During World War II, in September of 1941, German forces launched their invasion of the The Soviet Union. By September 16, they began to lay siege to the city of Kyiv in what is now Ukraine. In three days, the city would fall under Nazi control with over 600,000 Soviet soldiers captured and the citizens placed under strict, oppressive control.
Then, nearly one year later on August 9, 1942, a most unusual "battle" would take place in Kyiv involving less than two dozen active participants before a paying audience: A football (soccer) match. After the war's end, this one event would take on a life all its own and become the stuff of legend. Literally, a legend.
What is known for certain is that on one side of this sporting contest was a German squad referred to as "Flakelf" that was comprised of air defense artillerymen, and their opponents on the other side were "Start," assembled from a group of former football players from before the war who had been forced to work in a bread factory producing food for their Nazi oppressors. The two sides would indeed play a football match that would go down as a rousing victory for the Kyiv locals with a final score of 5 goals to 3. Then, one week after this match was played, on August 16, 1942, the Gestapo would arrive at the bread factory to read out the names of people wanted for questioning—namely, the Start players. Historians and researchers believe that, after the Start team had gone on to win another match 8-0 against another team, "Rukh," the players were accused by a bitter trainer from the losing side of having ties to the NKVD, the Soviet secret police. The consequences for this levied accusation were dire. One player was reportedly tortured to death during interrogation; another died while trying to escape from Gestapo jail; several were sentenced to hard labor at the concentration camp at Syrets in the western outskirts of Kyiv and were met with horrible fates. A few of the players did manage to survive, but that is a detail that commonly gets ignored or is forgotten.
It was in the ensuing years following the end of the war, with the re-establishment of Soviet government control in Kyiv when the narrative of this story began to change into something else entirely. Because Kyiv had fallen to the Nazis as quickly as it did and so many soldiers were taken prisoner in the process, the Soviet government felt a need to counter any perception that the people of Kyiv did not fight their enemy, and reports of a group of local football players beating a German team and subsequently dying is what they turned to. Facts became conflated, other details were wholly invented, and a new propagandized version of events took shape that portrayed the Start players as proud, defiant figures who were told to deliberately lose a game to a German team, disobeyed those orders and beat their opponents, anyway, and were subsequently made to pay for that insolence with their lives. The legend of "The Death Match," as it would come to be called, was born.
The phrase "Death Match," referring to this story, first appeared in a film script published by Aleksandr Borshchagovsky in August 1946. Twelve years later, Borshchagovsky would publish the novel Trevozhnye Oblaka (Eng. Altering Clouds) about the match, and a second novel published the same year, Posledni Poyedinok (The Last Duel) by co-authors Piotr Severov and Naum Khalemsky would have a very similar premise. Consequently, these two books would become instrumental in shaping a long and deeply fascinating list of adaptations of the myth into feature films the world over for more than 60 years.
Intriguingly, the most common story element that connects every adaptation together is a detail not present in the real events that transpired. Gone are any references or mentions of a football team working at a bread factory; instead, the players are usually situated in a POW camp or prison. However, every other detail of the Death Match is subject to change. Some tales are set in countries or places other than Kyiv. Some don't even take place during World War II or involve Nazis. Some, surprisingly, actually have happy endings. Some are deeply politically motivated. Many lay claim to being based on a true story.
Nevertheless, the story of this fabled "Death Match" has come to be known the world over, especially among fans of Association Football, and has become an intrinsic part of the sport's folklore and cinema history.
Films Inspired by The Death Match Myth in Chronological Order (Unmarked Spoilers!):
Directed by Zoltán Fábri; Written by Péter Bacsó and Zoltán Fábri
Surprisingly, despite the myth's origins in the Soviet Union, the first film adaptation of The Death Match originated under a different European Communist regime. Most significantly, at the time of this movie's release, the country of Hungary was already a few years removed from the Revolution of 1956 that saw the Soviet military intervene in effort to protect their interests in preventing the destabilization of what was a Soviet Bloc. Furthermore, it just so happens that immediately prior to the Revolution of 1956, Hungary had actually boasted the single best, most dominant national football team in the world (between 1950 and 1956, their "golden team" only lost one match—the 1954 World Cup Final) and was a clear-cut symbol of national pride and identity. This movie was obviously meant to recapture some of the national glory was lost in the latter half of the 1950's when the Revolution and its aftermath caused so much disruption, and what better way to achieve that than by sticking it to the Nazis in a sports film about your national pastime?
The film is set in a World War II labor camp in Hungary in 1944. Nazi officers are trying to organize a football match to celebrate Hitler's birthday, so they seek out a former professional footballer named Ónódi who is a prisoner in the camp to put together a team that can play against their best German players. He accepts their offer with conditions, and he builds together a team from the prison population, including one Jewish inmate named Steiner who can't play football but lied because he was afraid he would die. At one team training, the team attempts to make an escape from the prison camp, but they're recaptured. They're told that they all face the death penalty for the escape attempt, but, first, they are still made to play the football match. The first 45 minutes of the game doesn't go very well for the prisoners. They conceded three goals to the Germans, but they did manage to score one of their own as well with the score 3-1. At halftime, they are told that they might not be executed if they lose the match. However, the prisoners figure that they're going to die anyway, and they go back out and score three goals in the second half to win the match 3-4. The Nazi spectators are so upset that they mow down the prisoners with machine gun fire as they celebrate their match victory on the pitch.
Directed by Yevgeni Karelov; Written by Aleksandr Borshchagovskiy
Aleksandr Borshchagovskiy, the writer who first coined the term "Death Match" to refer to this tall tale in 1946, finally has his own helping hand in adapting his story to the screen.
This one takes place at a POW camp in Kyiv. Again, a team of prisoners is formed to play football against Nazis. Here, they are simply given an ultimatum: Lose or die. Naturally, the Soviets make a sluggish start at the beginning of the match, but they end up overwhelming the dark forces of the jackbooted oppression, only to be hauled in front of a firing squad when the final whistle blows.
This one isn't actually centered around the fabled Death Match, but in this film's telling of the history of FIFA and the World Cup, when the film reaches World War II, a time when international football and the World Cup tournament were postponed, FIFA president Jules Rimet is told a second-hand account of the Death Match as if it were entirely factual. Anachronistically, where the legend of this match only began to be told and spread around the world well after the war was over, the character who shares this story does so while the war is still being fought. One embellished detail about the game is that the team that refused to lose to the Nazis was so insanely good and cocky that, while they were already ahead by a goal, one player was able to dribble the ball right up the the goal line, only to turn around and kicking the ball back to the halfway line, instead of tapping it into the open net.
