As DFB President Bernd Neuendorf and Jewish Central Council President Josef Schuster commemorate the victims of National Socialism, along with Holocaust survivors Eva Szepesi and Helmut Sonneberg, this evening at the DFB Academy in Frankfurt, their thoughts also travel to Eintracht. club grounds Frankfurt.

Teacher and journalist Martha Wertheimer edited the association’s news until the National Socialists seized power. For this she reported from the first international match in Riederwald in 1922 and the final of the German championship in 1932 against Bayern Munich. During the Nazi era, Jewess organized the transport of children abroad, saving hundreds of young people from death. He did not survive his exile to Sobibor in 1942.

Wertheimer is one of the girls and women who risked their lives and fought against the Nazi terror regime in Germany and occupied European countries over 80 years ago. Under the slogan of “Attitude and act”, the 19th commemoration day of German football highlights this group of victims and in doing so commemorates the women organized in sports.

Like Anna Proell from Augsburg, born in 1916, who was on the gymnastics and sports club’s handball team and was known as her father, Karl Nolan’s power acrobat. When the Nazis came to power, Anna, like the whole family, resisted the new regime. He had joined the communist youth unit in 1931 at the age of 15, and has now become “the most important figure of the youth group trying to resist in Augsburg,” according to the website of the Association of Victims of Persecution by the Nazi Regime. (VVN-BdA) in Augsburg.

The group was arrested as early as 1933, and Anna was imprisoned for four and a half years in the Aichach women’s prison and Moringen concentration camp for “preparation for treason.” After her release, she met her future husband, Josef Proell, who was imprisoned in various concentration camps for a total of eight years as a communist. Anna Proell, who defended anti-fascism and democracy as one of the last survivors of the Augsburg resistance to old age, died in 2006.

Another resistance athlete was Margit Zinke, a hockey player at Hamburger SV. Growing up with adoptive parents, Margit attracted attention even as a teenager due to her rebellious nature. During the Nazi era, she became a determined opponent of the Nazi regime. “With her two and later three children, she is certain to openly scold Hitler and the National Socialists when there was an air raid alert in the bunker on the Falkenried Terraces,” says Stolpersteine-hamburg.de. “It is said that he even took down a swastika flag hanging in the courtyard once, she.”

Along with her second husband, Paul Zinke, an electrician and communist, she became a member of an anti-fascist resistance cell that, among other things, supported forced labor and forged documents for people in hiding. After her husband was drafted, Margit continued to work and provided shelter to fugitive resistance fighters. Paul Zinke was arrested in November 1944 and his wife in February 1945. Both were initially imprisoned in Fuhlsbüttel prison and killed in the Neuengamme concentration camp on the nights of 21-24 April.

Three of the many destinies that German Football Remembrance Day also wants to draw attention to women all over the world today “who are fighting against authoritarian regimes and for human rights, physical self-determination and a free life”. violence”.