Tim-Jake Gluckman
Chess in the Third Reich
How the Game Was Played, Glorified, and Abused in Nazi Germany, 1933–1945
Taylor Kingston
vi + 285 pages | 98 photos, appendix, notes, bibliography, indexes
hardback | €49.95
Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2025
Taylor Kingston (TK) is a well-established chess historian, biographer of Colle, Carlos Torre and has edited an Emanuel Lasker reader with Andy Soltis, for example. In the present excellent and readable chronicle, he has succeeded in bringing together the dry analyses of chess games with the human beings subjected to huge pressures both from the totalitarian regime led by Hitler and the world’s most destructive war.
Beyond that subtext the author’s aims in writing this book were to fully document the interaction between the National Socialist (Nazi) government of Germany 1933–45 and the world of chess inside and outside Germany. As well as a general overview contrasting the state of chess under the Third Reich with previous German dominance pre-1914,[1] TK’s central thesis is to show the failure of Nazi policies not only to suppress Jewish players (e.g. ex-World Champion Dr Lasker) [2] but also to insert Nazi ideology into chess e.g. the trope of the so-called ‘Aryan chess style’. Despite extensive state support for over-the board (OTB) chess, the longed-for international ascendancy was never to return. Furthermore, no significant new talents emerged apart possibly from Klaus Junge;[3] as TK shows, this contrasts tellingly with the Soviet Union whose policies quickly generated a massive growth in registered players,[4] as well as world-beating players who would become dominant after the war.[5]
Why did the Third Reich expect so much political and social capital from a board game?
The author draws attention to political and social capital that Germany expected to accrue by dominating European chess through the newly founded umbrella organisation Europaschachbund, which was backed not only by the usual suspects Dr Frank and Dr Goebbels but also by highly placed figures in the Foreign Ministry. They hoped this would be one of the first steps towards Germany taking over political leadership of chess.
In my opinion the Nazis had surprisingly unrealistic expectations of the political/social capital to be gained through chess given their emphasis otherwise on training its citizens for physical fitness in readiness for ‘annexations’ and wars of aggression.
The book’s strengths
In my opinion an outstanding feature of this book is the immersion effect in the now-distant world of (German) chess existing under a dictatorship; this deep dive is informed by, for instance, numerous photos, prints, event details, well-translated excerpts from chess magazines plus the elements listed below. Combined they succeed in conveying what people were experiencing at the time, rather than top-down evaluations spelled out from the post-war safety of libraries if not armchairs.
Chess history buffs will approve of over 70 full tournament tables, 30+ tourney lists and nine ranking lists compiled by ChessMetrics.[6] But above and beyond facts and stats, TK has succeeded in guiding readers astutely through the spats, splits and conflicts of that era: one of the most significant was a territory battle between the GSB (ECF equivalent) and the ‘Strength through Joy’ (KdF) movement.
135 games are analysed (with numerous diagrams) and usually TK contrasts contemporary annotations with his own comments based on Stockfish 14. But he goes one better in some cases such as Game 115 where chess buffs can compare four different views: Garry Kasparov’s notes + Alekhine’s + a book about the latter + TK’s own silicon-guided views.
Accurate summaries of political events are one of the book’s most effective features; the author was assisted by two respected historians who checked the text. Moreover, TK has not succumbed to the widespread lure of writing a saccharine text that would reflect and/or generate a fascination with Nazis. Indeed by embedding so many chess analyses in the story of a regime’s degeneration of into genocidal policies, chess-focused readers are unlikely (one hopes) to be impressed by the numerous blunders in most of the games.
The author is clearly writing in good faith and knows German and European history well, which has enabled him to produce a very readable and at times even gripping narrative. We work through the detail to make sense of what might otherwise remain hidden: for example, the ‘why’ and ‘what’ of the unofficial 1936 Olympiad in Munich and the mostly fruitless attempts over years by players outside Germany to oppose the regime.
The 1939 Olympiad started on 24 August 1939, ten days before the UK and France declared war on Germany. TK’s depiction is the best narrated I have read: Germany took first place but the two strongest nations (USA and USSR) were absent as was Yugoslavia who, like other poorer countries, could not afford to send a team. TK covers the ‘coup’ in FIDE, and details what happened to some of the 15 players (e.g. Najdorf, Ståhlberg and Eliskases) who decided not to return to Europe. But inevitably the Olympiad was overshadowed by Germany’s invasion of Poland (on 1 September), whereupon France and UK honoured the obligations of their treaties with Poland.
And most interestingly TK devotes 41 of 261 (16%) pages to the surprising relationship between then world champion Alekhine and the chess-obsessed Dr Hans Frank. TK states that this part of the work is mostly based on research by Dr Christian Rohrer.
Dr Frank, a prominent Nazi lawyer, was Poland’s autocratic ruler with callous traits typical of most Nazi leaders and their many followers, during whose (mis)rule 5.5 to 6 million Poles were killed.[7] The author leaves it to the reader to assess Alekhine’s volte-face: at the 1939 Buenos Aires Olympiad his ‘moral boycott’ of the German aggressors was co-organised with Dr Tartakower, a Jew. However, the former, dreading capture by the Soviets as well as the seizure of his American wife’s assets in France (and her safety?), wrote crude ‘Aryan chess’ articles in which he attacked ‘Jewish chess’. TK’s book provides more detail on this notorious episode which contextualises it (and to which I hope to add my ten cents in a longer Kingpin version of this text).
Weaknesses
Of course the book has weaknesses but these are mostly sins of omission. For instance, there is no mention of chess in Berlin’s cafés – fellow McFarland author Alan McGowan has written that even after 1933 Café Viktoria in particular had a ‘flourishing chess scene’ through the 1930s. Moreover, to fathom the enigmatic behaviour of Kurt Richter TK might have consulted McGowan although Kingpin’s review of AM’s biography of Richter pointed to its inability to link KR’ s personality with his games.[8] One should be grateful to TK for avoiding that trap. But TK does ignore the well-known concept of ‘inner emigration’ [9] e.g. by Friedrich Sämisch. He should have mentioned that Sämisch only escaped execution due to a bombing raid. There are other such details that would have added pungency.
Continuing a reviewer’s perfectionist comments: TK might have questioned whether some of the claims made about the population’s enthusiasm for chess were actually ‘fake news’ / propaganda (from Dr Goebbels & co). Nor does he reveal details about financing of the GSB (the main umbrella organisation) to boost chess. Finally, the historical summaries should have included the traumatic months of galloping inflation in 1923, and then the crucial US credits (the 1924 Dawes Plan) which created a brief period of comparative prosperity until the Great Crash of 1929.
Despite these and other omissions, the book’s strengths far outweigh its weaknesses. The erudite author has clearly worked very hard providing realia (e.g. photos), many translations, numerous annotations and above all sound judgement to highlight fissures within the Nazi chess system which far from being united and typically ‘efficient’ was actually dysfunctional – it was made up of different power centres competing for ever scarcer resources rather than run by committees working objectively. The omissions mentioned above however have a positive side: to stimulate readers to continue the author’s project and explore for themselves the widely scattered information about an epoch dominated by the largest military conflict ever seen.
In conclusion, this book is a path-breaking study in English showing how a sophisticated totalitarian regime set about re-functionalising chess as a tool to help break, subdue and destroy the many smaller nations destined to be its vassal states. TK has done the due diligence this subject demands to create a book to be mulled over and slowly digested.
Notes
[1] Chessmetrics(on p.10) lists for the year 1894, Lasker (1), Tarrasch (2), Lipke (5) and Teichmann (6). Steinitz (3) had become a naturalised American citizen. The first three were all of Jewish ethnicity.
[2] Including censoring even their names!
[3] Like so many other talents, the Chilean-German master (1924–45) died in battle during the last year of the war in which the number of Germany’s casualties amounted to a very high percentage of its total losses 1939–45.
[4] On p.30 TK quotes a rise of registered chessers from 1,000 in 1923 to 500,000+ in 1934.
[5] Smyslov, Bronstein, Boleslavsky, Kotov, for example.
[6] Estimated and compiled by statistician Jeff Sonas.
[7] He was executed at Nuremberg in October 1946.
[8] Hans Renette wrote: ‘Richter is not brought to life as a human being and the reader does not learn much about his personality or personal history beyond cursory details.’
[9] In German this refers to intellectual who didn’t support Nazism but neither emigrated nor openly expressed opposition.
Display image: Entrance gate of the Exhibition Park, venue of the 1936 Olympiad
Tim Gluckman lived for over 20 years in Germany where he worked as a translator, interpreter and journalist. See his previous review for Kingpin about Fred Reinfeld.
