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The Jewish community in Salzburg before 1938 never exceeded 300 and there were consequently hardly any Jewish sportsmen/women. Anti-Semitism was quite common, especially in the city of Salzburg, where nearly the whole Jewish community lived and where sport had been established by that time. There were, nevertheless, a few personalities who had a major impact on the development of sport (i. e. football) in Salzburg such as Johann (Isak) Dachinger, who played a part in the foundation of Austria Salzburg in 1933, Erwin Bonyhadi, who was an official in various clubs and the SFV (Salzburg Football Association), and Ferdinand Morawetz, the »founding father of football in Salzburg«, who was co-founder and official of the two oldest football clubs, helped to establish an independent football association in Salzburg in 1921, and was kicked out of Salzburger AK 1914 when the club introduced an Aryan Paragraph, just a few months after he had organised a football ground for the club.

The topic of this article is the history of National Socialist Skiing in Austria, as of 1938 called “Ostmark”. Following lines are based on a dissertation which was written and defended at the University of Salzburg in April 2020 and published in November 2021. The history of National Socialist skiing in Austria does not begin with the Anschluss in March 1938. Even before that, large parts of organized skiing were oriented towards the Nazi state. An increasing ideologization of sport led to a policy of exclusion in the ÖSV in the early 1920s, which was reflected in the radicalism of National Socialism. Austrian ski sport officials and activists played an important role in the Nazi regime. Their diverse participation only becomes apparent when their biographies are not only viewed in the context of sporting achievements. The article examines the power structures and scope for action of Austrian skiing before and during the Nazi dictatorship and investigates the extent to which this could become the carrier of the National Socialist injustice system. A specific focus of the article will be on actors, especially on athletes who served in the SA and SS. The analysis focuses on individual patterns of action, participation and interpretation. The individual stories of athletes are intended to illustrate the functioning of the Nazi regime in skiing from a bottom-up-perspective.

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