Football dignitary and Nazi perpetrator? Felix Linnemann was both. A compatriot called him a man with two faces. For twenty years, Linnemann was president of the German Football Association (DFB). Over those years, the organization grew by millions of members and developed into a modern and professional organization. As president, Linnemann appointed Otto Nerz as German national coach in 1926. Until then, the team captain and a few officials had selected the line-up for the national team. Players were not picked for performance alone, representation of all regional associations was more important.

After the Nazi Party seized power, Linnemann disbanded the DFB as an independent institution and merged it into the new Nazi sports structures. The newly-named Fachamt-Fussball, or Department for Football, was the sole remaining organization. All other associations had already been broken up or were later disbanded. With Linnemann’s active promotion, the Fachamt-Fussball was adapted to the Führer principle and centralized. The regional associations, which had once been very influential, disappeared completely. At the 1934 World Cup in Italy, the German team took third place. At the time, it was German football’s greatest achievement.

Linnemann also took advantage of other career opportunities offered to him. He worked as a criminal investigator, advancing in both the police force and the Nazi Party. Linnemann became a party member in 1937; in 1940, he joined the SS. He became director of the head office of criminal investigation in Hanover as well as director of the national criminal division. He advanced to the rank of SS Standartenführer at the Reich Security Main Office. In his position at the Hanover police, he was responsible for the deportation of hundreds of Roma and Sinti to Auschwitz concentration and extermination camp in 1943. His acts as part of the racist and antisemitic persecution machinery were not in contradiction to his engagement for football. Linnemann believed that one of football’s most important tasks was to “train its members to become patriotic members of the Aryan nation, ready and fit to serve the Nazi state.” Linnemann did not truly have a second face. His ideas about sports fit hand in glove with his politics.