Ultras

The Wiki page deBear linked is well worth reading for the background.

thanks lads

Also good to see no poppy arguments on here thus far this year.

Can't help but love everything about German Football

poppies ur fur poofs!

On a slightly similar vain, the Official Premierleague twitter site has designated the game between Swansea and Stoke with an official hashtag, keeping the tradition of using 3 letters from each teams name and joining them together.

They've decided to go with #SWASTK.

A wee bit close to SWASTIKA, which is unfortunate given that it's rememberance Sunday....

Probably should have went with #SWASTO

Good thread, Ivan <applause\>

Seems the English suits are as useless as ours

Nice gesture from the Munich fans. Germans still have their heads buried in the sand a little, but I suppose it is still a raw/awkward subject to talk about when there are still survivors of the holocaust and still Germans living now who were alive during that whole era.

Imagine being German and your grandparents being alive during that time, not knowing if they sympathised with the Názi party or if they were actively engaged with what was going on at the time. Must be quite a large potential stain on where you come from.

Remember Hamburg fans at parkhead using churchills no surrender slogan... That was nice too...

Jukebox - To be fair, I feel the same way about people that voted for Blair post-Iraq...

I think the Germans are actually fairly good at coming to terms with the past. You can't walk 500m in Berlin without some reminder of the war, it's almost overbearing. Certainly better at it than other countries, such as Japan the USA or even the UK. We had the largest empire the world has ever seen, and we didn't get it by being nice to people. Very little in the way of remorse or acceptance shown by us. (If you're thinking that's ancient history, it was only 11 years before Hitler's election as chancellor).

Anyway, nice touch from the Bayern fans, although I'm always somewhat uneasy about mixing real world events & football, as it can be quite selective.

I spent last week at a conference attended by several Germans, they were telling me how they are embarrased by the events during the war and the holocaust is taught in the schools, the children from the region these people come from take the school kids to the site of concentration camps every year and explain exactly what happened in these places. They also never refer to people dying in the concentration camps, they always say they were murdered.