Gottfried Fuchs

Gottfried Fuchs
Personnel
birthday	May 3, 1889
place of birth	Karlsruhe ,  German Empire
date of death	February 25, 1972
Place of death	Montreal ,  Canada
position	Storm
Men's
Years	station	Games (goals) 1
1904-1907	Düsseldorf SC 99
1907-1914	Karlsruhe FV
(...)	Wacker Hall
(...) –1920	Düsseldorf SC 99
National team
Years	selection	Games (goals)
1911-1913	Germany	6 (13)
1 Only league games are given.

Gottfried Fuchs (born May 3, 1889 in Karlsruhe , † February 25, 1972 in Montreal , Québec , Canada ) was a German football player.

Football sport

Fuchs played as a striker for the Düsseldorfer SC 99 in the German championship in 1907 and then, much more successfully, for the Karlsruher FV . At the side of Fritz Förderer and Julius Hirsch "Fuchs developed playfully and was able to show off his goalscoring qualities better as a center forward". Finally he became German soccer champion with KFV in 1910 . Also in the following two finals he was on his team, which was runner-up again in 1912 .

In February of the same year, southern Germany won the Crown Prince's Cup by beating Brandenburg 6: 5 . Gottfried Fuchs scored three goals in front of 7,000 spectators on Union-Platz in Mariendorf . Overall, he brought it in this competition on seven hits in six games.

Fuchs later returned to Düsseldorf; During the First World War he was at times a guest player for Wacker Halle .

From 1911 to 1913 he was active six times for the senior national team in international games and scored 13 goals. To date (June 2018) this is the best rate (2.17) for a German national player. In the 1912 Olympic football tournament in Stockholm he scored ten goals in a match against the Russian national team to the final score of 16: 0, a figure that is still unsurpassed in an international match for a German national player. The Australian Archie Thompson has held the world record since 2001 , scoring 13 goals in a 31-0 win against American Samoa . With these ten goals, Fuchs surpassed Germany's top international goal scorer, Eugen Kipp , who had previously scored eight goals in eleven international matches. His sixth and last international match he played in 1913 in the 2-6 defeat in Belgium, in which he scored his 13th goal for the national team.

Military service / professional activity

During the First World War , Fuchs served as an artillery officer , was honored and wounded four times. After the war he played again for a short time for the Karlsruher FV and then ended his career. His brother was the architect and composer Richard Fuchs .

Working in his father's family business, the Fuchs Söhne woodworking shop, Fuchs moved to Berlin in 1928, where he belonged to the local tennis club until 1935, before he was forced to leave the club because of his Jewish descent.

emigration

Since Fuchs was of Jewish origin, he had to emigrate via Switzerland to France in 1937 and finally to Canada in 1940 , where he died of a myocardial infarction in Montreal in 1972 - now under the name Godfrey Fochs . Because of the Nuremberg Race Laws , his name was deleted from some German football statistics. The journalist Karl-Heinz Jens (again) reminded Fuchs in the omniscient football 1959. Sepp Herberger's clear commitment to his former football idol (the " Franz Beckenbauer of his youth") contributed significantly to the fact that Fuchs' achievements for German football were gradually recognized again in public.

Der Spiegel wrote in 2012:

“On May 24, 1972, the opportunity seemed to come when the new Munich Olympic Stadium was to be inaugurated with a game against the Soviet Union. Herberger proposed in a letter to the then DFB vice-runner Hermann Neuberger to invite Gottfried Fuchs as a guest of honor at the association's expense. This would 'as an attempt to redress voluntary injustices, certainly not only find a positive response in the circle of footballers and athletes, but everywhere in Germany'. Herberger concluded that he hoped for the approval of the board of directors. […] The response from the DFB to Herberger was perfidious. The then treasurer Hubert Claessen wrote that there was 'no inclination to proceed in line with your proposal' . The Presidium was of the opinion that 'a precedent would be created that could also bring considerable burdens in the future'. This was followed by a dry reference to the 'tight budget situation'.

Precedent? In 1972 Gottfried Fuchs was the only living Jewish footballer who had ever played for Germany.

Tense budget situation? In the summer of 1972, the DFB paid every national player 10,000 marks to win the European Championship. A return flight with Lufthansa from Montreal to Frankfurt cost 1760 marks in economy class at that time. "

“At that time there were 13 men on the board of the DFB. Two, Hans Deckert from Schweinfurt and Degenhard Wolf from Cologne, had been members of the NSDAP. Immediately after the start of the war, a member of the presidium, Rudolf Gramlich from Frankfurt , who later received the Federal Cross of Merit and the DFB's Golden Badge of Honor, belonged to an SS skull association that murdered in Poland. "

Herberger wrote to his pen pal Fuchs on March 22, 1972, deeply disappointed by the cancellation of the DFB. The news did not reach Fuchs anymore. He had died a month earlier.

Awards

On June 16, 2013, the Karlsruhe municipal council decided to rename a section of the Karlsruher Weg to Gottfried-Fuchs-Platz .

In memory of Gottfried Fuchs, the three Baden-Württemberg football associations Baden , Südbaden and Württemberg have been awarding a youth award named after Fuchs to clubs, departments or individual teams from the youth sector of the three associations since the 2016/17 football season. The motto of the youth award is: "For humanity and tolerance - against racism and anti-Semitism" .

literature

• Harald Kaiser: When Fuchs went hunting for goals: ten goals in one game . In: Der Kicker , June 29, 2009, pp. 78–79.
• Werner Skrentny: Gottfried Fuchs - national player with a goal record. In: Schulze-Marmeling (ed.): Star of David and leather ball. The workshop, Göttingen. ISBN 3-89533-407-3 . Pp. 123-130.
• "Gotti" scored ten goals in an international match. In: Badische Latest News , May 24, 2003.
• Karlsruhe soccer star flees to Canada from Nazi thugs. In: Baden's latest news , May 28, 2003.
• Gottfried Fuchs on the way into exile / An exchange of letters with Herberger. In: Skrentny: Julius Hirsch. National player. Murdered. Biography of a Jewish footballer. Die Werkstatt, Göttingen, 2012, ISBN 978-3-89533-858-8 , pp. 226–236 and pp. 281–293

Web links

• Gottfried Fuchs in the database of weltfussball.de
• Gottfried Fuchs on dfb .de
• Gottfried Fuchs on karlsruher-fv1891.de
• Memorial event in Dortmund, January 2020 , with concert, Dt. Football museum

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Libero special German , ed. from IFFHS , No D 3, 1st quarter 1992, page 31
2. ↑ Libero special German , ed. from IFFHS , No D 3, 1st quarter 1992, page 45
3. ↑ "kulturfalter.de" , accessed on July 26, 2019
4. ↑ Badische Presse of December 28, 1914, page 4: “The Iron Cross received (...) Offz.-Stellv. Gottfried Fuchs, player from the Karlsruhe soccer club. (...) "
5. ^ Gottfried Fuchs in the Karlsruhe stadtwiki.net version
6. ^ But not from the Kicker Almanach , the 1941/42 edition of which Fuchs mentions in several places.
7. ^ Karl-Heinz Jens (ed.): The omniscient football , Nuremberg 1959, here: part 2, page 21; see. also Libero special German , ed. from IFFHS , No D 3, 1st quarter 1992, page 32
8. ↑ ^{a b c d} M. Wulzinger: Herberger's hero. In: Der Spiegel issue 14, 2012, p. 107.
9. ↑ Press release of the Karlsruher FV: Inauguration of Julius Hirsch-Straße and Gottfried Fuchs-Platz
10. ↑ Gottfried Fuchs Youth Prize for clubs with special commitment . Press release of the Badischer Fußballverband, accessed on August 26, 2016.