Martin Abraham Stock

Martin Abraham Stock (born August 20, 1892 in Hamburg as Abraham Martin Stock ; † September 21, 1970 ibid) was a German survivor of the Holocaust and a football official. He was deported in November 1941 and survived several concentration camps until he was liberated in April 1945 . In 1950 he was the first member of the DFB board to be Jewish.

Early life and activities in sports

In 1908, at the age of 16, Stock joined the Altonaer Spielvereinigung in the then independent city of Altona, which is now part of Hamburg, and was initially active as a bat player there before he later turned to football. In August 1914, at the beginning of World War I, he registered for entry into the army, from which he was excluded in 1916 as a result of the Jewish census due to his Jewish beliefs . German Jews even before the seizure of power of the Nazis exposed to significant discrimination. Against this background, Stock may have tried to adapt as much as possible to the majority society and did not use his middle name Abraham.

In the 1920s he was a member of the Altonaer Spielvereinigung of the first football team and was also accepted into the club's board of directors. To this end, he began working as a referee and took on a role in the North German Football Association (NFV), although some of the NFV officials at the time were considered anti-Semitic. His main job was to take over his late father's cloth company and then to run a successor company founded with the help of his siblings until the spring of 1933. This was followed by a year as a sales representative for a fabric wholesaler, before the Jewish owners emigrated and from then on he was dependent on public welfare.

Nazi era, deportation and liberation

When the National Socialists came to power in 1933 and the resulting increasing exclusion of Jews, he was excluded from the NFV and could no longer pursue his work as an arbitrator. However, he continued to receive a certain amount of support from the Altonaer Spielvereinigung. During the first years under the Nazi regime, he worked as a player, referee and administrative specialist for the Jewish sports group Schild , which enabled him to pursue football. However , the sports group was crushed by the November pogroms in 1938 .

Stock was arrested on December 12, 1936 for " racial disgrace " by Gestapo officials . The background was the relationship with his partner Clara Meyer, who was considered an Aryan and with whom he lived in the same house on Hamburg's Inner Alster. After the end of the war, he stated that he was largely released from the Fuhlsbüttel police prison after a month through a certificate of good repute from SS member and HSV striker Otto Harder .

In contrast to his siblings, Martin Abraham Stock did not flee abroad from the Nazi terror. On November 8, 1941, he was one of 969 Hamburg Jews who were deported to the Minsk ghetto . He was one of only eight survivors of this deportation. For around three and a half years he was imprisoned in various forced and concentration camps, most recently in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp . There he was liberated by British troops on April 15, 1945, although he was already 52 years old at the time of liberation.

Further work as a functionary after the end of the war

After his liberation and the end of World War II , Stock stayed in Germany and got involved in football again. In May 1950 he became head of the game committee of the German Football Association and thus also a member of the board of the DFB. In the history of the association, he was the first board member of the Jewish faith. Several high-ranking functionaries of the DFB had been members of the NSDAP during the National Socialist rule . A few years after the end of the war, the association showed little attention to the National Socialist past, and Stock's Jewish faith and his role as a victim of the Nazi regime were not mentioned at all by the DFB. His membership of the board ended in October 1950 when he decided to emigrate to Brazil . When he left, the DFB President Peco Bauwens , who was also a member of the NSDAP for a time, paid tribute to him for his “selfless and self-sacrificing work”.

In Brazil, Stock lived with his brother in Rio de Janeiro . His brother had made a new start in his career there and Martin tried to do it too, but he did not succeed. In addition, there were considerable differences between the brothers, which is why Martin Abraham Stock returned to Germany in 1957. He worked for a few years as a referee chairman at the Hamburg Football Association and also did important organizational work for them. Despite his earlier role at the DFB, his death in 1970 was ignored by the DFB.

literature

• Arthur Heinrich: As a Jew in German football - The three lives of Martin Abraham Stock. Werkstatt Verlag, Göttingen 2014, ISBN 978-3-7307-0084-6 .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Birth register StA Hamburg 1, No. 2400/1892
2. ↑ Death register StA Hamburg-Nord, No. 2536/1970
3. ↑ ^{a b c d e f g h} The three lives of Martin Abraham Stock , ndr.de. Retrieved February 3, 2016.
4. ↑ ^{a b c d e f} Sports history: At the edge of the playing field , juedische-allgemeine.de. Retrieved February 3, 2016.
5. ↑ Life saver football. How a Jewish soccer player survived the Holocaust in Hamburg . In: Welt am Sonntag of December 14, 2014, issue 50, p. 4
6. ↑ Information on the DFB website about an exhibition in Hamburg City Hall , accessed on February 5, 2016 (with photo)