Racist German Hooligans Pollute European Soccer Championships
The motto of the 2006 Soccer World Cup in Germany was “The world is our guest, you’re staying with friends” [Die Welt zu Gast bei Freunden] — or, in the simplified official translation, “A time to make friends.” Two years later, however, the prospects of a good showing by the German national team in the European soccer championships, currently being co-hosted by Austria and Switzerland, appear to be inspiring anything but friendly sentiments among some German soccer fans.
As first reported by the Austrian news agency APA [link in German], around 140 “mostly German” fans were arrested Sunday night in Klagenfurt in the run-up to the German team’s opening match against Poland. The rowdy German fans were chanting what the APA describes as “obviously racist and anti-Semitic slogans” that “recall the Nazi period.” More precisely and more bizarrely, they were in fact adapting anti-Semitic motifs from the Third Reich in order to insult their Polish rivals: chanting “All Poles have to wear yellow stars” and “Germans defend yourselves! Don’t buy from Poles!” The latter is a variation on the slogan with which the Nazis unrolled their infamous boycott of Jewish shops and businesses in 1933: “Germans defend yourselves! Don’t buy from Jews!”
