Chess in the Third Reich: How the Game Was Played, Glorified, and Abused in Nazi Germany, 1933-1945

The USSR is famous as the first totalitarian state to promote chess. Less well known is that Nazi Germany was the second. The Third Reich gave chess a tremendous financial and propaganda boost in hopes of making Germany a dominant chess power. Yet this aspect of the Nazi era has received scant attention in later German literature, and even less in English. This book fills that gap.

Using a multitude of German sources, the author has crafted a narrative showing how the Nazis completely remad...