Hero, traitor – or just Silesian?

The Star

a day ago

WAS he a hero or a traitor? And if he was guilty of treachery, which of the nations that claimed him did he betray?
As nationalism surges across Europe, the legacy of – a long-dead footballer who played for both Poland and Nazi Germany – is stirring uncomfortable questions about loyalty and identity.
In addition to Poland (for whom he once scored four goals against Brazil in a World Cup) and Germany, Wilimowski had a third allegiance: Silesia, a region with its own language, culture and sense of self – but no nation-state.
'From the Polish perspective, he was a traitor,' said Zbigniew Rokita, a Polish writer and Silesia native.
'But from the perspective of his family and society, the judgement is different.'
Fans of Ruch Chorzow, the Polish team where Wilimowski rose to fame in the 1930s, remember him not as a traitor but as a legendary goal scorer. During World War II, he played for Germany and died there in 1997.
Fans of Wilimowski's former team cheering against Polonia Warszawa during a game at the Silesian Stadium in Chorzow. — Maciek Nabrdalik/The New York Times
Today, his image adorns posters at the Ruch Chorzow stadium, where the club is fundraising for a new tombstone in Germany after the city of Karlsruhe announced plans to demolish part of the cemetery where he is buried.
The effort has infuriated Polish nationalists.
'He played in a shirt with a swastika on his chest and took money from the Germans while his teammates from the Polish national team were being murdered,' said Pawel Jablonski, a member of the European Parliament from the right-wing Law and Justice party.
But Wilimowski remains a hero to a different group: nationalists of a nation that doesn't officially exist.
'We want to show people that we have our own Lionel Messi,' said Arnold Reinhold Langer, a campaigner for Silesian identity, who runs a store in Katowice packed with flags and T-shirts declaring, 'Not German, Not Polish but Silesian.'
Langer insists that he doesn't want to break up Poland, only to promote a more 'flexible' view of national belonging.
'My passport is Polish, but I am not attached to Poland in any emotional way,' he said.
That view angers Law and Justice. In 2011, the party dismissed Silesian identity as 'a camouflaged German option'.
Arnold Reinhold Langer in Katowice. — Maciek Nabrdalik/The New York Times
And last year, President Andrzej Duda – aligned with the party – vetoed legislation recognising Silesian as a distinct language, despite nearly 500,000 speakers.
Russia's invasion of Ukraine, he argued, made it vital to 'preserve national identity' and guard against separatism.
But Rokita says Silesian identity doesn't easily fit into nationalist moulds: 'It's like an umbrella. It includes many different identities.'
Wilimowski's tangled story inspired the Croatian writer Miljenko Jergovic to pen a historical novel in 2016.
The lesson, he said, is that 'a person is never just one thing. Our identities change as long as we are alive.'
Born in 1916 to a German mother, Wilimowski took his Polish stepfather's surname.
He defied both Nazi racial purity and post-war Polish homogeneity – a nation that had lost most of its Jews, Germans and Ukrainians in the Holocaust and forced relocations.
'The Polish press called him a Nazi. The German press called him a 'Polack',' said Grzegorz Joszko, a Chorzow city councillor and historian of the football club.
'How can we say whether he felt more Polish or more German or more Silesian? Or was he just a man trying to survive the war?'
Many 'facts' about him – like having six toes or supporting Hitler – are myths, Joszko added, spread under Poland's communist regime after 1945.
At a recent game in Chorzow, 16-year-old fan Adam Bilek dismissed accusations of treason.
'He was just trying to stay alive,' he said. 'People don't know much about history.'
Upper Silesia, where Wilimowski was born, switched hands repeatedly. German until 1921, Polish until 1939, then seized by Hitler and reclaimed by Poland after the war.
'Silesia's history is not black or white,' said Seweryn Siemianowski, president of Ruch Chorzow.
'We don't know why Wilimowski made the choices he did. We can't judge him today.'
What we do know, he added, is that Wilimowski 'brought people a lot of happiness with his skills' – and that might be more important than any flag he played under. ­— ©2025 The New York Times Company
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.