Friedrich Scherfke

Friedrich Scherfke
Friedrich Scherfke
Personnel
Surname	Friedrich Egon Scherfke
birthday	September 7, 1909
place of birth	Poznan ,  German Empire
date of death	September 15, 1983
Place of death	Bad Soden ,  Germany
size	182 cm
position	Sturm , midfield
Men's
Years	station	Games (goals) 1
1925-1939	Warta poses	235 (134)
1940	1. FC Poznan
1941-1942	SG SS Poznan
National team
Years	selection	Games (goals)
1932-1938	Poland	12 00(1)
1 Only league games are given.

Friedrich (Fritz) Egon Scherfke (Polish: Fryderyk Scherfke or Szerfke ) (born September 7, 1909 in Posen , German Empire ; †  September 15,  1983 in Bad Soden ) was a football player who came from a Protestant German family in Posen and competed for the Polish national team.

Life

Scherfke was born the son of an agricultural machinery manufacturer . After 1918 his home region became part of the Second Polish Republic as a result of the Wielkopolska Uprising and the Treaty of Versailles . He attended the Schiller High School , the largest school of the German minority in Poznan. Soon after graduating from high school, he took on leading positions in his father's company, which also included a car repair shop.

After the German invasion of Poland and the reconnection of Poznan to the German Reich in October 1939, he signed the German People's List . The new German authorities appointed him as a “provisional specialist” for football in the newly founded Reichsgau Wartheland . He was commissioned to revive "German football" in Poznan. He held the post for several weeks until a Wehrmacht officer took it over. He was also one of the founders of 1. FC Posen , which was only open to German nationals, and took over the office of chairman. After the club was renamed the Air Force Sports Club (LSV) in Poznan in October 1940, he left there.

At first he continued to operate the car workshop on behalf of the Wehrmacht , where SS vehicles were also repaired. In February 1943 he was drafted into the Wehrmacht. As a sergeant , he was wounded in Yugoslavia in January 1945 . After a stay in a hospital he was taken prisoner by the British in April 1945 in Schleswig-Holstein.

After his release in July 1945, he was unable to return to his hometown of Poznan. He first settled in Senftenberg with his wife and son, who had fled the approaching front in time, before moving to West Berlin in 1947 . There he opened a furniture shop, which he ran for more than three decades. In the early eighties he moved to Hessen , near Frankfurt am Main . He died in Bad Soden hospital.

Club soccer

At the age of 16, Friedrich Scherfke and his brother Günther, who was one year older, joined the Warta Posen football club in 1925 . He soon made a name for himself as a center forward with strong header .

Both contributed significantly to winning the Polish championship in 1929. Friedrich Scherfke became one of the league's most successful goalscorers, scoring 131 goals in twelve seasons, placing him in second place in the interwar scorers list after Teodor Peterek von Ruch Wielkie Hajduki .

From February 1940 he played for 1. FC Posen, now mostly as a playmaker in midfield, at the same time he was team captain . In October 1940 he was the team captain of the national team of the Wartheland at the Reichsbund Cup, which, however, was eliminated in the first round after a 1: 2 defeat against Silesia . After the renaming of 1. FC Poznan in Air Force Sports Club Poznan in October 1940, he no longer appeared for the team. In the summer of 1941 he joined the newly established SS Posen Sports Association , although like most of the other players he was not a member of the SS. With the dissolution of the SG in February 1942, he ended his active career at the age of 32.

National team

In 1932 he was called up for the first time in the Polish national team for an international match against Latvia (2-1). But it wasn't until three years later that he won a regular place. He was particularly encouraged by the German national coach Kurt Otto , who looked after the Polish team in 1935/36.

He was also set up by Otto in the two games against the DFB-Elf in 1935 in Breslau (0: 1) and in 1936 in Warsaw (1: 1). "Der Kicker" praised him as a "prudent, (...) technically skilled, very elegantly playing storm leader".

As Fryderyk Scherfke , he took part in the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin, in which Poland took fourth place. Two years later he was part of the Polish squad at the World Cup in France , now in an even more polonized spelling of his name ( Fryderyk Szerfke ) . In the round of 16 against Brazil on June 5, 1938 in Strasbourg , he scored the first goal for Poland at a World Cup with a penalty, which made it 1-1. Poland lost the game after extra time 5-6. The other four Polish goals were scored by Ernst Willimowski from Ruch Wielkie Hajduki.

On September 25, 1938 he ran in the international match against Latvia (1: 2) in Riga for the first time as a team captain. It was his last game in the Polish selection. He had a total of twelve international appearances in which he scored a goal.

controversy

Since Scherfke entered the German people's list at the beginning of the Second World War and assumed an office in the Poznan sports authority, he was considered a “traitor” by the Polish underground press. At the time of the People's Republic of Poland he was accused of having placed himself in the service of the Gestapo , e. Sometimes even that he appeared in public in SS uniform. The information about his alleged work for the Gestapo, at least as a driver, was also included in international sports encyclopedias.

But in 2001 the Poznan editorial team of the left-wing liberal Gazeta Wyborcza succeeded in refuting the SS version. Contemporary witnesses and historians even reported to the newspaper that in the first two years of the war Scherfke was able to free several former Polish clubmates and their relatives from German captivity or to save them from deportation to forced labor , including the national goalkeeper Marian Fontowicz . He also saved his parents' Polish lawyer and his family from deportation, as his daughter later reported. He also warned former sports comrades who had joined the AK underground army of SS actions. It is believed that he was targeted by the Gestapo as a Polish helper.

As a positive hero, he found its way into a picture story about the Polish national team. In 2011 the content of a letter of condolence to his widow from 1983 was made public, in which his former Polish club mates from Warta Posen recognized him as a loyal helper.

References

literature

• Thomas Urban : Black Eagles, White Eagles. German and Polish footballers at the heart of politics. Verlag Die Werkstatt, Göttingen 2011, ISBN 978-3-89533-775-8 , pp. 59–74.
• Radosław Nawrot: Friedrich / Fryderyk Scherfke - footballer between Poland and Germany, in: From conflict to competition. German-Polish-Ukrainian football history. Edited by D. Blecking / L. Pfeiffer / R. Traba. Göttingen 2014, pp. 123–132. ISBN 978-3-7307-0083-9

Web links

• Fryderyk Scherfke in the FIFA database . Retrieved December 22, 2019.
• Fryedryk Szerfke in the FIFA database . Retrieved December 22, 2019.
• Photos in the National Digital Archive (NAC) Warsaw http://www.audiovis.nac.gov.pl/

Footnotes

1. ↑ Information on the biography from: Thomas Urban: Black Eagle, White Eagle. German and Polish footballers at the heart of politics. Göttingen 2011, pp. 59–74.
2. ↑ Der Kicker, June 18, 1940, p. 23.
3. ↑ East German Observer , April 8, 1940, p. 5
4. ↑ Der Kicker, December 24, 1940, p. 23.
5. ^ ^{A b} Deutsche Dienststelle, II C2 111014/209, pp. 3–4.
6. ^ Gazeta Wyborcza (Poznań) August 28, 2011.
7. ↑ East German Observer , October 7, 1940, p. 3.
8. ↑ Der Kicker, November 26, 1940, p. 27.
9. ↑ East German Observer , July 28, 1941, p. 5.
10. ↑ Der Kicker, September 15, 1936, pp. 4, 7.
11. ↑ sport.pl June 5, 2013
12. ↑ Andrzej Gowarzewski: Biało-Czerwoni 1921-2001. Katowice 2002, p. 59.
13. ↑ Bogdan Tuszyński: Za cenę życia. Sport Polski Walczącej 1939–1945. Warszawa 2006, p. 30.
14. ↑ z. B. Józef Hałyś: Almanac: Polska piłka nożna. Kraków 1986, p. 87.
15. ↑ Radosław Nawrot: Friedrich / Fryderyk Scherfke - footballers between Poland and Germany, in: From conflict to competition. German-Polish-Ukrainian football history. Edited by D. Blecking / L. Pfeiffer / R. Traba. Göttingen 2014, p. 127.
16. ^ Gazeta Wyborcza (Poznań) June 3, 2012.
17. ↑ Gazeta Wyborcza (Wielkopolska), September 14, 2001, p. 20, cf. Thomas Urban: Black Eagles, White Eagles. German and Polish footballers at the heart of politics. Verlag Die Werkstatt, Göttingen 2011, ISBN 978-3-89533-775-8 , pp. 70–72.
18. ↑ Sławomir Kielbus / Radosław Nawrot: Kazimierz Gorski. Warszawa 2008, p. 9
19. ↑ Thomas Urban: Black eagles, white eagles. German and Polish footballers at the heart of politics. Verlag Die Werkstatt, Göttingen 2011, ISBN 978-3-89533-775-8 , p. 74.