Peco Bauwens

Peco Bauwens (actually Peter Joseph Bauwens * 24. December 1886 in Cologne , † 17th November 1963 ) was a German football - international , international referee and 1950-1962 first president of the German Football Association (DFB) after the Second World War (overall the fifth), then honorary president of the DFB. His behavior during the National Socialist era is controversial .

youth

Bauwens came from a middle-class, musically influenced family. With a tendency towards tennis due to the social environment , the parents followed an urgent medical recommendation to let their son play football. Because after a serious accident, amputation of a leg was even considered. Due to the unpopular "proletarian sport" football, however, progress soon became apparent. From the summer semester of 1907 to 1913 (or 1914) he studied law . During his time in Bonn he became a member of the Corps Saxonia Bonn , a striking, colored student union in the Kösener Senioren-Convents-Verband (KSCV).

As a student, Peco Bauwens was one of the pioneers of the Middle Rhine division SC Brühl , to which he remained connected for a lifetime. From there he moved to KFC 1899 (later VfL Cologne 1899 ). Here he developed his football skills so far that he was even called up for an international match in the national team in 1910. Here, however, he only helped out because a replacement was wanted and he was just there. In the early days it was still possible to make it to the national team in this way.

International arbitrator

Peco Bauwens before the international match between Latvia and Lithuania in 1929 (standing 8th from left)

After the First World War, he chose the career of referee. With 76 international matches, a. a. the final at the 1936 Olympic Games , he is the European referee with the most international game directors. In addition, he was a referee in many German matches up to championship finals. It was considered a special honor at the time that he was allowed to whistle on British soil, the home of football. In 1922, Bauwens also headed the two finals for the German championship between Hamburger SV and 1. FC Nürnberg . He broke off the replay in the half-time break of extra time, as the Nuremberg team only had seven players instead of the eight required at the time due to being sent off and injuries. The abandonment of the game led to a fierce controversy between the clubs involved and ultimately to the fact that in 1922 no German champions were chosen.

Gravesite of the Bauwens family in the Melaten cemetery

Politics and family

Bauwens joined the NSDAP in 1933 , but was probably expelled a year later because he was married to a Jewish woman. Despite his prominent position, the family suffered a lot of reprisals. Elisabeth Bauwens, née Gidion, finally committed suicide on April 16, 1940 due to the increasing harassment from the National Socialists.

In his private life, Bauwens was financially independent and dedicated himself to football on a voluntary basis. He worked in the construction business and was President of the German-Belgian-Luxembourg Chamber of Commerce in his home town of Cologne. His company was included in an official list of 2500 "slave owners in the Nazi regime" of the Allies. She ran a forced labor camp with 100 inmates.

In his second marriage he was married to Hannelore Bauwens, nee Schultheiss, from Hellenthal and lived with her in Cologne-Marienburg. Peco Bauwens died there on November 17, 1963 and was buried in Cologne's Melaten cemetery , hall 43.

Official for DFB and FIFA

Since 1925, Bauwens has also been involved in committees of the world football association FIFA on behalf of the DFB, and in 1932 he was elected to its executive board. He particularly advocated that the German association (at that time the largest sports organization in the world with around 8.3 million members) should play a more important role in the world association than the associations from smaller or even dwarf states, which all had the same voting rights .

In 1950, Peco Bauwens was elected the first president of the DFB after the Second World War. He held this office until 1962 and then became honorary president, but died the following year.

At the 1958 World Cup in Sweden, Peco Bauwens ordered the team and DFB officials to return home immediately after the game for third place after the so-called scandal match in Gothenburg , the semi-finals Sweden - Germany .

Speech in the Löwenbräukeller in Munich

A special scandal occurred when Bauwens gave a speech in honor of the “Heroes of Bern” in the Löwenbräukeller in Munich after the German victory in the soccer world championship in Switzerland in 1954 . The live broadcast of the speech by Bayerischer Rundfunk was canceled after a few minutes with the message that the scheduled broadcast time had passed. In his own words, the editor responsible on site, Wolf Posselt, felt reminded of sounds from the “ 1000-year-old empire ” and his time in the “young people” and then initiated the shutdown. Bauwens had the speech that had been kept free subsequently transcribed using a tape recording and forwarded to the Office of the Federal President.

According to the transcript, Bauwens discussed the mysterious disappearance of the German flag before the game and said that the players wore the German flag in their hearts even without an external flag. They had shown "what a healthy German who is loyal to his country can achieve". Later in the speech, he described the final won as "best representative Germanness ". With regard to the performance of his deputy, Hans Huber, one could "exceptionally speak of the Führer principle in the good sense of the word".

The Süddeutsche Zeitung wrote on July 8, 1954, entitled "Derailed speech," Bauwens had on the "old German God" Wotan respect what can not be proved on the basis of the transcript. In a letter to the editor to the newspaper, Bauwen's speech was described as a “ Sieg-Heil -Rede”. Other voices saw the address as less problematic, the Spiegel spoke of a " Kaiser Wilhelm style" and the sports magazine attested "somewhat exuberant, nationalistic expressions". To this day, the classification of the speech is controversial.

Women's football banned under Bauwens' presidency

On July 30, 1955, the Bundestag of the DFB declared on the subject of women's football : “In the fight for the ball, feminine grace disappears, body and soul inevitably suffer damage, and exposing the body hurts propriety and decency.” It was unanimously decided to “our clubs not to allow women to set up women's soccer departments or to include women's soccer departments, to forbid our clubs, if they have their own seats, to make them available for women's soccer games, to forbid our referees and line judges to conduct women's soccer games " .

Bauwens himself had stated a few months earlier: “Soccer is not a women's sport. We will never deal seriously with this matter. "

rating

In the post-war period, Bauwens was the target of critics who accused him of uncritical proximity to National Socialism . One of the allegations was that by suppressing the votes of other associations he wanted to anticipate Hitler's world conquest policy in football. In each of these attacks, he referred to the fate of his Jewish wife.

In the edition of the weekly newspaper Die Zeit of March 16, 2006, the political scientist Arthur Heinrich sharply criticized Bauwen as a person and the DFB's coming to terms with the past. In the words of Heinrich, neither the academic dignity of the lawyer Bauwens, nor his alleged rejection of the Nazi regime, nor the circumstances of his wife's death that he stated were true. Rather, Bauwens submitted an application for membership to the NSDAP in 1933, which was rejected due to his marriage to Elise Gidion, a Jew from a Cologne merchant family. The author even suggests that Peco Bauwens, if not actively intervening at the death of his wife, possibly provided the means to kill himself.

On the international stage, people remembered his work in the FIFA bodies after the World War and his attempts to curtail the dominance of the French-speaking world in football in favor of the major associations from Germany and Italy, the European Axis powers .

Bauwens is also considered one of the early mediators of a new self-confidence among West Germans after the Second World War. Triggered by the re-allowed participation of German teams in international competitions and the victory at the Soccer World Cup in 1954 , a new awareness arose of the "We are who again!" At the same time, Bauwens stood out for his nationalist pathos, especially through his speech in the Löwenbräukeller.

Since the nineties of the twentieth century, criticism of the DFB's coming to terms with the past had repeatedly arisen in Germany because a halfway detailed account of its history during the reign of National Socialism was still missing. Such was even expressly requested by Federal President Johannes Rau in 2000 at the DFB's founding site in Leipzig. Peco Bauwens played a central role in assessing how apolitical football can be. The Mainz historian Nils Havemann worked on the old sources on behalf of the DFB. The result was published in book form in 2005.

literature

• Nils Havemann, football under the swastika - the DFB between sport, politics and commerce , Campus Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2005, ISBN 3-593-37906-6
• Heiner Gillmeister, soccer in the Cologne region. The history of SC Brühl , Verlag Die Werkstatt, Göttingen 2012, ISBN 978-3-89533-881-6
• Diethelm Blecking, The speech of the Football Association President Peco Bauwens on July 6, 1954 in the Munich Löwenbräukeller , Historical Social Research, Transition (Online Supplement), 27, 1–10 (2015).
• Franz Brüggemeier, back on the square. Germany and the Football World Cup 1954 , Deutsche-Verlagsanstalt, Munich 2004.

Web links

• A clean story , article by Arthur Heinrich in Die Zeit , March 16, 2006
• Peco Bauwens (1886-1963), Honorary President of the German Football Association
• Transcript of the speech on July 6, 1954 in the Löwenbräukeller in Munich .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Peco Bauwens (1886–1963), Honorary President of the German Football Association at the Rhineland Regional Association, Rhenish History .
2. ↑ Ranking list of European referees .
3. ↑ Hardy Greens : Encyclopedia of German League Football. Volume 1: From the Crown Prince to the Bundesliga. 1890 to 1963. German championship, Gauliga, Oberliga. Numbers, pictures, stories. Agon-Sportverlag, Kassel 1996, ISBN 3-928562-85-1 , p. 77.
4. ^ Josef Abt, Johann Ralf Beines, Celia Körber-Leupold: Melaten - Cologne graves and history . Greven, Cologne 1997, ISBN 3-7743-0305-3 , p. 93; P. 162.
5. ↑ "The Disaster of 1958"; FAZ of June 21, 2018, page 38; Author: Bert-Oliver Manig.
6. ↑ DFB yearbook 1955.
7. ↑ Michael Bulla: The development of women's football in Germany ... ; P. 26.
8. ↑ A clean story .

predecessor	Office	successor
-	Chairman of the WFV 1947–1950	Konrad Schmedeshagen