The Death Match


The Death Match is a name given in postwar Soviet historiography to the football match played on 9 August 1942 in Kiev in Reichskommissariat Ukraine following the German invasion of the Soviet Union. The Kiev city team Start, which represented the city's Bread Factory No. 1, played several football games in World War II. The team was composed mostly of former professional footballers of Dynamo Kiev and Lokomotiv Kiev, all of whom were forced to work at the factory under the Nazi occupation authority and were made to produce bread for German soldiers.
On 6 August 1942, FC Start played against the German team Flakelf, and won 5–1. A rematch was played on 9 August 1942 in the, with an estimated 2,000 spectators in attendance, each paying five karbovanets, in which Start again beat Flakelf 5–3.
According to later Soviet myths used for war-time propaganda, some or all players of the Kiev city team were allegedly arrested and executed for humiliating the German players with a double defeat, while some surviving players were persecuted for alleged collaboration with the Germans. In the mid-1960s, the official Soviet narrative changed, formally recognising four deceased players and five surviving players as brave Soviet citizens resisting the German occupation. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union in the 1990s, reconstructions were made of how the match and its aftermath went, which Start players had survived and how, and it was found that the deaths of the other Start players were unrelated to the supposed "Death Match" of 9 August 1942.

Background

A Kiev native, Georgiy Kuzmin, points out in his book Facts and fiction of our football that the first squads of Dynamo Kiev included a number of regular Cheka members, among whom was Kostiantyn Fomin. Kostiantyn Fomin is known to have participated in repressions against Kharkov sportsmen of Polish descent during 1935-1936. Prior to World War II, Fomin also played for Lokomotiv Kiev.
Because players were not getting paid regularly, the football team of Dynamo for some time had a shortage of playing staff. The team's captain Konstantin Shchegotsky even tried to escape to Dnipropetrovsk, where he played for FC Dynamo Dnipropetrovsk, but was forced to come back. During the Holodomor in 1932-33, half of the team escaped to Ivanovo near Moscow. Two of Dynamo's players, Piontkovsky and Sviridovsky, were arrested by NKVD agents during an attempt to exchange several cuts of cloth for products and therefore had to work "for the good of the country" for two years in a penal colony. During the Great Purge in 1938, Piontkovsky, and one of the Dynamo's team creators, Barminsky were targeted, and eventually shot in 1941. The season was never completed, as Germany invaded the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941. Several Dynamo Kiev players joined the military and went off to fight. The initial success of the Wehrmacht allowed it to capture the city from the Red Army in September 1941. Several of the Dynamo Kiev players who had survived the onslaught found themselves in prisoner-of-war camps.
In taking Kiev, the Germans captured over 600,000 Soviet soldiers. The city was under a strict occupation regime; a curfew on civilians was enforced, and universities and schools were shut down. Ukrainian youth over 15 years and adults under 60 years old were submitted to labour obligations. Thousands of inhabitants were deported to Germany for forced labour.

Historical accounts and analysis after the dissolution of the USSR

After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, journalists and historians in the new state of Ukraine were able to make detailed historical research without being controlled by Glavlit, the Soviet censorship agency.

Eyewitnesses

The 50th anniversary of the "Death Match" in 1992 marked the beginning of eyewitness reports in Ukrainian mass media:
  • Kiev Radio broadcast an interview with former Dynamo player Makar Honcharenko, who denied the version that the players were threatened by an SS officer: "Nobody from the official administration blackmailed us for giving up the match."
  • Sport reporter Georgi Kuzmin published a series of articles entitled "The Truth about the Death Match". According to him the creation of the "Death Match" legend was a countermeasure of Soviet propaganda to the reproach that the inhabitants of Kiev "did not fight against the aggressor".
  • Writer Oleg Yasinsky published his report "Did the Death Match happen?" Being a youth, Yasinsky was among the spectators of the match and later played on Dynamo's youth team.
  • Vladlen Putistin, son of midfielder Mikhail Putistin, an ethnic Russian, being eight years old at the time of the match, was one of the ball boys during the match. Later he interviewed some of the players.
All these reports contradicted aspects of the Soviet version: There were no SS officers being referees or threatening the Start team. The German team played a normal game and were fair, nor did the referee attempt to manipulate the match. There were no heavily armed soldiers with dogs in the stadium. The red jerseys worn by the Start players were not specifically intended as a symbol for communist spirit; rather the players were simply given them to wear by the Germans. Indeed, the Germans arrested nine of the Start players, however the first arrest was not until nine days after the match. Five, not four, players were murdered by the SS, three of them six months after the match took place. All the eyewitnesses denied the version that the Dynamo players were murdered specifically as revenge for the German defeat in the game.

Historical research

The first genuine historical studies of the "Death Match" confirmed the reports of the eyewitnesses. The former general lieutenant of justice, Volodymyr Pristaiko, having been vice chief of the Ukrainian Security Service, summoned his analysis of the papers documenting the arrest and death of the Dynamo players: "There was definitively no context to the match." In his 2006 book, he published NKVD papers concerning FC Start from 1944 to 1948 as well as KGB documents from the Brezhnev era.
Historian Volodymyr Hynda showed that defeats of German teams against local clubs happened regularly. The Ukrainian press, controlled by the Germans, published many reports about these matches. Hynda found information about 150 matches and documented the results of 111 among them: the Ukrainians won 60 matches and lost 36 matches, 15 were draws.

History of FC Start

Articles published in the daily Nove ukrainske Slovo, controlled by the Germans, the reports of the witnesses and the NKVD documentation allow a reconstruction of FC Start's history.

Squad

In bold are players of FC Lokomotiv Kiev.

Organisation of the bakery team

Under German occupation, all Soviet organisations and clubs were dissolved. By the end of 1941, German administration allowed newly formed Ukrainian sport clubs. In January 1942, football trainer and sport reporter Georgi Dmitrievich Shvetsov founded the club Rukh. He tried to engage the best players in Kiev.
But most of the former Dynamo players, among them the very popular goalkeeper Trusevich, did not want to play in Rukh, probably because they took Shvetsov for a collaborateur. Trusevich found a job in the Bakery No. 1 which guaranteed their workers and their families normal supplies of food. More former Dynamo players found jobs in the bakery. The German director Joseph Kordik, an engineer from Moravia, encouraged them to form a football team: FC Start. After World War II Kordik declared to the NKVD that in reality he was Czech, not German.
Three players of the former club Lokomotiv Kiev were incorporated into the new team. Four former players who were directly submitted to the German administration also played for Start: three Ukrainian policemen and one engine driver of the German railways Reichsbahn in Kiev. None amongst the Start players had played for the Dynamo team in the years immediately before the war, although some of them had left the club only a couple of years before.

Matches in June and July 1942

Seven Start matches are documented for June and July 1942: against the Ukrainian teams Rukh and Sport, three Hungarian military teams, a team of the German artillery and the German railway team RSG. FC Start won all these matches, scoring 37 goals in total and conceding only 8.

Match against Flakelf on 6 August 1942

On 6 August 1942, FC Start beat Flakelf scoring 5–1. The names of the German players are given in cyrillic letters on the poster: Harer, Danz, Schneider, Biskur, Scharf, Kaplan, Breuer, Arnold, Jannasch, Wunderlich, Hofmann.

Rematch against Flakelf on 9 August 1942

With 2000 spectators present, the teams met again three days later, in the later so-called "Death Match". The poster informed that Flakelf had a "strengthened" team, but did not reveal any names. But it named 14 Start players, amongst them Lev Gundarev, Georgi Timofeyev and Olexander Tkachenko, who were Ukrainian policemen under German command.
The final score was 5–3 in favour of Start. Only the first half of the match is documented: The Germans opened the score but Ivan Kuzmenko, and Makar Honcharenko scoring twice, made the score 3–1 at half time. After the match a German took a photograph of both teams, showing an apparently relaxed atmosphere. Some days later he offered a copy to former Lokomotiv player Volodymyr Balakin. This photograph was never published during Soviet times.
Afterwards the winners drank a glass of self-made vodka and met at a party in the evening.

Arrest of the players

On 16 August 1942, FC Start beat Rukh scoring 8–0. Two days later, on 18 August, the Gestapo arrested six of the Start players in the bakery and two days later two others were arrested.

The fates of the Kiev players

In contradiction to the Soviet version, not all of the Start players were prosecuted by the Gestapo. After the war, Soviet authorities punished some of them for collaboration with the Germans.