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40 Historical Facts Accepted as Real For Many Years

Khalid Elhassan February 14, 2020 34 min

Albrecht Gessler - William Tell — William Tell. Learn Swiss-German

4. Snitching, Not Sore Losership, Doomed the Ukrainian Soccer Players

German side Falkelf and Ukrainian team Start FC – whose players worked in a factory under Nazi management – actually did meet for two matches on August 6^th and 9^th, 1942. About a week later, the Gestapo arrested eight Start FC players. Five of them were eventually executed.

However, the arrests had nothing to do with the matches against Flakelf. Members of another Ukrainian team, that had been humiliatingly trounced by Start 8 – 0, had snitched to the German authorities, informing them that several Start players were former members of the NKVD (the KGB’s forerunner).

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.