Vienna, which chose to revamp a 77-year-old stadium rather than build a new one for Euro 2008, will host the June 29 final in a venue that was once the site of Nazi propaganda and racial experiments.
The Ernst Happel stadium, originally named the Prater stadium after the area of Vienna in which it is located, opened in 1931 for the second Workers’ Olympiad after 23 months of construction.
A “utopia made of steel, glass and concrete,” the sleek structure by German architect Otto Ernst Schweizer was then considered the most modern stadium in Europe.
The venue, which was home to the celebrated Austrian Wunderteam of the 1930s, originally held 60,000 spectators at a time when men still wore hats to games.
Its capacity was later increased to 90,000 in the 1950s, before standing places were abolished.
LANDMARK
Renovated in 1986, the stadium was renamed after legendary Austrian coach Ernst Happel in 1993 and is now a protected landmark.
But the affectionately nicknamed “Old Lady,” which underwent further restoration in preparation for Euro 2008 at a cost of 36.9 million euros (US$58.2 million), also served a more sinister purpose during the 1930s.
On May 1, 1934, marching schoolchildren paid tribute to Austro-fascist Chancellor Engelbert Dolfuss at the stadium, in a pompous Labor Day spectacle during which he proclaimed a new constitution, effectively turning Austria into an authoritarian state.
Four years later, on April 3, 1938, the stadium hosted the so-called Anschluss Spiel, or “annexation match,” following Austria’s occupation by Adolf Hitler’s Germany on March 12.
PROPAGANDISTS
Staged by Nazi propagandists as a reconciliation between two parts of the Reich that supposedly belonged together, the game — one week before an April 10 referendum, in which Austrians would overwhelmingly vote to join the Third Reich — nevertheless saw Austria defeat Germany 2-0, before an array of high-ranking Nazi officials.
A year later in September 1939, the stadium took on a new role as the German Gestapo locked up over 1,000 Jewish men there on the ground that the prisons were full.
Josef Wastl, the then-director of the anthropology department at Vienna’s Natural History Museum, examined some 440 detainees, taking measurements of their bodies and features for an Anthropology of Jews report, with photos, hair samples and plaster masks of their faces.
The prisoners were susequently sent to Buchenwald concentration camp on September 30 and business resumed as usual on the following day, as the stadium once again played host to a soccer game.
ANFIELD BLUES: Kylian Mbappe arrived at Anfield on a run of 21 goals in 17 games, but he managed just three attempts in the match, none of them hitting the target Kylian Mbappe has been nearly unstoppable this season, but he hit a roadblock in their UEFA Champions League match at Anfield on Tuesday. For the second year running, the Real Madrid forward had a night to forget at Merseyside as Liverpool won 1-0. Mbappe looked a shadow of the player who has been tearing defenses apart all season. “We were lacking that threat in the final third,” said Madrid coach Xabi Alonso, without naming Mbappe individually. The FIFA World Cup winner for France rarely looked capable of finding a breakthrough against a Liverpool team who have been so defensively fragile for much of the
LOCAL SUCCESS: In the doubles, Taiwan’s Hsieh Su-wei and Jelena Ostapenko of Latvia defeated Italians Sara Errani and Jasmine Paolini in straight sets Elena Rybakina on Monday punched her ticket to the WTA Finals last four with an impressive 3-6, 6-1, 6-0 victory over second seed Iga Swiatek in round-robin play in Riyadh. After cruising past Amanda Anisimova in her opener on Saturday, Rybakina claimed her second win of the week to guarantee herself top spot in the Serena Williams Group. Anisimova on Monday rallied back from a set and a break down to triumph 4-6, 6-3, 6-2 in her all-American battle with seventh seed Madison Keys, who has been eliminated from the competition. “Madi was playing so well, it was quite a battle out there,”
For almost 30 minutes, Vitomir Maricic did not take a breath. Face down in a pool, surrounded by anxious onlookers, the Croatian freediver fought spasming pain to redefine what doctors thought was possible. When he finally surfaced, he had smashed the previous Guinness World Record for the longest breath-hold underwater by nearly five minutes. However, even with the help of pure oxygen before the attempt, it had pushed him to the limit. “Everything was difficult, just overwhelming,” Maricic, 40, told reporters, reflecting on the record-breaking day on June 14. “When I dive, I completely disconnect from everything, as if I’m not even there.
An amateur soccer league organized by farmers, students and factory workers in rural China has unexpectedly drawn millions of fans and inspired big cities to form their own, raising hopes China can grow talent from the ground up and finally become a global force. The nation of 1.4 billion people has about 200 million soccer fans, more than any other country, but it has failed to build world-class teams, partly due to a top-down approach where clubs pick players from a very small pool of prescreened candidates. The professional game is marred by a history of fixed matches, corruption, and dismal performances,
RSS