Few international football matches have been mythologised as Austria v Germany at Vienna’s Prater stadium on April 3, 1938.
It was three weeks after the Anschluss and the match was intended as a celebration of the nations’ unification under Hitler. At the time Austria were one of, if not the greatest team in the world, renowned for the advanced tactics and sheer beauty of their playing style spearheaded by charismatic team captain and striker Matthias Sindelar of FK Austria Vienna.
At 35, Sindelar was entering the twilight of his playing career but was still one of the finest footballers in Europe. Slight of build and graceful in his movement, they called him Der Papierene (“the man of paper”) for the way he flitted between defenders like a scrap caught on the breeze.
While he planned to lead Austria to that summer’s World Cup in France there was a sense that age and a persistent knee injury meant this could be Sindelar’s last major appearance in his home city. The nature of the match, however, made this a curious farewell to one of Austria’s greatest ever sportspeople.
Among the myths surrounding the game were that the match was fixed to be a diplomatic goalless draw, that Nazi officials had entered the Austrian dressing room to threaten reprisals should they win or even dare to score, and that Sindelar reacted by pointedly, sometimes comically, missing a string of gilt-edged chances to score.
What is beyond dispute is that Sindelar really was the best player on the field that day, skipping and dancing his way through the German defence at will until, with 20 minutes remaining, he tucked home a rebound to send the 60,000 spectators wild with delight. Ten minutes later Karl Sesta smashed in a free-kick to make it 2-0 to the Austrians, at which point Sindelar ran towards the VIP section of the grandstand and danced a jig of delight before the assembled Nazi dignitaries.
Sindelar had long been the toast of the Viennese coffee houses, the intelligence of his play being praised in the same terms as the poets, actors and musicians who were turning the Austrian capital into the artistic hub of Europe. Yet his performance at the Prater was a virtuoso turn that brought joy to a tense, troubled city.
As the cafe patrons lapped up the match reports over Kaffee und Kuchen the next morning while the factory workers praised him at their workbenches, Sindelar was the talk of Vienna like never before: he had helped see them through the economic hardship of the early 1930s, now he would see them through this latest crisis.
He was one of them, Viennese to his bones, a man from a poor background who had not only become a true artist but had helped revolutionise his chosen field, turning Austrian football into something as beautiful as it was brilliant.
Yet on that fresh, joyous spring morning after the match nobody, not least Sindelar himself, suspected he had barely nine months to live.
“Er war ein Kind aus Favoriten, und hieß Matthias Sindelar,” wrote author Friedrich Torberg in a poetic tribute to the Viennese talisman – “he was a boy from Favoriten, and his name was Matthias Sindelar”.
Working-class Favoriten was where the city’s brickmaking factories were sited, a legacy of Vienna’s rapid growth in the early 20th century when the demand for building materials was higher than ever. Workers were drawn in from across the region, including Sindelar’s parents, who migrated from Moravia to join the ranks of the “brick Czechs” in Vienna.
Sindelar spent most of his childhood playing endless games of football beneath belching chimney stacks with a bundle of rags. The Wiener Amateure club spotted his talent and in Sindelar’s first season were catapulted to the league title thanks in no small part to Sindelar’s goals.
By 1926 the Amateure had become FK Austria Wien and Sindelar had made his debut for the national team, scoring the winner in a 2-1 victory over Czechoslovakia in Prague.
Within a few years under pioneering coach Hugo Meisl, Austria were so good that people called them the Wunderteam. They thrashed Scotland 5-0 in Vienna in 1931, put six past Germany and beat Hungary 8-2 with Sindelar scoring three and creating the other five.
The following year 20,000 people gathered on the Heldenplatz in Vienna to listen to commentary through loudspeakers of the Wunderteam’s biggest test yet – England at Stamford Bridge.
Although they lost 4-3, even the English agreed the Austrians were easily the better side, the Times calling Sindelar “one of the greatest players in the world”. They should have won the 1934 World Cup in Mussolini’s Italy, going out to the hosts in the semi-finals by the only goal of a brutal game.
By then FK Austria had become the country’s most successful club and Sindelar the nation’s first modern celebrity, endorsing yoghurt, milk, wristwatches and even starring in a feature film.
FK Austria was also the club of the city’s Jewish middle classes, which made them a frequent target of prejudice as fascism began to take hold in Austria. Within days of the Anschluss, FK Austria was thrown out of the league and the club’s popular Jewish president Michl Schwarz replaced by a Nazi who dismissed the club’s Jewish staff.
Sindelar, who was not Jewish, refused to comply with the new regime, striding up to Schwarz in the street, shaking his hand and announcing, “We have been told not to even acknowledge you but I will always give you my time, Herr Doktor”.
He declined all invitations to play for the new combined German-Austrian national team, missing out on a last World Cup as a result. Instead, he took over a cafe in Favoriten owned by a Jewish friend, paying him the full market price before the Nazis could confiscate it.
The Sindelar story would have a tragic end, however. On a cold January morning in 1939, he was found dead alongside his Italian girlfriend Camilla Castagnola in the bedroom of their apartment.
The news spread through a shocked Vienna, through which theories soon thrummed: Sindelar had been murdered by the Gestapo, he had committed suicide, it was a drug overdose, a gangland hit over gambling debts.
When the investigation was closed down within days the rumours gained more currency, yet Sindelar’s death was a simple, tragic accident: carbon monoxide poisoning from a leaky heater.
“The great Sindelar had followed the city, whose child and pride he was, to its death,” wrote the columnist Alfred Polgar.
“He was so inextricably entwined with it that he had to die when Vienna did.”
