Jewish influence in exhibition of FC Bayern

It’s football prowess that comes to mind when hearing the name FC Bayern Munich, not a rich Holocaust history peppered with Jewish people.

In fact, the man who shaped the face of what FC Bayern Munich is today was a Jewish salesman, Kurt Landauer, who played for the team and was a four-time president of the club. Before 1933, it had a 10% Jewish membership.

This was revealed by Fabian Raabe, the curator of the travelling FC Bayern Munich Museum at its opening at the Johannesburg Holocaust & Genocide Centre on 28 November.

Raabe said FC Bayern Munich took on the task of looking back at its history and sharing the good, the bad, and the ugly with a travelling exhibition that has gone to 11 different countries. Though the club has a checkered past, “history has never held us back. Rather, it has pushed us forward as an independent club”, Raabe said.

The exhibition “gives us an insight into the club’s most difficult years”, said German Ambassador Andreas Peschke, at the opening. “Its history isn’t only about great successes, outstanding athletes, and inspiring matches. It’s also a history of the club and its members during the times of the Nazi dictatorship, Germany’s darkest years.

“And it’s a ‘history of people who became victims, of people who chose to look the other way. People actively supported the Nazis and committed crimes against Jews’”.

Said Peschke, “This exhibition documents what antisemitism and racism in Germany gave rise to. Exclusion and violence against people who think differently or who believe differently must have no place. In the end, this exhibition was also proof of where thought and team spirit can take people.”

Raabe said Jews gravitated to football because at the start of the 20th century, football wasn’t that popular in Germany. The most popular sport at the time was gymnastics, which he said was rigid, militaristic, and antisemitic. There was a belief that gymnasts would unify the German nation.

German Jews were attracted to football because there was a chance for integration, Raabe said.

When FC Bayern Munich was founded in 1900, it wasn’t the city’s first football club but it pledged to play a leading role in this emerging sport. Its founding members were from middle-class backgrounds, and most didn’t come from Bavaria. Two of the 11 founding members had Jewish roots.

Raabe said that though 10% of the 1 085 members before 1933 had been Jewish, there’s evidence that only eight survived the Holocaust. Twenty-seven members were said to be murdered, four took their own lives, and 83 were forced to flee, he said.

According to their research, three Jewish members fled to Johannesburg.

The man who shaped the club at its inception, Landauer, played for the club as a youth from 1901. He left Munich to train as a banker in Lausanne, concluding his apprenticeship in Florence, and then returned to Munich in 1905. He was elected club president for the first time in 1913, but the outbreak of hostilities in World War I forced him to quit the position, Raabe said.

Landauer served a second spell as club president from spring 1919 until March 1933, with a one-year break in 1922. Fuelled by Landauer’s ideas and energy, the club grew into an internationally renowned club, said Raabe.

In 1932, the club won the German championship with a Jewish president, manager, and Jewish players.

When the Nazis came to power in 1933, many football clubs were reluctant to exclude Jewish people. However, in 1933, the club did sign the “Stuttgart Declaration” that committed itself to the removal of Jews from sports clubs, along with 13 other German football clubs.

Although there was no enforcement of this exclusion, many Jews were wary of the state of their club, with 41 Jews leaving between February and November 1933.

Landauer was forced to resign in 1933. On the day after Kristallnacht, Landauer was arrested, and sent to Dachau with 19 former Bayern Munich members and another thousand Jews. He was registered at Dachau as prisoner number 20009. However, because he fought in World War I, he was released 33 days later. Four of his siblings were killed by the Nazis, and then after World War II, he had the chance to immigrate to the United States but chose to stay in Munich because it was his home.

However, Landauer moved to Switzerland on 15 March 1939. In 1940, Bayern Munich went to Geneva for a friendly against the Swiss national team. When the players spotted Landauer among the spectators, they went to greet their former president. The Gestapo wasn’t amused, and threatened that this behaviour would have consequences.

In June 1947, Landauer moved back to Munich, and was re-elected to the Bayern presidency in the same year. His final term of office ended in 1951. Ten years later, on 21 December 1961, Landauer passed away in Munich at the age of 77.

During the years of the Nazi regime, the club excluded Jewish members and elected Josef Kellner, a dedicated Nazi official, as club leader in 1938.

Similarly, Adolf Fischer who was club president from 1953 to 1955, was guilty of Nazi plunder by enriching himself as co-founder of the Eidenschink Bank through the forced sale of Jewish companies.

Peschke applauded Raabe and the Bayern Munich research team for the exhibition, saying it was unusual for a football team to look back not only at the victims of the Holocaust, but also the perpetrators who were a part of the longstanding club.