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Mar 01, 2021

Boycott questions over Beijing Winter Olympics raise eerie echoes of 1936 | Sean Ingle

China’s treatment of Uighurs has been deemed by Canada as genocide. Are we about to legitimise the regime responsible?History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes. I am staring at two bundles of newspaper clippings – one present day, one past – and feeling a deepening chill. The first pile details China’s treatment of the Uighur Muslim population in Xinjiang, where more than a million people have been “re-educated” in camps, as well as the calls for the 2022 Winter Olympics to be stripped from Beijing. The second is from the Manchester Guardian in 1935, recording the abuse of Jews in Germany and demanding a boycott of the Berlin Games. The echoes are eerie. The looming question, then as now,...

May 06, 2019

Remembering the cream of Jewish footballing talent killed in the Holocaust

While Bert Trautmann became a household name in England despite previous Nazi links, the names of the Jewish players murdered in the death camps remain largely forgottenIt is interesting what people choose to remember. A recent film celebrates Bert Trautmann, a member of the Hitler Youth who later became a goalkeeping legend in England. Trautmann apparently regretted his former antisemitism and did wonders for Anglo-German relations. How touching. I wonder how many people throughout Europe know the names of the Jewish international footballers who were gassed, worked to death, beaten to a pulp or shot into pits by the regime Trautmann fought for.Poland’s first goal in international football came in Sweden in May 1922. It was the centre-half Józef Klotz...