German National Soccer Team Begins EURO2012 with Auschwitz Visit

Not many sports teams would consider visiting a Nazi death camp before a major tournament but for a German team things are different – especially when that tournament takes place in Poland and Ukraine. Many of the worst Nazi atrocities were committed in those two countries.

A week before kick-off, head coach Joachim Löw, team captain Philipp Lahm, as well as strikers Miroslav Klose and Lukas Podolski (both Polish-born) were part of a DFB (Germany’s Football Association) delegation that visited the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp, now in Poland, to pay their respects to the victims of the Holocaust. More than a million human beings were murdered in this camp alone.

DFB President Wolfgang Niersbach quoted former German President Richard von Weizsäcker who once admonished: “People who close their eyes to the past, become blind to the present.”

The President of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, Dieter Graumann, had asked that the national team visit a Holocaust memorial as part of their participation in the EURO2012 tournament.

In an interview in March, Graumann said, a visit by the team to Auschwitz or Babi Yar would be an important signal for young people idolizing the soccer stars. “Özil, Klose, Gomez, Schweinsteiger or Khedira are today’s heroes. If they visit Auschwitz, it will have a much bigger effect than a thousand speeches.”

In the last test game before EURO2012, Germany chose to play Israel in Leipzig.

This week, the German team moves into their quarters in Gdansk, before playing their first match against Portugal in Lviv, Ukraine on Saturday.

It’s a city that once belonged to Poland as Lwow, after being part of the Austrian Habsburg Empire for many decades under the name of Lemberg. It suffered through Nazi and Soviet occupations and even a brief war between the hosting nations, Poland and Ukraine.