Paul Mross, born as Pawel Mroz on January 23, 1910, was one such player. Although Mross held his own against players like Alekhine, Bogoljubow, Richter and Euwe and was still active after the war, he is unknown to chess fans of today.
One source lists his date of death as January 17, 1991 and says that in 1986, he moved to Dusseldorf, where his son Joachim Mross also lived. However, a 2004 article in Chessbase (in German) states that his fate is unknown.
Mross grew up in Silesia, a region of Central Europe located mostly in Poland with small parts in the Czech Republic and Germany, which was raped by the Nazis after 1939. He won the Silesian Championship in 1929 and played for Silesia at second board in the 1st Polish Team Championship in 1929.
Mross was a member of the club Wielkie Hajduki (today: Chorzow Batory). At that time, it was a large and well-known club that was active until the outbreak of World War II. Mroz was a pillar of the club and his chess career started out to be very promising.
In early 1930s, he moved to Berlin and in 1935, tied for 3rd-4th in Swinemunde. In the Berlin City Championship he tied for 7th-8th in 1936, and tied for 4th-6th in 1938. In the spring of 1939, he finished 2nd in Berlin-Kreuzberg.
On September 1, 1939, Germany when invaded Poland to start World War II the finals began at the Chess Olympiad in Argentina. Two days later England declared war on Germany and the British team withdrew from the Olympiad and returned home on the first ship back to Britain.
The Olympiad continued and was won by Germany, but all five members of the German team (Eliskases, Michel, Engels, Becker, Reinhardt) chose not to return to Nazi Germany. Additionally, most of Jewish players from Europe chose to stay in Argntina. The list included Moshe Czerniak, Movsas Feigins, Paulino Frydman, Sonja Graf, Aristide Gromer, Markas Luckis, Mendel Najdorf,Jiri Pelikan, Ilmar Raud, Adolf Seitz, and Gideon Stahlberg, among many others.
There were some tournaments held in Germany during the War. Salzburg in Austria brought together the six strongest players in Germany and the occupied and neutral European countries. The players included Alekhine, Keres, Stoltz and Germans Paul Schmidt, Klaus Junge and Bogoljuow. Euwe was invited by withdrew due to “illness.”
A book that may be interesting to chess players is The Death's Head Chess Club by John Donoghue, a psychiatric pharmacist by trade, that tells the story of an SS- Obersturmfuhrer who is transferred to Auschwitz from the Russian front after he is wounded. There, in an attempt to shore up camp morale, he establishes a chess club and learns of a Jewish prisoner considered unbeatable. The novel shifts between the camp and Amsterdam in the 1960s where a chess tournament brings up ugly issues of forgiveness after the horror of the concentration camps.
The German Championship was played from 1939 to 1943 and was won by Erich Eliskases (1939), Georg Kieninger (1940), Paul Schmidt and Klaus Junge (1941), Ludwig Rellstab (1942) and Josef Lokvenc (1943). There is an interesting biography of Elikases HERE that discusses his relationship with the Nazi party.
The most promising German player was Klaus Junge (born 1924), who tied with Alekhine for first place at Prague 1942, at the age of just 18. Prague proved was his last tournament. Serving in the German army, he was killed in action on April 17, 1945, just three weeks before the war ended in Europe.
Mross played in several tournaments during During World War II: 5th-8th in the 1st General Government tournament at Krakow–Krynica–Warsaw, 1940, 12th at Munich 1941, 10th-12th in the 2nd General Government at Warsaw–Krakow in 1941 and he won in the Krakow Championship in 1941.
After the war, he lived in Berlin-Spandau, where he played in several tournaments with moderate success before moving to Erlangen in the 1960s.
The following game is from a forgotten tournament against an opponent known only as Baueriedel and is most interesting; Mross launches a snappy tactical attack that seems to materialize out of nowhere.
No comments:
Post a Comment