Football is more than a game: it is part of society, reflects broader power structures, and can both bring people together and exclude them. The exhibition shows how closely sport and politics were intertwined under National Socialism, and asks what lessons sport can draw today from this history.
The exhibition was first shown to a wide audience in Berlin during EURO 2024. Presented in the context of a major international football tournament, it invited visitors not only to celebrate the sport, but also to reflect critically on its history. With support from the Alfred Landecker Foundation, it is now touring as a travelling exhibition and reaching new audiences in clubs, schools and other educational settings, as well as among the wider general public. Its aim is to encourage sustained engagement with the history of sport – and with questions about the persistence of antisemitism and racism – in the places where sport is played and experienced today: in stadiums, on playing fields, in schools and in youth teams.
Sport under National Socialism
Under National Socialism, sport played a central role. It was meant to shape bodies, discipline people, and prepare them for war, obedience and ideological submission. The Nazis promoted the idea of a so-called Volksgemeinschaft (“national community”), but only those who conformed to their racist and antisemitic worldview were meant to belong. Sport became a means of making such inclusion and exclusion visible and socially consequential. At major sporting events, the regime presented itself as modern, efficient and united. One of the best-known examples is the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin.
Another section of the exhibition is dedicated to a little-known yet particularly striking chapter: football in concentration camps. Football was played there too—under coercion, as a distraction, as an instrument of power and humiliation, but sometimes also as a final act of self-assertion and humanity. The exhibition also highlights individual stories. Among those featured is Lotte Specht, who founded the first women’s football team in Frankfurt am Main in the early 1930s, though her efforts were ultimately defeated by social prejudice. The stories of Jewish footballer Eddie Hamel and successful athlete Lilli Henoch show that sporting success offered no protection: they too became victims of antisemitism, exclusion and Nazi violence.
Guided tours, workshops and educational programmes for sports clubs, youth teams and schools invite visitors to learn from history and to help shape sport as a place of diversity, solidarity and participation.
Remembrance in sport
The Alfred Landecker Foundation supports the project because it sharpens awareness of the causes, effects and consequences of the Holocaust, shows how the Nazi regime exploited social spaces for its own ends, and at the same time examines the continuing presence of antisemitism and racism today.
Football in particular reaches people across generations, social backgrounds and walks of life. That is where its particular value for Holocaust remembrance lies: it offers a way into historical and political education for people whom more traditional approaches often fail to reach. In this way, the travelling exhibition "SPORTS. CROWDS. POWER." creates a space for historical learning, public reflection and contemporary debate about responsibility in sport.