Ajax, the Dutch, the War

Simon Kuper

Prolonged exposure in print and on screen to Churchill's "We will fight them on the beaches" speech has given the British the idea a Nazi invasion and occupation of these islands would have been fiercely resisted. In fact, most historians agree, the Germans would have had a fairly easy time. I think occupied Britain would have looked something like occupied Holland.

The Dutch too have their wartime myths. In Ajax, the Dutch, the War Simon Kuper, South African born Jew, examines the Dutch war record and exposes an inglorious story. Like the British, the Dutch love rules, and this made them good collaborators. In one Dutch athletics club the minutes record the committee discussing at length the newly imposed "No Jews Allowed" sign. Not its morality but its size, typeface and positioning.

Kuper takes the story of the Ajax during the war and allows the story to ripple out to other football clubs, other sports, and to society in general. It's a strategy which works well. In its sports and social clubs we get to see into the soul of a nation. Clubs also keep good records.

So, people carried on playing sport, in the midst of war and persecution. Perhaps that's understandable. But this that this was so little questioned is what is astonishing. After Jewish referees were banned a newspaper urged its readers to come forward and in their place "otherwise the league might stagnate". Even as Jews were herded into one sports stadium, tennis matches were being played on the adjacent courts. Occasionally Kuper's exasperation with Dutch wartime complacency boils over. Recording that one Jewish football club, reforming after the war, asked to be excused an old debt on the grounds that its membership had been wiped out and its funds exhaused, Kuper records that the Dutch FA refused, adding waspishly "perhaps fearful of setting a precedent for future genocides".

But football lived on in the concentration camps too. One Jewish player wrote to his wife from Westerbork: "Jenny please send me my football boots".

There is much to ponder in this book and it's a valuable work of sports journalism. Not least because conventional sports histories and biographies prefer to gloss over the war years and pretend almost no sport was played (or watched) in that period. It's a defence (perhaps subconscious) against a modern audience judging wartime recreation to be distasteful. In fact people's appetite for sport in 1940 was greater than ever. "Football stopped for the war" turns out to be just another of those WWII myths.