Frank, a pretty decent player himself and owner of an extensive chess library, used his position to promote the game. On November 3, 1940 he organized a chess congress in Krakow and six months later set up a chess school under Bogoljubow and Alekhine.
As soon as Joseph Goebbels (1897 – 1945), Germany’s Reich Minister, heard of Frank’s chess activities he disapproved because Frank was pursuing a policy “which is anything but that sanctioned by the Reich.” Frank had ordered the setting up of a chess seminar in Krakow under Polish management which Goebbels deemed unimportant. He added that “Frank sometimes gives the impression of being half mad. Some of the incidents that have been reported to me concerning his work are simply dreadful.”
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| Frank and Goebbels |
After the war Frank was found guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity at the Nuremberg trials, was sentenced to death and in October 1946 he was guest at an Allied “necktie party.” As for Goebbels, after Hitler’s suicide on April 30, 1945, Goebbels became Chancellor of Germany for one day before he and his wife committed suicide after poisoning their six children.
In 1939 Alekhine and many other players were surprised by the outbreak of World War II during the Chess Olympiad 1939 in Buenos Aires. A lot of players stayed in South America, but Alekhine returned to his wife Grace Wishaar and joined the French Army in its fight against Nazi Germany.
After the French surrendered he first went to the zone occupied by the Vichy French but later collaborated with the occupying German forces. After the war he justified his collaboration by claiming that otherwise he and his wife would have been sent to a concentration camp.
In 1941, Alekhine published his anti-Semitic material about Jewish and Aryan chess. According to his friend, the Portuguese player Francisco Lupi, Alekhine was approached by the Nazis who asked him to write some propaganda material which appeared in a German newspaper in March, 1941. Lupi asked his readers what would they have done in a situation where “death and despair was everywhere and life had very little value"? Would his readers have said “No.” and watched their wife “take a headshot before you also get blown away, or you can write some gibberish and live to fight another day.”
It’s not well known, but during the Munich tournament in 1942 which was held for the Axis-controlled championship of Europe, Alekhine wrote in a French newspaper that the tournament stressed "the leading role played by new Europe and marks the end of the , to say the least, inopportune interference of America in the European chess question.”
One of the tournaments organized by Frank was Krakow/Warsaw in October of 1941.
1-2) Alexander Alekhine and Paul Schmidt 8.5
3) Efim Bogoljubow 7.5
4) Klaus Junge 7.0
5) Josef Lokvenc 5.5
6) Teodor Regedzinski 5.0
7-9) Eduard Hahn, Georg Kieninger and Max Bluemich 4.5
10) Paul Mross 3.5
11-12) Carl Carls and Heinz Nowarra 3.5
Paul Schmidt (August, 1916 – August, 1984) was an Estonian player, writer and chemist who is virtually unknown today, but appears to have been far stronger than one might suspect.
Chessmetrics assigns him a rating high of 2696 in 1943 and that put him at number 9 in the world. He last appears on Chessmetrics list in 1952 with a rating of 2522 ranking him number 137th in the world.
Among his many successes, in 1935, Schmidt won, ahead of Paul Keres, at Tallinn and in 1936, he drew a match against Keres (+3 –3 =1). In 1936, he won the Estonian Championship. In 1937, he won Estonia's first-ever international tournament at Parnu, ahead of two world title contenders, Salo Flohr and Keres.
Schmidt emigrated from Estonia to Germany in the autumn of 1939 and in 1940, he took 2nd, behind Georg Kieninger, in the German Championship. In August 1941, he tied for 1st with Klaus Junge in the German Championship and won the play-off match +3 –0 =1. Both during and after the war Schmidt’s success continued and in 1950 he was awarded the IM title.
In 1951, he earned a PhD in chemistry from Heidelberg University, and moved to Canada, then to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania where he took a job as a professor. Later he and his wife Eva moved Allentown, Pennsylvania, where he worked for Bell Telephone Laboratories and made co electro-chemistry and anodic oxidation of silicon, was expert in neutron activation analysis, and published many papers, till his retirement in 1982. He continued playing occasional games and regularly visited Reuben Fine in New York.
His opponent in this game is the virtually unknown German Master Heinz Nowarra (1897–1945). Nowarra played in many Berlin Championships in the late 1930s and during World War II, he played in several tournaments in General Government (occupied central Poland), usually finishing around the middle of the tournament. Nowarra took also part in correspondence tournaments. In December 1944, his game against Klaus Junge had to be interrupted when Junge left for the front. Ludek Pachman wrote that Nowarra. Like Junge, probably died in the final days of World War II, but nobody really knows.
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