The focus of this book is on the biographies of the 142 Jewish members who were compelled to leave the sports club 1. FC Nürnberg in 1933. Among them are the football-enthusiastic youth whose father had been beaten to death by SA troopers in the Night of Broken Glass, and who himself was deported to a concentration camp, where he was subsequently murdered. The tennis-playing lawyer who, as chairman of the club’s rules committee, implemented the concept of “political and religious neutrality” and was later interned in England as an enemy alien. Or the merchant who, in a veritable odyssey, was brought to safety in New York via Italy, Belgium, France, and Trinidad and who, almost fifty years later, still had not come to a resolution of his feelings about having been expelled from 1. FC Nürnberg.

Bernd Siegler conducted intensive research into the life stories and fates of the Jewish members expelled from the club; for the first time, they have thereby acquired not only a name, but also a story and a face. But the book does not focus solely on the past. It also tells of the perpetrators from that time and how, after 1945, they were once again able to hold influential positions. The book examines the club’s treatment of its own history and addresses the anti-Semitism that is still widespread in the game of football. At the same time, it issues an insistent summons to oppose Nazi thought and action in both the past and the present.