Title: Aryan and Jewish chess Author: Alekhine A. A. Publisher: Russian Pravda Year: 2009

Description: In April 1941, Alekhine received permission to travel to Portugal. Shortly before this, from March 18 to 23, 1941, a series of anti-Semitic articles under the general title “Jewish and Aryan Chess” were published in the Parisian German-language newspaper Pariser Zeitung, signed by Alekhine, which were then reprinted in the Deutsche Schachzeitung. In these articles, the history of chess was presented from the point of view of Nazi racial theory, while the position was substantiated that “Aryan” chess is characterized by active offensive play, and “Jewish” chess is characterized by defense and waiting for the opponent’s mistakes. In an interview given after the liberation of Paris by the Allies (December 1944), Alekhine said that he was forced to write articles in order to obtain permission to leave, and that the articles in their original form did not contain anti-Semitic attacks, but were completely rewritten by the Germans. After the war, in an open letter to the organizers of the London tournament (1946), Alekhine clarified that all that remained from the original text were reflections on the need to reconstruct FIDE and criticism of the theories of Steinitz and Lasker. In 1996, Alekhine’s biographer V. Charushin argued that the Austrian chess player and journalist, editor of the Pariser Zeitung and ardent anti-Semite Theodor Herbetz, who died in 1945, was behind the rewriting of the articles. At the same time, another researcher, Jacques de Monnier, claimed that in 1958 he saw drafts of these articles written by Alekhine in his own hand, which Grace Vischar gave to an acquaintance before her death, but their publication would not be possible until they went into the public domain by French legislation (2017) and only with the consent of Alekhine’s heirs.