1941 German football championship
 |
|||||||
| Event | German football championship | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|
|||||||
| Date | 22 June 1941 | ||||||
| Venue | Olympiastadion, Berlin | ||||||
| Referee | Boullion | ||||||
| Attendance | 95,000 | ||||||
The 1941 German football championship, the 34th edition of the competition, was won by SK Rapid Wien, the club's sole German championship. Rapid, which had previously won twelve Austrian football championship between 1911 and 1938 as well as the 1938 German Cup, won the competition by defeating FC Schalke 04 4–3 in the final. The final was held on 22 June 1941, the same day Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union in Operation Barbarossa.
FC Schalke 04, having won five of the previous seven finals, being the defending champions and aiming for an unprecedented third consecutive German championship, were the favourites and led the final 3–0 after 57 minutes but Rapid scored four unanswered goals, the last three of them by Franz Binder, to win the championship. It marked the second of three occasions of a club from Vienna (German: Wien) in the final, Rapid becoming the only one to win the competition while Admira Wien had made a losing appearance in the 1939 final and First Vienna FC would do the same in 1942. Austrian clubs had played in the German league system from 1938, after the Anschluss, until the German surrender in 1945.
Rapid's victory led to a number of conspiracy theories. On Schalke's side it was speculated that Rapid was allowed to win to award a national championship to a club from the Ostmark while, in Austria, the theory developed that Rapid players were punished after the final by being sent to the front line. Both theories were disproven when Rapid, in 2009, commissioned a study into the history of the club during the Nazi era and found no evidence for either. Rapid continues to list both German titles, the 1941 championship and the 1938 cup win, in its honours.
...
Wikipedia