History of Basketball: Swastikas on the Baskets

The little book that laid the first foundation for basketball in Germany is thin. It has just 72 small-format pages. It was published 90 years ago, in 1935. The guidebook, which is not much more than that, was published by Wilhelm Limpert Publishing and commissioned by the Reich Handball/Basketball Office of the German Reich Association for Physical Exercise , the Nazi sports authority. Author Hermann Niebuhr titled his explanations and explanations on the correct handling of the equipment "Basketball, the new netball game."

In the foreword, the high school teacher explains that other nations, especially the Americans, who invented the game, were far ahead of the Germans, but that by including basketball in the 1936 Olympic program, the aim was to "establish" the sport in this country and replace the little-noticed basketball, which was mainly played by women who were organized to do gymnastics. "This makes basketball the new German basketball game!" he writes programmatically in the foreword.

Hermann Niebuhr is the central engineer in the development laboratory of German basketball - and at the same time a contemporary who could only with difficulty conceal the breaks in his biography. His story is exemplary for German (post-war) sport.

Niebuhr learned about US college basketball at the highest level at the time and immediately set out to establish the "martial arts" in the German high school in Constantinople, now Istanbul. The students made rapid progress. In 1933, a team coached by Niebuhr won the "junior championship" in Constantinople.

Niebuhr returns to Germany. It suits him that the German Olympic organizers, especially Reich Sports Leader Hans von Tschammer und Osten, actually a diehard handball fan, suddenly and out of nowhere are promoting basketball.

Sports historian Alexander Priebe suspects that this was a calculated move: "The inclusion of basketball was an attempt to counteract the boycott movement in the USA against participation in the Olympic Games in Berlin." The Nazi-friendly president of the US Olympic Committee, Avery Brundage , is pushing for basketball in Germany in order to pacify the critical voices in the USA.

Basketball is included in the 1936 program, although there are no halls for it in Berlin and German players are in short supply. The games are played on Olympic tennis courts, and the Germans - with Hermann Niebuhr - suffer three heavy defeats against Switzerland, Italy and Czechoslovakia. The final (USA-Canada 19:8) sinks into the mud, making dribbling practically impossible.

The Völkischer Beobachter praised the debacle, but some officials were not happy with the Germans' performance. The head of the handball/basketball department, Richard Herrmann, SS brigade leader, found the performance "pathetic". The magazine Leibesübungen und Immunsystem criticizes basketball in general: "A game that is so intellectually overloaded from the start is actually no longer a proper game."

Hermann Niebuhr, now the Gau Group sports director, tries to defend himself, turning against the "usual critics and deniers". Army sports teacher Hugo Murero, a consultant to the department since 1936, is upset about tendencies towards "Germanization" and speaks out in favor of the name "basketball" instead of Korbball.

The sport grew despite the resistance. Hermann Niebuhr established it in Bad Kreuznach at the school and the VfL 1848, and of course also in the local Hitler Youth, in which he was involved. Murero ensured that basketball was played ambitiously at the Army Sports School in Wünsdorf, and dribbling was also now a popular sport at the Spandau Air Force School. At the Junker School in Braunschweig, basketball was also on the hunt for baskets.

Richard Herrmann is promoted to head of the Office for Physical Education in the SS Main Office . From now on, the SS also plays basketball - in up to 17 teams: "The SS sports association has everything in its power to make the world game of basketball a household name among large sections of our people," Herrmann decrees. The German basketball team is expected to be successful at the 1940 Tokyo Olympics, but things turn out differently. The Nazis start the Second World War and the games are cancelled.

Hermann Niebuhr is drafted into the Wehrmacht as an officer in an espionage unit. He serves in France and North Africa. When the war is over, he wants to resume his work at the Bad Kreuznach school, but nothing comes of it. He has to undergo a denazification process, which Henk Wedel meticulously traced in a 2003 paper.

The charges, which affected tens of thousands of Germans at the time, were as follows: membership in the NSDAP since May 1933, various offices in Nazi organizations, strong promotion of the Hitler Youth; membership in this youth organization from 1934 to 1939 (Fähnleinführer in the Jungvolk), denunciation of fellow teachers and espionage activities before and during the war.

Now you have to know that at that time there were five categories of involvement in the Nazi dictatorship: the main culprit, the accused, the lesser accused, the followers and finally the exonerated. In a first trial in 1946, Niebuhr was severely punished. A unanimous decision was made to dismiss him from teaching without a pension. He was one of the strongest recruiters for the Hitler Youth, held classes in Hitler Youth uniform and organized tent camps based on a purely National Socialist model.

He is also said to have "always been in close contact with the Gestapo man Buchwald from Bad Kreuznach and the HJ's Bannführer, Röhling," Wedel documents. Niebuhr disagrees. It takes three years before an "appeals court" revises the verdict. Niebuhr is classified in the category of "fellow traveler," and the only charge he is still accused of is party membership.

However, the statements made by three of his older teaching colleagues at the time to the denazification committee remain impressive. They say that Niebuhr was firmly in line and encouraged spying on unpopular opinions. The fact is that a rift ran through the teaching staff in Bad Kreuznach, as the observations and research of the Bad Kreuznacher Heimatblätter show. "In 1935 he was a Nazi and the more the party consolidated, the more he became a Nazi," says one of the statements against Niebuhr.

On the one hand, there were the older, German nationalist and bourgeois teachers who cultivated an inner resistance against the National Socialists, including Director Karl Post; on the other hand, there were the young teachers who often became ideologically inflamed and indoctrinated students.

Whether this dispute led to Niebuhr being subsequently denounced remains a matter of speculation. At least the basketball pioneer seems to have been an active part of the Nazi movement in the early 1930s, even if he writes in an exculpatory way that he could not avoid joining the party at the time; he was seized by a "desire for integration".

Years later, there was an aha moment: Niebuhr's father, a senior inspector of the Reichsbahn, was dismissed from office because of his unpopular political views. His father-in-law, headmaster Ernst Bernert, was also subjected to years of hostility by NSDAP henchmen and officials of the Nazi Teachers' League. Niebuhr now claimed: "My inner attitude from that time on was completely anti-Nazi."

He claims to have withdrawn entirely to promoting basketball. To exonerate himself, Niebuhr quotes war comrades who confirm his distance from the regime. Niebuhr even creates a scenario that places him close to the anti-Hitler movement, and he also claims to have saved several French citizens. The verdict is: "The person concerned is a fellow traveler."

Niebuhr covers the costs of the proceedings, which amount to 500 marks. He can be employed in the public service again. This happens. In 1949 he co-founds the German Basketball Association (DBB), becomes the association's referee manager - and an honorary member; the DBB is not afraid to shed light on the dark spots in the association's history - In 2012, the journalist Hans-Dieter Krebs provides a solid chronicle of the "early history" of the sport with "Basketball - a German late starter".

In Bad Kreuznach, the Niebuhr issue was brought up again when a street was to be named after him in 2003. A journalist from the Public Advertiser , Joachim Rehbein, opposed the plan, which also failed in 1989, because, as Rehbein wrote, Niebuhr had worked "actively for the regime" and was therefore morally disqualified. In the course of the dispute, the family objected to the use of the name Hermann Niebuhr.

"With the consent of my mother and my brother, I prohibit the town of Bad Kreuznach from using my father's name in any form now or in the future," the daughter wrote in the Allgemeine Zeitung in 2003. There is a Hermann Niebuhr Street in the town of Detmold. However, as the town archivist there makes clear, it is not named after the basketball fan, but after a social democrat who was persecuted by the Nazis.