Greater German Chess Federation

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The Großdeutsche Schachbund (GSB, partly also GDSB) was a National Socialist chess organization based in Berlin . The Großdeutsche Schachbund was the umbrella organization for German chess players from 1933 until the end of World War II .

First foundation

At the beginning of the 1930s, only about every fourth organized German chess player belonged to a member club of the German Chess Federation . The rest were organized in the party-political ( SPD , KPD ) oriented workers' chess clubs, the chess departments of the German National Sales Assistant Association and in several Catholic chess organizations, including the "Chess Federation in the Catholic Young Men Association " (with around 4,000 members in 1933). Since double memberships were possible, the total number of players organized at the end of the Weimar Republic can only be estimated at around 30,000 to 40,000 chess players.

In this environment, Berlin chess activists founded another National Socialist chess association on December 13, 1931, which called itself the "Greater German Chess Association". The name expresses the fact that the association was expressly aimed at chess players among Germans abroad . Bruno Hartmann was appointed chairman. It was a purely politically motivated foundation. Nothing is known about a match or clubs that joined the GSB until 1933.

Coordination and leadership role of the GSB

After the " seizure of power ", the NSDAP leadership pursued the goal of replacing the existing diversity in the chess organization with a unified organization under the umbrella of the GSB. Workers' chess clubs were banned from operating as early as 1933; its members could often join other associations.

The transfer of the existing chess organizations to the Greater German Chess Federation was decided on April 23, 1933. This date was considered to be the founding date of the GSB in contemporary representations. Otto Zander became federal manager, Ehrhardt Post was appointed managing director . At the end of May 1933, Joseph Goebbels took over the honorary chairmanship of the GSB.

The German Chess Federation then temporarily revoked its approval and appointed a National Socialist functionary to its head. The attempt of the German Chess Federation to assert its independence in this way failed and the replacement by the GSB was confirmed in July 1933. At the same time, the Greater German Chess Federation held its first congress in Bad Pyrmont , which made its claim to leadership clear. The regional associations and member clubs of the German Chess Federation were included in the GSB. They had to hold extraordinary general meetings in July 1933, at which, if possible, a member of the NSDAP was to be elected "club leader". In accordance with the leadership principle, the club leader appointed additional employees, such as a "deputy leader", a secretary or a "team leader". The German Chess Federation continued to exist legally until 1934.

As a result of the Reich Concordat , which regulated the continued existence of the Catholic organizations, the Catholic chess organizations led a restricted special existence until 1937/38. The same was true in this period (up to the November pogroms 1938 ) for the Jewish chess organizations, which only emerged as a result of the exclusion of Jews from the GSB after 1933 (see below ).

After 1935, the GSB, as a nationwide organization, faced some competition from the chess community of the Nazi leisure organization “ Kraft durch Freude ” (KdF). The KdF chess community, which also tried to organize competitions and tournaments, remained limited from 1938 to taking on tasks in popular chess and, in particular, to organizing company chess groups.

The journalistic organ of the GSB was the Deutsche Schachblätter and in 1943/44 the only remaining German chess magazine was the Deutsche Schachzeitung .

Organized chess promotion

The Greater German Chess Federation was not given the status of a subdivision of the NSDAP or one of its sub-organizations . The GSB therefore had to remove the swastika from its emblem at the end of 1933 . More importantly, the association could not claim any institutional funding.

Nevertheless, the Großdeutsche Schachbund pursued an intensive, politically deliberate upgrade of German chess, which may have been influenced by the example of chess promotion in the Soviet Union . Larger events and “promotional weeks” should increase interest in the game. In October 1934 Otto Zander reported that compared to the approximately 10,000 members of the German Chess Federation in 1933, 45,000 to 50,000 players now belonged to the new general association.

In addition to the ideologically motivated exclusion of Jews, the GSB pursued several thrusts. The competitive nature of chess was emphasized. The conditions for the awarding of the championship titles , which were only to be awarded for a limited period of one year, were tightened considerably. The number of elimination tournaments for the “ Championship of Germany ” increased, and supra-regional zones were set up for the tournaments above the state level.

On the one hand there was material support for chess by the state, while at the same time the amateur character of the game was emphasized. As a result, no cash prizes were offered at tournaments, the players were reimbursed for all costs incurred for participation. Finally, team chess experienced an upswing, including hosting the first German team championship .

In addition, the officials and a number of National Socialist chess publicists tried to militarize chess terminologically (“combat chess”) and, after the start of the war, to emphasize the psychological importance of the “intellectual defense game” for the war effort.

Exclusion and defamation of Jews

The GSB had stipulated in its statutes to accept “only German Aryan descent” as members ( Aryan paragraph ). As early as the spring of 1933, all Jewish chess officials had to resign from their offices, above all the President of the German Chess Federation, Walter Robinow . In May 1933 Heinrich Ranneforth wrote in the Deutsche Schachzeitung : "Anyone who feels and acts German and feels inwardly connected to the German people, why shouldn't they be considered a national comrade ?" But from July 1933 Jews were no longer allowed to be members of Be chess clubs within the GSB. For example, the former world chess champion Emanuel Lasker had to be expelled from the Berlin Chess Society , of which he was an honorary member. During this time, some purely Jewish chess clubs were founded, some of which lasted until 1938. In 1935 and 1937 there were even “Jewish championships”, won by Sammi Fajarowicz .

From 1936 the GSB published a series of publications under the title “Library of the Greater German Chess Association”. In their publications, some opening variants named after Jewish chess players were renamed and all of the games with Jewish participation were won by “Aryan” masters. This deprived readers of many of the best chess games, as the leading chess players between 1880 and 1930 were mostly Jews.

In the spring of 1941, when the German-Soviet non-aggression pact was still in place, the then world champion Alexander Alekhine published a series of articles in two magazines entitled “Jewish and Aryan chess, a psychological study that - based on the experiences on the black and white board - proves the Jewish lack of courage and creative power ”, which was supposed to prove that“ Aryans ”would be better chess players because of their talents - especially because of their“ fighting spirit ”. Alekhine, who had also received financial support from the German side after 1941, then left the German Reich in 1943 due to the development of the war and settled in neutral Spain.

Such theoretical attempts were accompanied by the martial-racist rhetoric typical of the time in official papers. The invitation to the 23rd Swabian Chess Congress in June 1941 was made with the words: "For the second time in this great struggle of National Socialist Germany against its plutocratic-Jewish enemies, the Württemberg-Hohenzollern Chess Association is calling its members to a war chess congress."

In his essay “Schach - Kampf und Kunst”, published in 1943 in the Deutsche Schachzeitung , Emil Joseph Diemer wrote : “I see in this fear of responsibility, of risk, of great deed, of dangerous life, the ultimate expression of Jewish influence on our chess youth. Why should it be any different in chess, this symbol of human life, this parallel phenomenon to all human conflicts in cultural and political areas, than in all other areas of human existence today? Here fight, here Maginot spirit! "

Relations with FIDE

The Großdeutsche Schachbund declared its withdrawal from FIDE in 1933 , which led to the international isolation of the German chess sport. The reasons remained closed to foreign observers. In November 1936 the British Chess Magazine was still puzzled as to why Germany had actually withdrawn.

In 1935, the GSB approached FIDE with the request to support the organization of an international team tournament in Munich on the occasion of the 1936 Summer Olympics . At its congress in Warsaw, the World Chess Federation stated that the GSB's statutes contained provisions that had "no relation to the game of chess" and that were incompatible with the nature and statutes of FIDE - thus the anti-Semitic provisions, especially the exclusion of Jewish players from the competitions, condemned. However, since the GSB had agreed to suspend this regulation for the duration of the tournament, FIDE gave its member associations the option of participating in the tournament in Munich known as the “ Chess Olympia 1936 ”.

For the Chess Olympiad in 1939 Germany joined again after the World Chess Federation had taken the GSB as a member association. The German team prepared by " Reichstrainer " (since 1937) Efim Bogoljubow was in the lead when the Second World War began. Germany was eventually declared the winner, but most of the players, including Erich Eliskases , did not return to Germany.

Territorial expansion and activity during the Second World War

The so-called Anschluss in March 1938 was welcomed by leading chess officials and chess players in Austria, as can be seen from a letter that Hans Geiger and Albert Becker wrote to the GSB just six days after the German invasion. The Austrian Chess Federation and then the German Chess Federation of the Sudeten areas , which were also annexed in 1938 , joined the Chess Federation as new regional associations. Ultimately, a chess organization emerged in occupied Poland that was only accessible to German chess players. In November 1940 the “1. Championship tournament of the GSB in the Generalgouvernement ”took place, the first of several tournaments for which (the 1946 executed as a war criminal ) Governor General Hans Frank campaigned.

In 1938, Franz Moraller took over the office of federal director after Zander was killed in an accident. This meant that the managing director Ehrhardt Post was given more room for maneuver. Under his leadership, the GSB organized the "European Chess Tournament" in Munich in 1941 and two well-attended tournaments in Salzburg in 1942 and 1943. The sport-political climax of the GSB's activities was the founding of the European Chess Federation , which held a chess "European Championship" in Munich in 1942 aligned. Representatives of the European countries ruled by the German Empire and two neutral states (Sweden and Spain) were involved in the Europa-Chessbund. Due to the development of the war, this remained a unique event.

On November 23, 1943, the Berlin office of the Greater German Chess Federation was completely destroyed in a bomb attack. The same fate befell the following Berlin office a few months later. All files and documents of the GSB were destroyed.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Figures on the chess organizations in Germany around 1933 ; Woelk, p. 15.
  2. ↑ Woelk, p. 24f.
  3. ↑ For the synchronization of the chess clubs see the example of SV Bottrop 1921 .
  4. ↑ For the dissolution of the DSB see Harald Balló: Zettel 187 .
  5. ↑ Woelk, pp. 61, 90.
  6. ↑ Woelk, p. 62ff.
  7. ↑ For the zoning of the GSB, see the map from Wolfgang Maier: History of the Saarland Chess Association from 1921-2006 ( Memento from March 1, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) (PDF; 1.8 MB), p. 7.
  8. ^ Speech by Alfred Kinzel on the occasion of the 130th birthday of Emanuel Lasker ( Memento of November 7, 2007 in the Internet Archive ).
  9. ^ Alfred Diel : Chess in Germany. Festival book on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the Deutscher Schachbund e. V. 1877-1977. Düsseldorf 1977, p. 87; Woelk, p. 66.
  10. ↑ British Chess Magazine, November 1936, p. 546, quoted from Edward Winter: Chess: Hitler and Nazi Germany , in: Kingpin , No. 33, 2000 (“It is difficult to understand why Germany withdrew; for it was, of course , a case of withdrawal, not of expulsion. ")
  11. ^ Resolution of the FIDE Congress in Warsaw in 1935, quoted from E. Winter (in French)
  12. ↑ For information on joining the Austrian Chess Federation, see the history of the NÖSV .
  13. ↑ Woelk, p. 79.

literature

  • Ralf Woelk: Chess under the swastika. Political influences on the game of chess in the Third Reich , Pfullingen 1996 (= Tübingen contributions on the subject of chess 3) ISBN 3-88502-017-3 .
  • Alfred Brinckmann and Kurt Richter : First congress of the Greater German Chess Federation in Pyrmont 1933. Detailed report, selected games and appendix: Bahrenfeld main tournament. Publishing house of the Greater German Chess Federation, Berlin 1933.
  • Edmund Bruns: The chess game of Jews from the National Socialist point of view, including the world champion Alexander Alekhine

Web links