Inside the dark past of Scotland’s Euro 24 Garmisch-Partenkirchen training base

ON every lamp-post, in every shop window, in every bar and on every face, the message is the same wherever you go.

Scotland are welcome.

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These past few days, Garmisch-Partenkirchen has thrown its arms and its doors open to our footballers and to our nation.

The oompah bands have been out, bars offer free drinks when they hear our accents. Even in the chill wind of weather more November than June, you can’t help but feel their warmth radiate.

Yet there was a time in the history of two towns made one by political decree when the signs on the buildings and the look on the faces were very different.

A time when this Alpine idyll scowled: Jews are NOT welcome.

Late in 1935, when International Olympic Committee Henri de Baillet Latour arrived in town to make plans for the upcoming winter games, he was so shocked by the endless parade of openly anti-Semitic placards and posters that he demanded a meeting with Adolf Hitler to insist on their removal.

Hitler told him: “It is usual, when a guest enters a person’s home, that they follow they wishes of the host.”

Baillet-Latour replied that when the five rings of Olympia flew above that home, it was Hitler and his people who became the guests.

The signs were removed.

Hitler decreed that an order taken by the town council to expel all Jews from the area should be put on hold until the Games were over. Nazi propaganda newspaper Der Stürmer toned down its editorials for the next few weeks.

Not that everyone connected with the Games was in the least bit offended by the attitudes at large around here back then.

When asked for his views, Avery Brundage, head of the US delegation, shrugged: “Jews aren’t allowed in my club in Chicago either.”

The Nazis flagged those Winter Games, a dress rehearsal for the summer version that would be staged in Berlin, as “a non-political festival of peace.”

Yet the main track and field stadium – today the training base for Steve Clarke and his squad  – was named after Karl Ritter von Halt, a member of the Nazi party’s paramilitary wing and a major donor to a sinister business cabal who filled Hitler’s war chest.

It wasn’t until 2006, after a complaint from a tourist, that it was renamed the Stadion am Gröben; though even then, local councillors were so embarrassed that they made a pact never to publicly discuss the decision.

None of this is the town’s fault, of course, any more than it’s the fault of modern-day Glasgow that the city has statues and street names dedicated to slave traders. We can’t re-write history, all we can do is learn from it.

It’s also not as if we can throw our hands up about religious intolerance – after all, every weekend, in our two biggest football stadiums, we allow thousands to chant that either Protestant or Catholics are not welcome, to bawl songs about exterminating one or the other.

Where we can be thankful, of course, is that these are only words.

While the lengths to which Germany took their loathing of the Jewish community led to the most obscene genocidal actions.

Just 12 days after the 1936 Winter Games ended, Hitler started the clock ticking towards World War II and The Holocaust by militarising the Rheinland.

Within months, the Jews Not Welcome signs were back up on the streets of Garmisch-Partenkirchen. By the end of 1938, the last 50 living here were being given just hour to pack up and flee.

Yet as as the host nation’s coach Julian Nagelsmann realised to his horror only last week, hate speech is still alive and ill and still has the power to chill the blood.

He and his players reacted furiously to a poll conducted by public broadcaster ARD – Germany’s equivalent of the BBC, to which viewers pay a licence fee – which asked the question: “Do we want to see more white players in our national team?”

Of those asked, more than one in five answered Yes.

Nagelsmann’s reaction was as swift as it was angry, snapping: “This is racist. The question is insane.

“We need to wake up. Many people in Europe have had to flee, searching for a safe country.

“We in Germany are doing very, very well and it would be crazy to turn a blind eye to these things, to block them out.”

ARD’s response?

Go Ballistic – SunSport’s new podcast

SUNSPORT is going Ballistic with the launch of our brilliant new podcast.

Every day of the Euros host Roger Hannah will bring you all the latest news and views from the Scotland camp in Garmisch-Partenkirchen.

He will be joined by our men in Germany – Bill Leckie, Robert Grieve and Derek McGregor.

And there will also be special guest appearances from our Euro 2024 columnist Gordon Strachan, regular columnist Kris Boyd and bookie basher Jim Delahunt.

You can watch every episode on our website or our brand new YouTube channel.

What are you waiting for, it’s time to Go Ballistic!

That members of the public repeatedly ask their reporters about the multi-cultural make-up of the national side and that it was fair subject to tackle.

Maybe they meant this with the best of intentions. Maybe there was no dark side to their survey, just a genuine interest in how the public view the society they live in.

But I’m guessing plenty said the same about the Jewish “problem” back in 1936. In fact, scrub that, because there’s no need to guess.

Not when, in November of 1938, as those last 50 terrified souls were chased out of town – with some preferring to take their own lives than become refugees – local newspaper Tagblatt ran a headline that should still made us shudder today:

“Now We Are Among Germans Once Again”.

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