Paul Mahrer

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Paul Mahrer (also Pavel Mahrer , born May 23, 1900 in Teplitz-Schönau , Austria-Hungary ; died December 18, 1985 in Los Angeles ) was a Czechoslovak-American national soccer player .

Life

Paul Mahrer was nicknamed "Aule". He did a banking apprenticeship and initially played in his local club Teplitzer FK , which played an outstanding role in Central European football before 1914 and a few years after 1918. With the TFK he made a tour of South America in the summer of 1922. In 1922 he married Betty Guttmann in Prague, their son Peter was born in Prague in 1926, his brother Jerome in New York in 1929. In 1923 he moved to DFC Prague . With this club he was several times champion of the German-Bohemian Football Association . During this time he was called up to the Czechoslovak national team six times. He took part in the soccer tournament of the 1924 Summer Olympics in Paris, where the team was eliminated in the round of 16 against the Swiss national soccer team. In 1926 he signed a $ 500 contract and played in New York City for the Brooklyn Wanderers , who had become champions of the International Soccer League the previous season . After another year in the ČSR, he went back to New York and played for the Hakoah All Stars Brooklyn , which used him over a hundred times in three seasons, a teammate there was Béla Guttmann . As a result of the global economic crisis, the family had to return to Czechoslovakia in 1932. In 1932/33 he played again in the ČSR for FK Náchod and then again for the German Football Club Prague. When the DFC played at Hertha BSC in Berlin in August 1933, Jews Samuel Schillinger , goalkeeper Fritz Taussig and Paul Mahrer were not allowed to compete. In 1936 he ended his career as a professional footballer. Mahrer now ran a tailoring shop for shirts in Prague and, thanks to his fame, had a good clientele.

After the German defeat of Czechoslovakia in March 1939, Mahrer was persecuted and forced to work in road construction. He was imprisoned by the Prague Gestapo for a year and deported to the Theresienstadt ghetto on June 9, 1943 . His brothers Kurt (1899–1944) and Otto (1903–1943) were also prisoners in Theresienstadt. They were both deported to the ghetto in 1941 and from there to the Auschwitz concentration camp , where they were murdered. His wife and sons escaped custody because their son Jerry was born in the USA, which was respected by the Gestapo before Germany declared war on the USA in December 1941. Betty Mahrer was interned in the Lindele camp, the two sons were held separately from her in the prisoner of war camp in Tittmoning and later in Laufen . A prisoner exchange organized by the IRK brought Betty, Peter and Jerry Mahrer to Switzerland in February 1944 and from there to the USA.

In the Theresienstadt ghetto, the Judenrat succeeded in getting football games approved as a leisure activity between spring 1943 and August 1944, and games in the first and second football leagues, a cup competition and youth games were organized. Mahrer played as a player-coach in the butchers team that won the cup competition.

Mahrer was liberated by the Red Army in 1945 and was able to emigrate to the USA a year later. The family donated part of his estate to the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York.

literature

  • Stefan Zwicker: Paul Mahrer - the national player who survived Theresienstadt , in: Diethelm Blecking , Lorenz Peiffer (eds.) Athletes in the "Century of the Camps". Profiteers, resistors and victims. Die Werkstatt, Göttingen 2012, pp. 323–329.
  • Frantisek Steiner: Fotbal pod žlutou hvězdou: neznámá kapitola hry, která se hrála před smrtí . Olympia, Prague 2009 [ football under the yellow star ]

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c Stefan Zwicker: Paul Mahrer - the national player who survived Theresienstadt , 2012, pp. 323–329
  2. ↑ Kurt Mahrer ( Memento of the original from February 5, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , at the victim database holocaust.cz @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www2.holocaust.cz
  3. ↑ Otto Mahrer , at the victim database holocaust.cz
  4. ↑ Ronny Blaschke : The wrong game , in: Frankfurter Rundschau , January 23, 2016, p. 24f.
personal data
SURNAME Mahrer, Paul
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Mahrer, Pavel
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Czechoslovak-American national soccer player
DATE OF BIRTH May 23, 1900
PLACE OF BIRTH Teplitz-Schönau , Austria-Hungary
DATE OF DEATH 18th December 1985
Place of death los Angeles