Survival and Resistance During the Holocaust with Kevin Simpson

Sport in the Nazi concentration camps and ghettos defies the modern imagination. Relying on long-forgotten memoirs and testimonies, Football under the Swastika reveals the surprisingly powerful role that the most popular wartime sport of football played during World War II. From the earliest days of the Nazi dictatorship, captives played football behind the walls and fences of the Nazi terror state. To these prisoners, the ‘beautiful game’ was a glimmer of joy amid unrelenting hunger and torture, a show of resistance against the most heinous regime the world had ever seen.  Drawing upon survivor accounts and captivating photos and archival film of these heroic individuals, Dr Kevin Simpson (USA) shares his research on wartime football tinged moral ambiguity and offers a reminder why sport matters as a deeply meaningful form of shared human expression.

Dr Kevin Simpson is Distinguished Professor of Psychology at John Brown University in Siloam Springs, Arkansas (USA). He is the author of two books on football during the Nazi era and in 2019, Kevin was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship to the Slovak Republic. He has been a research fellow three times at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC and has served as a teaching fellow at Yad Vashem (Israel). Dr Simpson shared the Julius Hirsch Honorary Prize for 2021, an award recognizing efforts to combat antisemitism, racism and exclusion in modern European football. Awarded by the DFB— the German National Football Association—the Hirsch Prize recognized the installation of a memorial plaque honoring the forced Jewish laborers who built the football stadium currently being used the Slovak professional football club, MŠK Žilina.  Dr Simpson is also a former college soccer player and a current coach at his alma mater, JBU.