June 29, 2021 - 3:47pm
In early 1945 German paratrooper Bernhard Trautmann was captured by two Americans soldiers inside a barn, then forced to walk at gunpoint with his hands up. A veteran of the eastern front, Trautmann had recently survived a ferocious Allied bombing that had killed most of his comrades, and had also escaped capture by the Russians and French.
He was now going to be executed, he believed, and so made a run for it — jumping over a fence, only to land at the feet of a British soldier who captured him with the quintessentially Anglo-Saxon words “Hello Fritz, fancy a cup of tea?”
Sent to a POW camp in Lancashire, Trautmann had begun playing as goalkeeper for local non-league side St Helen’s Town while working on a farm, staying on after the other inmates had been repatriated. Large crowds had started to gather to watch the brilliant German keeper, until eventually that crowd included a scout from Manchester City — who signed him.
The move provoked outrage in Manchester, which had suffered heavy casualties in the Blitz — indeed City and United then shared Maine Road after Old Trafford had received a direct hit. Hostile protests greeted the new arrival, with up to 20,000 fans shouting “Nazi” outside the ground. But in a touching move, this anger eased when local rabbi Alexander Altmann, a refugee from Nazi Germany whose parents had been murdered in the Holocaust, wrote a letter in Trautmann’s defence. He was just a man, and shouldn’t carry the guilt of a whole nation.
The rest is football legend, and the subject of a charming biopic The Keeper.
“Bert” Trautmann would overcome anti-German hostility to help City win the FA Cup in 1956, despite breaking his neck 15 minutes from full time. After the game Trautmann was congratulated by the Duke of Edinburgh, who asked him in classic Philipesque style “why is your neck so crooked?”
His story resonates as a beautiful microcosm of how Anglo-Germany rivalry was played out on the football pitch; football both aggravated tensions, and helped to resolve them. It showed how the individual could overcome hostility to the group in the general, the Man City keeper becoming a model of Anglo-German reconciliation.
Trautmann would become the first foreigner to be awarded FA Footballer of the Year, indeed the last for another 40 years, and was made an OBE in 2004, before his death in 2013. To this day he is the only man to have won both the Iron Cross and an FA Cup winner’s medal — a record I imagine he’ll hang onto for some time.
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SubscribeThere was a lot more post war reconciliation in the UK than is often acknowledged. Many Italian, German and some Ukrainian POWs stayed on as farm hands, then went into small businesses.They had earnt the respect of many local communities, because of their good conduct and religious piety, whilst prisoners . In turn they received charitable help through Church organisations and sympathetic locals. One should remember many young Axis servicemen had lost everything and had nobody to return home to, or that their home and family were now behind the iron curtain. This wasn’t lost on the locals who had encountered similar loss. My cousin married the son of a Ukrainian Baker, our local butcher, Hans Kraal, was in the Kriegsmarine . My Father used to banter with him saying “I should have shot you when I had the chance”. Ernst Muller, also Kriegsmarine, married an English woman and went back to Germany, returning to our village every year, often staying with my parents.
I confess, I had never heard if him. Very interesting and would like to know more about his “transition”.
There is an interesting point here. Where I used to live, in Walthamstow was twinned with a German town and this arrangement was set in place shortly after the war. The generation that actually fought the war, my parents generation (I was born in 1952) regarded the war as something to be put behind you and get on with your life. The idea of regarding football as a continuation of the two world wars (a sentiment wholly absent in Germany) only really started in the 1970s. My parents would never have booed the German National Anthem and frankly weren’t obsessed with flying flags.
Lovely article, I sent it out to all my contacts. One of my grandparents was a Schultz, owing to a German POW who stayed on.
Great piece, the clown in Batley and Spen – Galloway, Robinson, Labour, LimpDim etc would do well to read it. As would the Tories, the only reason they’ve not got tarred with the dirty tricks brush is they don’t need to. The Socialists including EDL, Hizb Ut Tahir etc at each others throats and ignoring the voters.
It was a great example of the UK’s culture of tolerance. Ardiles and Villa, Spurs 2 Argentine players, were cheered by the crowds after the Falklands War. When asked if British players would be treated the same way in Argentina, one of them is reported as saying ‘they wouldn’t get to the match’.
We had a German a prisoner working for us in 1946. Captured after Stalingrad. Weighed 5 stone . Lived in a caravan on the farm. Brilliant mechanic, mended anything. Zep. (I learned that Germans use final syllable abbreviation. Here he would be Joe). I was 16 then.
He was great and became a family friend. married an English girl.