nazi collaborator, but then in later interviews, those that took
place after the fall of the Soviet Union, it was
a different story. Maybe he felt like he could finally
tell the truth. Who knows. Incidentally, in the sixties, the
Soviet government actually gave I think posthumously, they gave the
(19:44):
four who had died medals, and they gave they tried
to give the living players medals as well, but I
think one of the players actually refused to take a
medal because he was like, I don't want to be
part of a lie. Wow. But this controversy involving the
new movie The Match that we mentioned and an intro
to this episode is sort of all wrapped up in
kind of similar attentions to not exactly the same. But
(20:05):
it's a Russian made film, and some Ukrainians feel that
it depicts Ukrainians as Nazi collaborators who would be better
off sticking with Russia. So it's still kind of all
about the Ukrainians feeling like the Russians want to keep
them in their sphere of influence. I guess well, and
we should mention too that after the collapse of the
Soviet Union, other accounts of the deathmatch really started to emerge,
(20:28):
and that's how some of the alternate versions of details
you've heard today came about. You know, that's why this
story seems so sketchy in a way. And like you
said earlier, all we know, really there was a soccer match,
they won. What else happened? Yeah, all this other research
started to come out later, but it was difficult in
the nineties because I mean, Gondarenco was the one who
lived the longest I think, and he lived until so
(20:51):
there's really no one to ask anymore who was part
of the game. There may be still eyewitnesses and things
like that, but you know, with the differing stories and
stuff exactly, we're still left to wonder what the exact
story is. But many agree that even if the match
wasn't quite as dramatic as the myth that was perpetuated
(21:11):
for so many years, the FC Start players were still
significant and heroic in a way because they boosted morale
and they gave people hope during a really dark time.
Reardon calls it quote a brief moment of human decency
provided by football in the maelstream of war. That reminds
me a little bit about some of those quotes surrounding
(21:32):
the First Olympics too, about how sports can be inspiring
and show that competition can be something that's peaceful and organized. Yes,
today there's still a monument at Dynamo Stadium honoring the
four start players who died in the months after the deathmatch,
So what these men did is still remembered and even celebrated,
(21:54):
regardless of the exact details. So I think you know,
what you're saying about the Olympics is also a good
tie in It's it's in general. I mean, you can
be inspired what people with, what people do, and what
they can accomplish in sports, even if it's not necessarily
an act of heroism, as you might well. It also
shows just how charismatic sports stars can really be and
(22:17):
how much they can grip a country's attention. Even during
a time when there was clearly so many other things
to be thinking about and worrying about, they could still
have a sports figure that you followed and cared about
and paid half of your monthly salary to go see
And well, I think it all comes back to that
idea of hope and um, you know how that can
(22:39):
be an active heroism in itself, just providing that for
people sometimes no matter what the medium, I guess, but
a very sad story about also one that's really interesting
and when the you know we may continue to find
out more about over the years, is maybe more details emerged.
So if you know of any other I know that
there are a lot of other side and theories and
(23:01):
parts to the story that we didn't get a chance
to cover today, and if you want to share any
of those with us, please feel free to email us.
Where a history podcast at Discovery dot com. You can
also find us on Facebook and on Twitter at Myston History.
And people have been suggesting soccer topics to us for years.
I hope this one was was interesting for you guys.
But well, I can't believe we haven't done one yet.
(23:22):
I know I like soccer. You do love soccer so much,
so you don't need to read this article, but maybe
I should get back to my desk and check it out.
We do have an article called how Soccer works, or
I could just you know, get some tips from Dablina
or something. But um, all to the office tomorrow. Okay, okay,
it's a date. Um. You guys who need to freshen
(23:44):
up your your soccer knowledge a little bit like me,
you can go check out that article. It's called House
Soccer Works. You can find it by searching on our
homepage at www dot house stuff works dot com for
moral this, and thousands of other topics. Is it how
stuff works dot com? M m m m
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm to win your chalk reboarding and I'm fared out.
And if you're even remotely a soccer fan, you probably
took in at least some of the UEFA European Football
(00:22):
Championship earlier this summer. It's a more commonly known to
a lot of people as the Euro twelve Championship, but
it's pretty much the world's biggest soccer tournament after the
World Cup. Did you watch some of it? I did
watch some of it. Well, I did the whole DVR thing,
which isn't the best way to watch it now with
Facebook and everything, everybody always reveals the scores. But I
did my best. But if like me, all you did
(00:45):
was tune in now and again to cheer for your
favorite team. You may not have heard about a little
pre tournament controversy involving euro co host the Ukraine and
a new movie called The Match. So just to give
you some background on the movie. It tells the legendary
story of a soccer match that took place in nineteen
forty two and not the occupied Kiev, between a team
(01:07):
of skilled Ukrainian players and a team of German players,
and according to the classic version of events that was
generally accepted for a very long time, the Ukrainian team
was warned that essentially it would be in their best
interest to lose the match, but they decided to not
give in to the threats and just to play good soccer,
(01:29):
which was a move that won them the match, but again,
according to legend, lost them their lives. Some say that
all eleven players were lined up and shot by German
troops after the match. Hence this became known as the
death match or match of Death, depending on what source
you're looking at. So, the movie The Match was supposed
(01:50):
to be released in April in the Ukraine, but the
Ukrainian film officials originally tried to block its release. They
ended up changing their minds though, but when the film
finally came out later that month, it was met with
anchor and protests from a lot of Ukrainians. So we're
gonna be talking about a little bit more about why
the film got that reaction later in the podcast. But
(02:11):
as you might have already guessed from the episodes title,
our main goal here is going to be to talk
about the deathmatch itself and all of the myths, all
of the markiness surrounding it. And because while the legendary
soccer game we just related to you is a dramatic story,
it makes for a pretty great story to tell. Honestly,
most people today except that a story is all it
(02:33):
really is. It's it's just a legend, at least in part.
I mean, it's generally accepted that a soccer game did
take place in between Ukrainians and Nazison occupied Kiev, but
the details are still up for debate. So we're going
to take a look at the story and try to
separate myth from fact like we sometimes do, and also
try to understand why this myth came to be in
(02:57):
the first place, how did it come about? But before
we get too much into the soccer, you'll need an
idea of what was going on in World War Two
at the time, at least as much as it relates
to the Ukraine. Yeah, So to give you some background
on these events, Hitler's troops invaded the Soviet Union on
June twenty sick and nineteen forty one in Operation Barbarossa,
(03:18):
and less than three months after that, on September nineteenth,
nineteen forty one, they made their way into the capital
of the Ukraine, which was Kiev. So that invasion was
followed up almost immediately by mass executions at a ravine
on the city's outskirts called bobby Are, and between September
twenty nine and September about thirty three thousand, seven hundred
(03:43):
and seventy one people were killed at that ravine, including
almost all of the Jews who lived in Kiev, men,
women and children, and in the following years who It
wasn't like things ended after that. In the following years,
thousands of more people were killed there as well. Yeah. Ultimately,
according to an article by James Rearden in the journal
Soccer and Society, more Ukrainians died in the war than
(04:06):
any other single nation, which is something that I didn't
know before. It was something like ten to fifteen million
people total. And that's largely because, as Reardon points out,
the Nazis viewed people of Slavic descent to be unter
mentioned or subhuman like the Jews. According to Defiance the
Story of FC Start, which is a short ESPN documentary
(04:27):
on the death Match, many Ukrainians were taken prisoner right
away and thrown into camps, where some of them soon
died of disease and starvation. But about six months into occupation,
a lot of these POWs were released and ended up
living like refugees on the streets of Kiev. They existed
off of food rations that were at times cut to
(04:48):
two hundred grams of bread per week, and this was
said to be about the size of about a matchbox,
so not very much at all, and so people had
to resort to eating things like dogs, rats, crow's bark,
and even kal dung. So we're gonna be starting our
story basically with one of these POWs among those who
were released in return to Kiev. According to an article
(05:11):
by Johnny Kay Lee in Soccer in Society, where a
few Ukrainian soccer players who had played for the local team,
the Dynamo Kiev before the Nazi invasion, and Lee points
out how soccer was really at its height kind of
that it gained popularity in the Soviet Union during the
nineteen thirties, maybe as a way to escape from the
(05:31):
harsh realities of being ruled by a totalitarian government. And
Russia had a couple of pretty well known teams, but
the Dynamo Kiev was considered one of the best of
these soccer teams in Europe. Yeah, Anti Dugan, the author
of Dynamo Triumph and Tragedy and Nazi Occupied Kiev said
in that ESPN documentary that we mentioned quote, the way
(05:53):
that Kiev played was revolutionary. They played tremendously attacking football.
At the time, all the low coals knew who the
players were, and they would talk about games for days
after their celebrity. Indeed, but of course Nazi occupation changed
all that, and the Dynamo Kiev players who were released
as POWs had to struggle like everybody else did. However,
(06:15):
one of them, Nikolaicha Savic, who had been the team's goalkeeper,
upon his return to the city managed to land a
job at the Kiev Bakery Number three, which, if you're
getting rations that our match book sized with the pretty
great opportunity. So how he got that opportunity had to
do with his soccer playing past. The Kiev born manager
of the bakery had been a huge Dynamo fan and
(06:38):
he recognized to Savitch and brought him on, hired him,
making sure that he had shelter and food and This manager,
whose uh name some sources list as eosph Cordic, also
had German ancestry, so he had a relatively privileged position
in the city. At this time. He managed to convince
the Kiev governor and the Reischkomi Star for the Ukraine
(07:00):
that there should be an amateur football tournament in the
city to raise the morale of the Germans. Of course,
that was how he presented it, so some organized development
of soccer teams was allowed to go on. Besides this,
According to Carol Berkhoff's book Harvest of Despair, Life and
Death in the Ukraine, under Nazi rule, organized sports were
pretty much suppressed because the Germans were afraid that sports
(07:23):
would encourage Ukrainian solidarity. So this was really almost a
coup that he was able to convince them to stage
this and go through with it. Yeah, in a way,
the bakery manager encouraged to save it, to put together
a team and save it. Managed to track down some
of his old teammates and some players from the Locomotive
Kiev team who were also given jobs at Bakery Number three.
(07:46):
They called their team FC Start, which Lee suggests may
have been symbolic of a new beginning. So by June
of ninety two, the soccer tournament that the bakery manager
was hoping for was finally organized, and it took play
at the Zenit Stadium in Kiev and reared and describes
it as a eurostyle competition where FC START played teams
(08:09):
representing the various occupying powers so Hungary, Romania, Italy, Germany
and nationalist Ukrainians. And from the beginning it was FC
Start that just dominated the tournament. So, for example, they
beat Hungry six to two, they beat the Romanian team
eleven to zero, and they just continued to steamroll everyone,
(08:30):
just go on undefeated throughout the summer. And that may
not be too surprising when you think of the team's makeup.
So FC START players were, after all, very skilled, professional
level athletes who had been competing at the highest levels
in their sport even before the Nazi invasion. Other teams
might have been made up more of mostly military military folks.
(08:51):
You know, they weren't professional soccer players. But at this
point the Ukrainian team was also malnourished, they were tired
from working hours, they didn't have proper equipment. They shouldn't
just think of them as a team of highly conditioned
professionals either FC starts wins, though especially considering the origins
of the teams, that they were winning again started to
(09:12):
really boost the morale of locals in Kiev. People would
pay high prices, maybe higher than they can necessarily afford,
for tickets to come out and see FC Start beat
these teams that represented occupying forces. According to Lee's article,
the Germans realized that this morale boosting was going on.
They started to to to sort of come to know
(09:33):
this that they were dealing with a type of resistance here,
that they and their allies were being humiliated basically by
what they considered to be a team of you know,
sub human Ukrainians. So they decided that it was time
to do something about it wasn't boosting their mora It
wasn't boosting their morale at all. So on August six,
(09:53):
a game was set up between FC Start and a
recently formed German team called fluck Elf. According to an
article in The New York Times by Drey Longman and
Andrew larn, the name flock Elf suggested that the German
team was made up mostly of people who manned anti
aircraft guns around Kiev. Flock Elf had apparently pummeled the
Ukrainian Nationalist team prior to this match, so they felt
(10:15):
that they were easily going to come in and dominate
FC Start too. But Start ended up winning five to one.
That was not a problem for Flock Elf. They just
scheduled a rematch for only three days later. And Lee
also notes, of course, that the Germans controlled the local newspapers,
so no reports about that original Ukrainian victory were getting out,
(10:36):
and they were probably hoping that FC Start would be
so tired. You know, we already mentioned they were malnourished
and um not in the best physical shape. They would
just be so tired from that previous match. And um,
they working, and they didn't get like a three day
vacation before the rematch exactly. They figured they would be
really tired from that match during the rematch, and um,
(11:00):
they were also planning on coming out with a possibly
reinforced team of their own, so they would be new
and improved while their opponents would be worn down and tired.
So the rematch, the one that would become known as
the Match of Death, took place on August nine, two,
and according to that New York Times story we mentioned,
there was said to be about two thousand spectators and
(11:20):
Zeena Stadium was surrounded by s S officers and police dogs,
though some say that that actually wasn't the case. Tickets
to the game where five rubles apiece, which according to
that ESPN documentary, would have been about half a person's
a monthly salary at the time. One of the Start players,
Makar Goncerenko, later said that an s S officer came
(11:41):
to the FC Start dressing room before the match started,
told them that he was their referee and then asked
them to follow the rules and to greet their opponents
in quote our fashion before the start of the match,
which meant that he wanted them to give the Nazi salute,
and they agreed to us in the moment. But when
they went out there, instead of shouting Kyle Hitler, they
(12:04):
were said to have yelled feats could Hurrah, which was
a Soviet slogan that means fitness culture hurrah. So, according
to the account of the game given by Gunturenko in
a nineteen oral history, it was a really rough match
and all of the calls went to the Germans. Drsavitch,
who was the goalkeeper, was said to be kicked in
(12:26):
the head and knocked out in the first half, and
in Gunturenko said that this led FC start to fall behind,
understandably losing it's it's best player like that. But in
n he changed his story and he said that rather
they were inspired by Rosavitch's injury and they were actually
(12:47):
winning at halftime. The latter story would tend to drive
better with the legend, at least as we related it
in the beginning of this podcast, the one in which
the s S officer slash referee comes into FC star
Its dressing room at halftime and warns them against winning
them right. Uh. The author that we mentioned, Dugan, told
The New York Times that he thought that this was
(13:09):
possible that the halftime ultimatum did take place, though in
Reardon's article he says that the referee was actually a
Ukrainian nationalist, that's what he his research came up with,
and not a member of the Gestapo, is some believe,
and that the ultimatum actually never took place. So, as
you might have guessed by now, pretty much everything about
how this game went down is up for debate. And
(13:30):
while we just said it was a rough match and
the Germans played dirty. Reared in whose research included interviewing
sons of two Start players and eyewitness and the Ukraine
Sports Museum curator, says that it was tough but a
fair match, and that both sides in fact played roughly,
not just the German side. And there's some examples of
that too, aren't there of of pretty bold moves? Say?
(13:55):
There are in Dugan's book, and eyewitness says that FC
Start player alexeac Alimenko made a saucy move at the
end to pretty much embarrass the Germans. Further, he dribbled
all the way down to the mouth of the Germans
goal and then instead of scoring, he kicked the ball
back up field, as if to say, I don't need
that goal. Yeah, exactly. So, regardless of the details, it's
(14:18):
generally accepted that FC Start went on to win the
match five to three. So we know there was a match,
we know they won to five to three, but then
all these other details. Yeah, we've given you various options
on still though, I mean, what you're probably most interested
in is the legend of what happened to the players
after the match, where they really taken out and shot.
(14:41):
That's the myth that we mentioned uh, and it was
taken pretty much as gospel for about fifty years, just
lined up and shot right after the match. And this
is obviously untrue since Contrenko lived on to tell the tale.
He died at age eighty six, But there have been
other versions of the story that trast quite sharply with
(15:01):
this has the players shaking hands, posing for a photo together,
and going home. That's what Reardon's eyewitness, who was sixteen
years old at the time of the match, told him.
Interesting though, there is a photo that supposedly shows players
on both teams standing together and smiling after the game,
but according to an article in The Guardian by Jonathan Wilson,
(15:23):
this photo was probably taken at an entirely different game
because the correct mix of people aren't pictured there, and
the Germans were reported to be wearing a completely different uniform,
so it's something else entirely another just bizarre aspect of
this another twice. In Gonzarenko's account, he said that the
players were all apprehensive afterward, but they just showered and
(15:44):
went home. By some accounts, FC START players were arrested
at the bakery on August tenth, the day after the rematch,
and Gestapo agents came hunting for them by name, came
in actually with a Dynamo Kiev poster. I've read and
matched him up and tried to match him up. But
by other accounts, the team played one more match on
August sixteen, which they won eight to zero, and then
(16:07):
they were arrested a couple of days later, on August eighteen.
There are also alternate reasons though, why they were arrested, though,
and at least one of these arrests had absolutely nothing
to do with soccer. So again, according to Reardon's article,
someone added ground glass to the bread that was coming
out of Bakery Number three and the bread that was
(16:27):
specifically intended for German officers. And according to the New
York Times story, the players might have also been suspected
of having ties to the n k v D, which
was the Soviet secret police, and at least one player
was said to have been killed for this reason, So
it might not have been They might not have gotten
in trouble because they were such fantastic soccer players, but
(16:48):
because they had all of these other ties and other
suspected activities going on. Right, Lee writes that these ten
players were sent to a labor camp at Surettes, and
about six months after the match, three players were shot
to death, and those were Trasavich Klemenco and Ivan Kuzmenko,
and Lie suggests that these players deaths actually didn't really
(17:09):
have much to do with the fact that they won
a soccer game, or at least they didn't have everything
to do with the fact that they won a soccer game.
He believes that their fates were just the same as
so many other Soviet people who died during this time,
and Gondurenco himself kind of agreed with the statement. He
said something sort of similar in the interview um. He said,
(17:30):
a desperate fight for survival started, which ended badly for
four players. Unfortunately, they did not die because they were
great footballers or great Dynamo players. They died like many
other Soviet people, because two totalitarian systems were fighting each
other and they were destined to become victims of that
grand scale massacre. The death of the Dynamo players is
(17:51):
not so very different from many other deaths. Dugan, however,
told The New York Times that he does believe the
Start players were killed on purpose, because it seems to
coincidental that it was three of the best players that
were shot first. So according to Lee, though at least
three players, including Concurenco, did manage to escape and to
hide out in Kiev until the city was liberated by
(18:13):
the Soviets in November ninety three. But it's not like
things started looking up for the soccer players from there
on either. After Stalin took control of the Soviet territories again,
anybody who had had contact with the Nazis during their
occupation was arrested and questioned as a suspected collaborator. And
because the sc start players had competed in these sports,
(18:36):
uh you know, a sports event with the occupiers competed
in games against them, that was considered pretty close contact,
pretty close collaboration. Eventually, though, word about the supposed deathmatch
started to get out and articles were published, and at
first Soviet authorities didn't really want to promote it because
it wasn't something that had been sponsored by them, But
(18:59):
eventually they really adopted this story. They spun it to
their own advantage, so it became something like Soviet propaganda
in a way. And this is probably why the more
extreme version of the Match of Death exists today, because
it did serve a purpose at the time, right According
to the New York Times article. This is probably also
why Gontranco story changed over time, because he was initially
(19:22):
afraid of being seen by the Soviet government as a
Nazi collaborator, but then in later interviews, those that took
place after the fall of the Soviet Union, it was
a different story. Maybe he felt like he could finally
tell the truth. Who knows. Incidentally, in the sixties, the
Soviet government actually gave I think posthumously, they gave the
(19:44):
four who had died medals, and they gave they tried
to give the living players medals as well, but I
think one of the players actually refused to take a
medal because he was like, I don't want to be
part of a lie. Wow. But this controversy involving the
new movie The Match that we mentioned and an intro
to this episode is sort of all wrapped up in
kind of similar attentions to not exactly the same. But
(20:05):
it's a Russian made film, and some Ukrainians feel that
it depicts Ukrainians as Nazi collaborators who would be better
off sticking with Russia. So it's still kind of all
about the Ukrainians feeling like the Russians want to keep
them in their sphere of influence. I guess well, and
we should mention too that after the collapse of the
Soviet Union, other accounts of the deathmatch really started to emerge,
(20:28):
and that's how some of the alternate versions of details
you've heard today came about. You know, that's why this
story seems so sketchy in a way. And like you
said earlier, all we know, really there was a soccer match,
they won. What else happened? Yeah, all this other research
started to come out later, but it was difficult in
the nineties because I mean, Gondarenco was the one who
lived the longest I think, and he lived until so
(20:51):
there's really no one to ask anymore who was part
of the game. There may be still eyewitnesses and things
like that, but you know, with the differing stories and
stuff exactly, we're still left to wonder what the exact
story is. But many agree that even if the match
wasn't quite as dramatic as the myth that was perpetuated
(21:11):
for so many years, the FC Start players were still
significant and heroic in a way because they boosted morale
and they gave people hope during a really dark time.
Reardon calls it quote a brief moment of human decency
provided by football in the maelstream of war. That reminds
me a little bit about some of those quotes surrounding
(21:32):
the First Olympics too, about how sports can be inspiring
and show that competition can be something that's peaceful and organized. Yes,
today there's still a monument at Dynamo Stadium honoring the
four start players who died in the months after the deathmatch,
So what these men did is still remembered and even celebrated,
(21:54):
regardless of the exact details. So I think you know,
what you're saying about the Olympics is also a good
tie in It's it's in general. I mean, you can
be inspired what people with, what people do, and what
they can accomplish in sports, even if it's not necessarily
an act of heroism, as you might well. It also
shows just how charismatic sports stars can really be and
(22:17):
how much they can grip a country's attention. Even during
a time when there was clearly so many other things
to be thinking about and worrying about, they could still
have a sports figure that you followed and cared about
and paid half of your monthly salary to go see
And well, I think it all comes back to that
idea of hope and um, you know how that can
(22:39):
be an active heroism in itself, just providing that for
people sometimes no matter what the medium, I guess, but
a very sad story about also one that's really interesting
and when the you know we may continue to find
out more about over the years, is maybe more details emerged.
So if you know of any other I know that
there are a lot of other side and theories and
(23:01):
parts to the story that we didn't get a chance
to cover today, and if you want to share any
of those with us, please feel free to email us.
Where a history podcast at Discovery dot com. You can
also find us on Facebook and on Twitter at Myston History.
And people have been suggesting soccer topics to us for years.
I hope this one was was interesting for you guys.
But well, I can't believe we haven't done one yet.
(23:22):
I know I like soccer. You do love soccer so much,
so you don't need to read this article, but maybe
I should get back to my desk and check it out.
We do have an article called how Soccer works, or
I could just you know, get some tips from Dablina
or something. But um, all to the office tomorrow. Okay, okay,
it's a date. Um. You guys who need to freshen
(23:44):
up your your soccer knowledge a little bit like me,
you can go check out that article. It's called House
Soccer Works. You can find it by searching on our
homepage at www dot house stuff works dot com for
moral this, and thousands of other topics. Is it how
stuff works dot com? M m m m
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