Germany could be in Six Nations if it was not for Second World War

Telegraph

07-05-2025

'And it's Schmidt, with a floated pass to Müller – and now Schneider is over in the corner! Jubilation for Germany and an early shock for the Twickenham fans.'
My imaginary commentary might sound peculiar. But there is a parallel universe where such guttural-sounding names are a regular feature of the Six Nations Championship.
When we think of Germany's place in world sport, we generally see them as a football-loving nation with a strong history of motor racing, athletics and tennis. Some of their preoccupations – especially handball – are mysterious to us.
So it is surprising to discover that the Germans were serious players on the continental rugby scene of the 1930s. In fact, they were well ahead of Italy, whom they beat 12-3 in their final victory before the Second World War. A few months earlier, in March 1938, Germany had defeated France on the rugby field for the first time, presaging military events two years later.
'The Nazis were generally supportive of rugby,' says Walter Gebhardt, the curator of Germany's rugby museum. 'They promoted it as a fighting sport that developed players with a warrior spirit.'
In researching this article, I came across some striking images, including the German rugby team performing the Nazi salute in 1934, and Leni Riefenstahl – Adolf Hitler's favourite filmmaker – making a ceremonial kick-off at a club match.
But we should not get too carried away. It is not as if Hitler was debating scrum dynamics with his generals. Indeed, there is no evidence that he had a view on the sport in either direction. He preferred to focus on the propaganda potential of football – already a much bigger sport across Europe – and the Olympic Games.
No, the sudden upswing in Germany's rugby fortunes stemmed not from the Nazis' vague and distant endorsement, but from one controversial vote in the committee rooms of London. The vote that approved the ejection of France from the Five Nations Championship in 1931.
'At that time, the home nations felt that the French players were too violent, and their crowds were also prone to dangerous pitch invasions,' explains rugby historian Tony Collins. 'Underlying that was the fact that everyone knew the French secretly paid their players.'
So, who were the French going to play now? Well, the Germans had a decent history of rugby. They had formed their first clubs in the 1870s, based around Hannover – a city that regularly hosted English princes – and the prestigious schools of Heidelberg. In 1900, a team from Frankfurt won silver at the Paris Olympics.
France's solution was thus to invite a German, Hermann Meister, and an Italian on to the board of the newly founded Fédération Internationale de Rugby. Now Rugby Europe but previously known as FIRA, this body still runs the Rugby Europe Championship for the likes of Georgia and Romania. In the 1930s, it helped arrange fixtures between the continental powers.
'The German rugby community probably only had 800 players at that time,' says Gebhardt, 'but they were being advised by French coaches and educated in French training techniques. Club teams were encouraged to go across the border, with their travel and accommodation paid for, and stay a week to prepare before playing a local side.
'Where they had been playing a couple of matches per season, German players were now regularly coming up against superior teams on the field, and that's how you get better.'
Here was the background for the surprise of 1938, when German full-back Georg Isenberg kicked the only penalty in a 3-0 victory over France in Berlin. Had France's investment backfired? Quite the contrary, it had succeeded in creating an opponent worthy of respect.
But even as German rugby gathered momentum, so did the slide towards war. Only a year after the triumphs of 1938, many of the players became caught up in deadly confrontations, starting with Hitler's invasion of Poland in September 1939.
By contrast with Germany's leading footballers, who were kept away from the action by their influential manager Sepp Herberger, the rugby men found themselves in the thick of it. No fewer than 16 internationals died in the conflict, nine of them attached to clubs from Germany's original rugby epicentre of Hannover.
And then, when peace finally broke out, Germany did not play another rugby international for seven years. France had returned to the Five Nations by now, so they were stuck with mighty Belgium.
'There were all sorts of problems after the war,' says Gebhardt. 'So many players died, and then the Allies didn't allow sports associations to meet in the first few years, so any communication had to be done in secret.
'The shadow of football grew, especially when [West] Germany won the 1954 World Cup. Then there was the partitioning of the country into East and West, and the shortage of goods. To take one example, there were no rugby boots. Even into the 1970s I was having to go to France to find them.'
Today, Germany is almost as strong in cricket – a sport in which it has no tradition at all – as it is in rugby, thanks to the number of immigrants from India and Afghanistan.
Admittedly, the national rugby team did make a run in the qualification event for the 2019 World Cup, before losing to Canada in a play-off. But their international ranking of 36 marks a considerable dip from the golden days of the 1930s: an era when Isenberg and scrum-half Carl Loos led a team mentored and partly manufactured by the French.
'There's an interesting counterfactual where the rise of Germany isn't interrupted by the war, and they go on to be more successful than Italy in the long run,' says Collins.
'Rugby was never going to be on a par with football there, or indeed anywhere else in Europe, but it could potentially have kept growing into a substantial sport.'
This is a curious corner of sporting history, which remains largely unknown outside a small circle of curators and academics.
Its very obscurity has given rise to various myths, as Second World War enthusiasts overreach the available evidence. Amateur historian Nigel McCrery has suggested that Hitler deliberately squashed rugby because he saw it as too English. In fact, Hitler admired and imitated the British public-school ethos. Other sources claim that Nazi architect Albert Speer was a rugby player and enthusiast, but he was actually more interested in rowing.
Of the characters who really were involved, we should spare a second mention for Meister, the urbane Heidelberg author and publisher who chaired the German Rugby Federation. The Nazis genuinely did not like Meister, who published progressive literature and refused to use their favoured gothic fonts. But his sophistication made him the ideal person to build bridges with the French.
Although Meister survived the war, much of his contribution was washed away by the bloodshed, along with Germany's potential as a rising rugby nation. Yet the fact remains: were it not for the Second World War, the Six Nations could easily have ended up with Berlin – instead of Rome – as a regular stop.
Four players who fell in the war
Prince Alexander Obolensky (1916-40)
The great left-arm spinner Hedley Verity is probably the best-known sporting casualty of the Second World War, but Prince Obolensky is in the conversation. Arriving in Britain as a baby after his Russian parents fled the revolution, he became an all-round sporting star at school and Oxford University. In 1936, his two Twickenham tries helped deliver a 13-0 victory over New Zealand – the first time England had ever defeated the All Blacks. Rugby writer TP McLean called his second try 'a stupendous exhibition of the hypotenuse in rugby'.
After such a short but glorious life, Obolensky's death had a terrible sense of futility. According to another great sportswriter – Frank Keating – 'he became the first of 111 rugby internationals to lose their lives in the conflict when, taxiing on landing his Hawker Hurricane on the turf airfield at Martlesham Heath, east of Ipswich, the aircraft's wheels snagged a rabbit warren and, having loosened his harness, the pilot was catapulted out of the cockpit, breaking his neck in an instant.'
Yet this was not atypical for the Second World War. By contrast with the First World War, where lives were mostly lost at the front, a surprisingly high proportion of casualties took place on home soil. Many were the result of unreliable engineering, with more than 8,000 Britons dying in training or on non-operational flying missions.
Christopher 'Kit' Tanner (1908-41)
In the exhaustive lists of sporting wartime casualties compiled by amateur historian Nigel McCrery, few can match Tanner when it comes to a heroic final contribution.
A winger who won five England caps, Tanner was ordained in 1935 and then served as a chaplain on the light cruiser HMS Fiji. Struck by a German bomb near Crete, the listing Fiji waited for assistance from nearby HMS Kandahar. Meanwhile, Tanner tended to the wounded and even sang music-hall songs to bolster the men's spirits. He then assisted others to climb the scrambling nets that brought them up on to the deck of Kandahar, and was personally credited with saving 30 of the 500 surviving personnel.
According to The London Gazette, Tanner 'spent himself in helping men to rafts and floats … in bringing over disabled men and such as could not swim. At length only one man remained to be brought across. Despite his exhaustion Mr Tanner made a last effort to save him and saw him safely on board. But when hauled up himself he died within a few minutes'.
Tanner was the only England international to be awarded the Albert Medal during the war.
Paul Cooke (1916-40)
Scrum-half Cooke was another Oxford man who played alongside Obolensky for the Dark Blues. He won two international caps in 1939, and would surely have added to them but for the war. Instead he travelled to France as a lieutenant in the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry.
When German advances threatened to cut off the British Expeditionary Force in the lead-up to Dunkirk, the Ox and Bucks was one of the units involved in the Battle of the Ypres-Comines Canal – a three-day stand-off which bought the rest of the Army time to retreat. Cooke is reported to have died while setting up a machine gun in the window of a house. He was one of more than 300 casualties suffered by his regiment.
Robert 'Mike' Marshall (1917-45)
A phenomenal athlete at No 8, Yorkshire's Marshall made a spectacular England debut at Lansdowne Road in 1938, when one newspaper reported that 'he ran some 50 yards to score the try of the match'.
In the war, he joined the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, and earned the Distinguished Service Cross for ramming and sinking a German E-boat which was attacking a convoy.
By all accounts, Marshall – who became a lieutenant commander – embodied the archetypal ideal of an officer-class Englishman. He took part in numerous operations involving motor gunboats, including one campaign that rescued 19 stranded aircrew from the far side of the Channel, and later received a bar for his DSC.
Marshall actually made it through to VE Day in 1945, and would have survived the war had he not volunteered for a mission that involved transporting Merchant Navy officers to Gothenburg. (The mission should have gone to a different captain, Jan Mason, except that Mason was away in London receiving his own DSC.) Marshall's vessel encountered a floating mine that had been cut free by a British minesweeper only a few days earlier, and only two of the 28 crew survived.
One obituary described Marshall – who left these shores for the last time on May 11, 1945 – as 'the perfect companion who never wasted a word in idle chatter, was never put out, laughed loudest in disaster, was humble to a fault, and staunch until death'.