A Soccer Game in Ukraine During World War II Echoes Through Time KIEV, Ukraine - There are few striking features about Start Stadium except its disrepair. Wooden planks in the grandstand, like neglected teeth, are mostly loose or missing. Behind the tiny seating area, though, a sturdy column rises and supports a statue. It depicts a muscular, naked man heroically kicking a soccer ball into the beak of a trampled eagle. Seventy years ago, on Aug. 9, 1942, the stadium became the site of one of soccer's most infamous and disputed games, the so-called Death Match. With Kiev under Nazi occupation during World War II, a group of Ukrainian players defeated a military team of Germans thought to be from artillery and perhaps Luftwaffe units. According to legend, the Germans warned the local team beforehand or at halftime that it had better lose the match, and when the Ukrainians ignored the threat and prevailed, key members of the team were killed in retribution. The final score was 5-3. That much seems widely agreed upon. And four or five Ukrainian players did die within six months of the game, according to various accounts. Were they killed because they won a soccer match? All the participants are believed to be dead. The truth remains elusive. One player who popularized the legend seemed to tell as many versions of the story as there were goals in the match, both burnishing the myth and betraying it. That long-ago game is gaining renewed attention as Ukraine serves as co-host to the European Championships. The match has grown far beyond a sporting contest into myth and folklore, immortalized in landmarks around Kiev and in articles, books, documentaries and movies, even a version featuring Sylvester Stallone. The latest film, called "Match" and made by Russians, was released before Euro 2012 and raised an outcry for portraying Ukrainians as Nazi sympathizers. Some believe the 1942 game was, or could have been, a death match. Many academics and journalists dismiss the legend as Soviet-era propaganda and have sought to refute it. Still others seem unconcerned with the truth. They embrace the myth as an enduring symbol of Ukrainian patriotism and defiance in a country where 8 million to 10 million citizens died during the war, a country where starvation diets included tree bark and cow dung, a country whose national World War II museum displays a machine used by the Nazis to grind human bones into fertilizer. "The facts say the match took place, but there was no death match as such," said Marina Shevchenko, a historian who works at Kiev's National Museum of the History of the Great Patriotic War, as World War II is known in the former Soviet Union. People want their legends, like Robin Hood. If the game and its legend did not exist, Alexander Dovzhenko, a pioneering Ukrainian film director of the first half of the 20th century, once said, "We would have had to invent it." Under Occupation 19, 1941, the Nazis occupied Kiev. Days later, more than 33,000 Jews were killed at Babi Yar, a ravine on the outskirts of the battered capital. In a footnote to the German invasion of the Soviet Union, the Ukrainian soccer season was abandoned. But by June 1942, a kind of soccer tournament was apparently organized, featuring two Ukrainian teams and garrisons representing Germany, Hungary and Romania. The best team, F.C. Start, went undefeated. It was composed of Ukrainian bakery workers, most of whom had played or were to play for the powerful Kiev club Dynamo, which would later win 13 Soviet league championships. As the story goes, the owner of the bakery, also described as a bread factory, had been a big fan of Dynamo. He came up with the idea of forming an amateur team, providing extra food rations to the players and time to train. On Aug. 6, 1942, Start is said to have routed a German Flakelf team by 5-1. Flakelf translates to Flak 11, suggesting the German team was composed mainly of those who manned antiaircraft guns around Kiev. A rematch against a reinforced German team was held in late afternoon three days later. A copy of a poster announcing the Aug. 9 game is displayed at the World War II museum. An estimated 2,000 spectators, paying five rubles apiece, were said to have attended the rematch at Start Stadium, then known as Zenit Stadium. By some accounts, the stadium was ringed with soldiers, SS officers and police dogs, though others discount this. Makar Goncharenko, a star wing for Start, said in a 1985 oral history that some unnamed people warned it could be risky playing against and defeating the Germans in a rematch. "Everyone told us: "What are you doing? It's a real danger," " Goncharenko said in the oral history, taped by the staff of the World War II museum, which also translated that interview from the Russian for this article. The Start players listened, but ultimately decided to proceed with the match. "Sport is sport," Goncharenko said. We didn't want to lose. He also said that a Gestapo officer visited the team before the match, introduced himself as the referee and told the players they should raise their right arms and make the Nazi salute on the field in a pregame greeting. The players agreed without intending to comply, Goncharenko said. Ultimately, they refused the order, he said, and instead gave a popular sportsman's yell, "Fitness, culture, hoorah." Jeré Longman reported from Kiev. Andy Lehren reported from Kiev and New York.