The Barcelona of the Baltics

‘Otto Fischer’, Ilana Ivanova says almost absent-mindedly, leafing through the pictures as we talk in her offices at the Jewish Heritage Foundation in Liepāja, a port city on the southwestern tip of Latvia’s Baltic coast.

‘My mum knew him. He was a small man, well-dressed in elegant suits. My mum trained at the Stadia Olimpija at the same time as him. The football team went a few times to the Nazis to ask them not to shoot him. That’s Fischer in the suit’.

She points at the picture of a small man in a suit, surrounded by footballers. Everyone looks happy, and no wonder. This is Olimpija Liepāja, the Barcelona of the Baltics in the 1930s, the team Fischer coached to the Latvian League championship three times in four years.

The story of Otto Fischer is of a man who brought beautiful football to a sprawling industrial port city and vast Russian military base. His fate was to be murdered by the Nazis in the early stages of as they wiped out Latvia’s Jewish population.

Until WWI Liepāja was a cornerstone of the Tsarist Empire more associated with endless railway wagons full of freight and huge warships emptying cadets into the barrack city across the Trade Canal.

In the early part of the 20th century the city was best known to Eastern Europeans as a port with a direct boat to New York. From 1906 when the service started hundreds of thousands of Jewish families passed through Libau – its German name – to get away from the violent anti- semitism of the time. In the first year alone 40,000 made the trip. Demand was so great that the boats between Liepāja and New York, and then on to Halifax in Canada, ran for 18 years until 1924. (1)

Born in in 1901, Otto ‘Shloime’ Fischer came to this city after a playing career in the golden age of Austrian football. A promising left winger, he cut his teeth at ASV Hertha Vienna before moving to Karlsbad in Germany in 1921 for two seasons. He made the first of seven international appearances in friendlies for in a 2-0 defeat to in 1923.

Between 1923 and 1926 he played for First Vienna 1894, the oldest club in Austria and nicknamed the Döblinger (‘blue-yellows’). In his first season they were runners-up in the league to rivals Vienna Amateurs. The following year they reached the Cup Final where the Amateurs beat them 3-1. The 1926 final was a repeat, except this time the ‘blue-yellows’ narrowly lost 4-3.

In 1926 Fischer, by then considered the best left-sided player in Vienna, moved on to the all- Jewish club Hakoah [Strength] Vienna. They were one of the biggest sporting clubs in Vienna and drew their players from the 180,000-strong Jewish population in the city. There were also Hakoah teams for ice-hockey, , swimming, and fencing. They made a feature of touring, especially in America, to market themselves to around the world, with security provided by the wrestling team. But so many players decided not to return to Europe after a trip in 1926 that the team’s competitive edge was effectively lost.

Fischer joined at this point, and toured North America with Hakoah in 1927, staying until 1928 when he made his last international appearance and was sold to Wacker Vienna. There a knee injury ended his playing career. (2,3) He moved to the Italian top flight in 1928-29 to become manager of Napoli but was sacked before the end of the season. (4) He continued as a coach through the early 1930s in Yugoslavia and Switzerland without any notable success until he was alerted to a vacancy with FC Olimpija Liepāja, one of the strongest teams in Latvia. When the new national Latvian First Division was formed in 1927 – the Virsliga - Olimpija won it three years on the trot. They also won the Riga Football Cup three times in a row between 1928 and 1930, on one occasion beating their opponents 9-0.

Fischer took the job because friends recommended the team, all Liepāja men and blessed with stability. Seven in the side he inherited had played for Liepāja since 1927.

There was fearless goalkeeper Harijs Lazdins, a Latvian international who stayed in the team until 1944. Defender Karlis Tils won the League six times with Olimpija and made ten international appearances for Latvia. His defensive partner Fricis Laumanis played from 1927 to 1940, including several seasons where he didn’t miss a game. Striker Voldemars Žins became the first Latvian footballer to score an international hat-trick following independence in 1918.

Lazdins, Tils, Laumanis, Zins and Stankuss, Dudanecs and Kronlaks would be the backbone of Fischer’s new Olimpija. What he brought to the club was a professional attitude and football philosophy which was difficult to instil at first.

Until Fischer took over, Liepāja played a physical style more akin to the English ‘kick and rush’ model. Spectators became used to strong powerful clearances by defenders followed by sweeping charges by strikers. Fischer introduced a new system called ‘Viennese Lace’; low precise passing combinations where intelligence is more important than power. It took some time for the grumbling both from spectators and players to die down: they complained it was boring to play that way, hour after hour.

But Fischer stuck to his principles. The first phrase he learned in Latvian was ‘The team that plays on the ground never loses’. Those among the playing staff who wouldn’t adapt were sometimes slapped physically until they did, or were shown the door. Results improved, and before long the spectators were packing in. Crowds of 5,000 became regular. President Ulmanis sent the team a telegram complimenting them on their ‘beautiful and masculine game’.

Taking charge for the 1936 season Fischer successfully guided Olimpija to the league title without losing a game. The following season football was suspended, but he won the league a second time in 1938 and then again in 1939.

Fischer was in Latvia just five years but he learned Latvian, always wore a suit and endeared himself to players and spectators alike. When the Soviets occupied Latvia in 1940-41, Olimpija Liepāja was disbanded. In June 1941 Liepāja was besieged and bombed by the Nazis as they fought to oust the Red Army quickly from this key port in their strike into the Soviet Union. The city fell, but then the round-up of the Jewish population began – and Fischer was among those arrested.

In his book Liepāja Sporting Legends, veteran sports journalist Andzils Remess tells how Fischer’s players begged the Nazis to spare his life, but in vain. Fischer was shot along with thousands of the city’s Jews in the first mass executions of the Holocaust: 69,000 of the country’s 70,000 Jews would be murdered by Nazi death squads and their Latvian auxiliaries.

Olimpija Liepāja continued during the war years until 1944, when the city was the focus of repeated military onslaughts by the Red Army in efforts to break the Nazi supply lifeline through the port to the Baltic and so to Germany. Battered by endless bombing and shelling for six months, Liepāja was a ruin at the war’s end.

But Fischer’s legacy and methods lived on. Many coaches applied his philosophy of possession and passing and players referred to ‘Fischer’s time’.

After the end of the war nine of Olimpija’s players joined Daugava Liepāja, coached by former Fischer defender Karlis Tils. With Voldemārs Sudmalis and another Fischer player in the team, striker Ernests Zingis, they won the Latvian Soviet League in 1946. Sudmalis, who began his playing career with Olimpija in 1942, is considered one of Latvia’s greatest footballers of all time. Merging with another Liepāja team and taking the name Sarkanais Metalurgs they won the League seven times in 10 years between 1948 and 1958, a dominance greater than their time under Fischer.

For a while during the Soviet occupation they reverted to the name Olimpija Liepāja and even made the qualifying rounds of the Europa Cup in 2011-12 with an almost entirely Latvian playing squad, but went bankrupt in 2014. City council sponsorship revived the team, and they play today as FK Liepāja.

The contribution Fischer made was significant, Andzils Remess says: ‘Fischer made Liepāja the pride of Kurzeme [the western Baltic region of Latvia], and the only way Liepāja could compete with Riga and win’.

He is not forgotten though: the First Vienna FC 1894 ’Dream Team’ of pre-1945 players includes Otto Fischer.

Hakoah Vienna were shut down by the Nazis after the of 1938 but were revived after the war and still exist today, playing in the Prater Park under the name SC Maccabi Wien.

The Liepāja Jewish Heritage Foundation is developing a project about Otto Fischer in conjunction with the Austrian Embassy in Latvia. (5)

This article is an excerpt from ‘Blood in the Forest: the end of WWII in Courland’ by Vincent Hunt, an account of Latvia’s wartime experience at the hands of Soviet and Nazi occupiers. It’s published in 2017 by Helion & Company of Solihull, UK (www.helion.co.uk)

Sources:

Drawn from A.Remess Liepājas sporta leģendas, Kurzemes Vārds, 1996, thanks to Kristine Zuntnere at the Latvian Football Federation and from I.G. Körner Lexikon jüdischer Sportler in Wien 1900 – 1938, courtesy of Ronald Gelbard at SC Hakoah, Vienna. Player biographies from Miķelis Rubenis, History of football in Latvia, 2002.

Other sources: 1. Special Economic Zone website: http://www.Liepāja-sez.lv/en/Liepāja-port/history/ (accessed 01 Feb 2016) 2. Austrian playing career: National Football Teams website [Austria] http://www.national-football-teams.com/player/43292/Otto_Fischer.html 3. Napoli historical website: http://www.sscnapoli.it/static/content/Rose-degli-anni--20- 25.aspx 4. International career http://www.worldfootball.net/player_summary/otto-fischer/ 5. Ilana Ivanova, Jewish Heritage Foundation, Liepaja.

ENDS Author: Vince Hunt ([email protected]) 0780 858 2327