 The official poster about the 9 August 1942 match printed by the German administration | |||||||
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| Date | 9 August 1942 | ||||||
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| Venue | Zenit stadium[a], Kyiv, Reichskommissariat Ukraine | ||||||
The Death Match (Ukrainian: Матч смерті, Russian: Матч смерти) is a name given in postwar Soviet historiography to the football match played on 9 August 1942 in Kyiv in Reichskommissariat Ukraine under occupation by Nazi Germany. The Kyiv city team Start (Cyrillic: Старт), which represented the city's Bread Factory No.1, played several football games in World War II. The team was composed mostly of former professional footballers of Dynamo Kyiv and Lokomotyv Kyiv, all of whom were forced to work at the factory under the Nazi occupation authority and were made to produce bread for German soldiers.
On 6 August 1942, FC Start played against the German team Flakelf,[b] and won 5–1. A rematch (revanche) was played on 9 August 1942 in the Zenith Stadium (today Start stadium, Kyiv), with an estimated 2,000 spectators in attendance, each paying five karbovanets, in which Start again beat Flakelf with 5–3.
According to later Soviet myths used for war-time propaganda, some or all players of the Kyiv city team were allegedly arrested and executed for humiliating the German players with a double defeat, while some surviving players were persecuted for alleged collaboration with the Germans. In the mid-1960s, the official Soviet narrative changed, formally recognising four deceased players and five surviving players as brave Soviet citizens resisting the German occupation. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union in the 1990s, reconstructions were made of how the match and its aftermath went, which Start players had survived and how, and it was found that the deaths of the other Start players (who were arrested and executed or otherwise died during the war) were unrelated to the supposed "Death Match" of 9 August 1942.
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