Germany has had a chess championship since 1861, and Erich Eliskases won it in 1939. The Nazis were going to have him play for the WC in 1941 yet he defected before that. So I guess he wasn’t a NAZI. Lasker died in 1941, and wasn’t a Nazi either, apparently.
Alekhine wasn’t a Nazi; he played in tournaments in France sponsored by them before the war in order to perhaps get his wife released from Germany. The Nazis wouldn’t let her go. That is, he sought to be on their good side a little for a favor, yet he lived in France until he moved to Buenos Aires.
He was something like an extortion victim of the NAZIs.
Chess.com published an article on Alekhine and the NAZIS in 2007.
The Chess.com article I cited says about Alekhine “So he stayed in France and played in chess tournaments sponsored by the Nazis.”
Alekhine wrote articles such as the anti-Semitic tract 'Jewish and Aryan Chess' (1941), perhaps under coercion. Alekhine was French and Russian and well aware of Morphy, Lasker and other chess GMs that were Jewish or partly so. In his articles he wrote about Jews being too materialist (grab a pawn sort of materialism). Mikhail Tal, Gary Kasparov and Robert James Fischer who all are or were at least partly Jewish, in addition to Morphy and even Lasker, make the idea seem de trop. Really, one shouldn’t be bigoted against taking a pawn, or advocate chess communism with all pieces advancing together. Perhaps the Hippopotamus opening is an example. It led to a draw in a WC match between Tigran Petrosian and Boris Spassky in the 26th world championship. https://www.chesscentral.com/pages/free-chess-games/hippopotamus-anyone.html
Alekhine was a brilliant chess ultra-modernist and his tract must have been something like having Pablo Picasso write on the blandness of positional classical art. Historians may or may not have gone far enough in depth into understanding his actual motives in the period.
It’s a tough question. Maybe the German chess champion from the war years gets the title? It might have been the champion in 1943- apparently they didn’t have a championship match in 1944–45. Ludwig Rellstab (chess player) - Wikipedia
The wiki article for Eliskases informs us that he choose to stay in South America in 1939 rather than return to Germany, intentionally, along with other members of the Olympiad team. He remained in Argentina and Brazil for the duration of the war and then became an Argentine citizen playing in several Olympiads for them after the war. Erich Eliskases - Wikipedia
The 1939 Olympiad didn’t finish until Sept 19, 1939 and war broke out Sept. 1, 1939 at which time Lufthansa suspended commercial air travel. Yet it is not at all plain that actual Nazis could not still journey to Germany via Mexico or elsewhere. Mexico did not declare war on Germany until late in 1944 or early 1945. Pan Am might have had a flight he could have caught to Europe someplace where he might have slipped across some border to enlist in the Wehrmacht if he’d really cared.
Eliskases probably wasn’t a NAZI. He defected, or appeared to do so, and that is not consistent with acquiescence in the political party values from which he defected. There is an article about Eliskases that has more detail of his history in Austria, relationship with the Nazis before he left to South America, and potential showdown with Alekhine for the World Championship the Nazis wanted to arrange. Eliskases
The German “Grossdeutscher Schachbund' (GSB” wanted Eliskases to be the good example of the pure” German upright style of fighting chess’. He was in somewhat apparently involved with keeping ‘the purity of the German language’, even though he left to live in Portuguese and Spanish speaking nations. I would think that for Alekhine at least the idea of an Aryan style of chess must have seemed very odd or comical, unless he was prescient and thinking about Vishy Anand.
Jewish chess players have had been champions and outstanding GMs. Germany in the Nazi era lost most of the Jews that played a good game. They would have fallen on hard times bereft even of an Austrian champion contender.
Being Jewish was not an automatic exclusion from being a NAZI; nearly so, yet not absolutely. A wiki article states that there were a few high ranking Nazis with Jewish ancestry, such as Admiral Rogge. List of Nazis of non-Germanic descent - Wikipediaand a few Jewish Nazi collaborators such as given in a wiki list Category:Jewish Nazi collaborators - Wikipedia
Some Jews did not know a priori that Hitler and Himmler would try to wipe out all the Jewish pieces from the board with a sweep of the arm.
No comments:
Post a Comment