Captain, Leader, Nazi Collaborator – Alexandre Villaplane, Football’s First French Villain

Samiran Mishra

27th March 2018 | 11:00 PM

Following the Nazi invasion of France, Alexandre Villaplane swapped the captain’s armband of the French national team, for the armband of the SS. This is a story of a conman, a sadist and a footballer.
Captain, Leader, Nazi Collaborator - Alexandre Villaplane, Football's First Villain
From captaining France to becoming an SS-Obersturmführer. Art by Fabrizio Birimbelli.

Boxing Day in 1944. The Second World War was fast approaching its end. The French Resistance had staged an uprising in Paris earlier in the year to liberate the city from Nazi occupation. After years of being slavishly subservient to their German masters, Parisians were finally granted respite as they revelled in the yuletide spirit.

Not one particular individual, however.

As the rest of the city spent the day with friends, family or remembering their lost ones, this man was standing blindfolded against a wall at the fort of Montrouge in the south-east of Paris. His stance was implacable, his face swathed in sanctimonious piety, his bastardised ideological beliefs intransigent still.

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