Eintracht Frankfurt have stripped their former president Rudolf Gramlich of an honorary title after discovering his involvement with the Nazis during the Second World War.
Gramlich made 200 league appearances for Frankfurt in the 1930s. He also won 22 international caps and captained Germany at the 1936 Olympic in Berlin, a Games notorious for its host’s flagrant antisemitism.
Frankfurt recently investigated its former presidents via the Fritz Bauer Institut for Holocaust research ahead of Holocaust Memorial Day on Monday, and found that Gramlich was an active member of Adolph Hitler’s Nazi party and of the SS.
“Rudolf Gramlich approvingly accepted the violent reign of National Socialism,” Frankfurt’s current president, Peter Fischer, told the Bundesliga club’s annual meeting on Sunday.
“This is documented through his leadership of the club that conformed with the regime, his membership of the SS and the NSDAP, two criminal organisations, and especially through his participation in the German terror regime in the occupied territories.”
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80,000 shoes line a display case in Auschwitz I. The shoes of those who had been sent to their deaths were transported back to Germany for use of the Third Reich
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Barracks for prisoners in the vast Auschwitz II (Birkenau) camp. Here slept as many as four per bunk, translating to around one thousand people per barracks. The barracks were never heated in winter, so the living space of inmates would have been the same temperature as outside.
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Sign for the Auschwitz Museum on the snowy streets of Oswiecim, Poland
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The Gateway to hell: The Nazi proclamation that work will set you free, displayed on the entrance gate of Auschwitz I
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A disused watchtower, surveying a stark tree-lined street through Auschwitz I concentration camp
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Stolen property of the Jews: Numerous spectacles, removed from the possession of their owners when they were selected to die in the gas chambers of Auschwitz
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A sign bearing a skull and crossbones barks an order to a person to stop beside the once-electrified fences which reinforced the Auschwitz I camp
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The peace and the evil: Flower tributes line a section of wall which was used for individual and group executions
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Life behind bars: Nazi traps set to hold the Third Reich’s ‘enemies’. In Auschwitz’s years of operation, there were around three hundred successful escapes. A common punishment for an escape attempt was death by starvation
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Burying the evidence: Remains of one of the several Auschwitz-Birkenau gas chambers
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The three-way railway track at the entrance to Auschwitz-Birkenau camp. This was the first sight the new camp arrivals saw upon completion of their journey. Just beside the tracks, husbands and wives, sons and daughters and brothers and sisters were torn from each other. Most never saw their relatives again
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A group of visitors move through the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp. Viewed from the main entrance watchtower of Auschwitz-Birkenau
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“The Final Solution”: The scale of the extermination efforts of the Nazis at Auschwitz-Birkenau can be seen by comparing the scale of the two figures at the far left of the image to the size of the figure to the left of the railway tracks’ three point split
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Each cattle car would transport up to one hundred people, who could come from all over Europe, sometimes from as far away as Norway or Greece. Typically, people would have been loaded onto the trucks with around three days food supply. The journey to Auschwitz could sometimes take three weeks.
Hannah Bills
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80,000 shoes line a display case in Auschwitz I. The shoes of those who had been sent to their deaths were transported back to Germany for use of the Third Reich
Hannah Bills
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Barracks for prisoners in the vast Auschwitz II (Birkenau) camp. Here slept as many as four per bunk, translating to around one thousand people per barracks. The barracks were never heated in winter, so the living space of inmates would have been the same temperature as outside.
Hannah Bills
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Sign for the Auschwitz Museum on the snowy streets of Oswiecim, Poland
Hannah Bills
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The Gateway to hell: The Nazi proclamation that work will set you free, displayed on the entrance gate of Auschwitz I
Hannah Bills
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A disused watchtower, surveying a stark tree-lined street through Auschwitz I concentration camp
Hannah Bills
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Stolen property of the Jews: Numerous spectacles, removed from the possession of their owners when they were selected to die in the gas chambers of Auschwitz
Hannah Bills
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A sign bearing a skull and crossbones barks an order to a person to stop beside the once-electrified fences which reinforced the Auschwitz I camp
Hannah Bills
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The peace and the evil: Flower tributes line a section of wall which was used for individual and group executions
Hannah Bills
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Life behind bars: Nazi traps set to hold the Third Reich’s ‘enemies’. In Auschwitz’s years of operation, there were around three hundred successful escapes. A common punishment for an escape attempt was death by starvation
Hannah Bills
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Burying the evidence: Remains of one of the several Auschwitz-Birkenau gas chambers
Hannah Bills
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Hannah Bills
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The three-way railway track at the entrance to Auschwitz-Birkenau camp. This was the first sight the new camp arrivals saw upon completion of their journey. Just beside the tracks, husbands and wives, sons and daughters and brothers and sisters were torn from each other. Most never saw their relatives again
Hannah Bills
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A group of visitors move through the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp. Viewed from the main entrance watchtower of Auschwitz-Birkenau
Hannah Bills
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“The Final Solution”: The scale of the extermination efforts of the Nazis at Auschwitz-Birkenau can be seen by comparing the scale of the two figures at the far left of the image to the size of the figure to the left of the railway tracks’ three point split
Hannah Bills
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Each cattle car would transport up to one hundred people, who could come from all over Europe, sometimes from as far away as Norway or Greece. Typically, people would have been loaded onto the trucks with around three days food supply. The journey to Auschwitz could sometimes take three weeks.
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Gramlich died in 1988, having taken two stints in charge of the club, first from 1939 to 1942, and later from 1955 until 1970. He was president when Frankfurt won their only top-flight title in 1959 and reached the European Cup final the following year, losing to Real Madrid in Glasgow.
He was awarded the title of honorary president, but that distinction has now been withdrawn.
“We are convinced that the facts, that played at the time of his being named honorary president … must today be evaluated differently,” Fischer added. “An honorary president, no matter how positive his contribution to the club, must also be morally and ethically a role model for the youth, the membership and society.”
