The Estonian Olympic Football Martyrs

By Satish Sekar © Satish Sekar (November 11^th 2021)

The Estonian Olympic Footballers

In 1924 Estonia made their debut in the Olympic Games Football Tournament. Eduard Eelma and Harald Kaarmann played in that team, which lost 1-0 to the USA – Andy Straden’s penalty resulted in Estonia being eliminated narrowly in the first round.

Eduard Eelma and Kaarmann were especially talented players also won the Estonian league with JK Talinna Kalev in 1923 and Talinna JK in 1926. Later, they shared a much sadder distinction.

Both were arrested by the NKVD (the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics’ People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs) and executed – Eelma in a prison in Kirov in 1941 and Kaarmann was executed after a year in a prison camp in Sverdlovsk Oblast in August 1942. Ekaterinburg, the place that the last Tsar Nikolai II and his family were executed in 1918, is the major city of this region.  Sadly, they were not the only members of the Estonian football team of 1924 to share that fate. Three years ago I visited Estonia and found some of these sad stories – football should honour these victims of totalitarianism (for further details see my article for AIPS, Estonia and Europe’s forgotten victims of sporting cruelty at https://www.aipsmedia.com/index.html?page=artdetail&art=23317).

Barbarism

Eelma and Kaarmann were not the only Estonian Olympic footballers who were victims of this barbarism. Teammates, Heinrich Paal and Otto Silber also represented Estonia at the 1924 Olympic Games. They too died in Soviet custody.

Paal was arrested by Soviet forces. He was imprisoned and murdered by NKVD in the Vyatlag prison camp in Kirov in September 1942.

Otto Silber was a giant of Estonian football. He played for JS Meteor in the first official derby in Talinn in April 1909. He played in Estonia’ first international against Finland in 1920 and was a founder member and player of Talinna JK in 1921, playing for them until 1925. He finished playing for the national team in 1926. He was part of Estonia’s Olympic team in 1924. After he hung up his boots he refereed and became an official of the club. Silber fought in both the First World War and the Estonian War of Independence of November 1918 to February 1920 which resulted in Estonia’s independence. That lasted until occupation in the Second World War. Estonia’s inter wars independence was secured by defeating Soviet forces, which helps to explain the animosity encountered by Estonians when the Soviet Union occupied the country twice in the Second World War.

Silber was arrested by the NKVD in 1940 and as reported to have been executed in Saue in Estonia in 1940. In 1924 he represented Estonia at the FIFA Congress. Clearly, he was a very important figure in Estonian football and deserves to be honoured by both FIFA and the IOC.

The last of the 1924 Estonian Olympic Football team to be arrested, imprisoned and executed by the NKVD was Hugo Vääs. He played for Estonia from 1923-25. He died, believed to have been executed, in a gulag at Yekaterinburg in 1943.

No Olympic football team suffered like this and few countries lost more Olympians to unheralded war crimes than Estonia. But Poland and Latvia also lost Olympian footballers in the Second World War to despicable war crimes.