World chess champion and favourite of Hans Frank? : assessing Alexander Alekhine’s closeness to the National Socialist regime

Abstract

Whether Alexander Alekhine (1892-1946) was a “Nazi” is a question the chess community has been asking for decades. This historiographical study examines the closeness of the fourth world chess champion in history to the National Socialist regime. New archival evidence leads directly to the Generalgouvernement, where Alekhine had a dubious connection to the Generalgouverneur Hans Frank: a chess lover and war criminal at the same time. Relegating Alekhine to one side or the other is misleading, since the contextual, causal, logical and chronological connections are far more complex. In the present study, Alekhine’s steps through Europe during the Second World War are brought into a sufficiently coherent sequence and placed in the relevant, equally specific chess-historical and general historical contexts. The result is a new, highly differentiated view of the last years of Alexander Alekhine’s life.