Ethics Review: Levy Rozman (GothamChess) on Alekhine and the Nazis

 

Ethics Review:  Levy Rozman (GothamChess) on Alekhine and the Nazis 

Welcome to another Ethics Review, where ethics, as it should always be, is number one!

Lionizing collaborators

Today I am reviewing a YouTube video that purports a “historical deep dive” on world chess champion Alexander Alekhine (1892-1946).   I argue below that the video is an egregious failure, for it unabashedly and enthusiastically celebrates and lionizes someone who was a widely influential propagandist for the Nazi regime at the highest levels.  In this role, Alekhine befriended and accepted a well-paying job from Hans Frank, a genocidal war criminal.

Why a chess video?

I have written before on chess [1] and my father was heavily involved, winning the State championship of North Carolina several times.  More importantly, the entrepreneurial attitudes expressed in the video are symptomatic of a larger cultural problem.  The ubiquitous norm in our social-media era is to prioritize attention:  likes and views over what is just and true. 

For influencers, who ply the trade of charisma, it is very tempting to push decency to the side.  The power of persuasion translates into money and fame, reaped from an anonymous, scattered internet audience.  If accumulating the most clicks becomes the focus, far above, or even to the exclusion, of the humane norms necessary for social stability, the consequence is a devil’s bargain.

 Most important of all -- 

Never Forget!

The evils of the Nazis should never be forgotten is an essential, axiomatic moral claim.  Nazism should never be downplayed, normalized, minimized or dangled as ornamental click bait.

“Never Forget” and “Never Again” are mottos on many Holocaust memorials.  The latter originates from prisoners freed from Buchenwald.  Sadly, instead of what is clearly right, our glitzy culture fixates on sales.  Coin and adoration.  The result is a primitive level of ethics, buried below an avalanche of logos and commercials, accompanied by moraines of resplendent barkers, who arrest our attention and broker our trust. 

Considerations of right-and-wrong track with the health and compassion of a society, the overall quality of life.  The lower the level of ethics technology, the more barbaric, greedy and cruel the country.  The worst case scenario is might-makes-right under a malignant narcissist, which results in a pyramid of ogres atop a mountain of broken wings.

 

Forgotten horrors

Many people are completely uneducated on the horrors of Hitler, including the delusional, narcissistic, macho toxicity which dragged the globe into World War 2. 

We have forgotten the hate.  The cruelty.  The sadistic bullying and beating of people in the streets.  The shameless, ubiquitous vandalism.  The castigation and mockery.  The raping.  The burning of books by jeering, rabid crowds.  The knee-bending pall of fear, punctuated by spikes of terror.  The juif badges, the consignment of human beings to ghettos, then slave labor and death. 

Perhaps we remember the concentration camps and the arid stench from the crematories, but only as plot-twists for the assembly line of the entertainment industry, where the main goal is adrenal hedonism for mass consumption.

 

It can happen again

We must embrace advanced ethics technology [2].  Otherwise, decadence and complacency seduce and dominate. Without the guardrails of a mature conscience, we walk in a vulnerability of social landscapes prowled by opportunists:

It is all too easy to imagine that the Third Reich was a bizarre aberration.  It’s tempting to imagine that the Germans were (or are) a uniquely cruel and bloodthirsty people.  But these diagnoses are dangerously wrong.  What’s most disturbing about the Nazi phenomenon is not that the Nazis were madmen or monsters.  It’s that they were ordinary human beings.[3]

 

Who is GothamChess?

Levy Rozman, known as GothamChess, is am influencer with global status.   Since the pandemic, chess has surged in popularity.  As the game expands, so does the clout of its spokespeople.

In his wikipedia entry, Rozman is given an impressive title:

Often referred to as “The Internet's Chess Teacher,” he produces content on the online platforms Twitch, Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube.

Rozman began streaming on Twitch in August 2018. His YouTube channel gained rapid popularity during the COVID-19 pandemic and the release of The Queen's Gambit in 2020. His YouTube channel became the first chess channel to surpass one billion views.

 

A video on Alekhine

About a month ago, Rozman put up a video on Alexander Alekhine, titled “The Most Notorious Chess Player of All Time.” [4]  At the time of this writing, it has approximately 305,000 views.  Part of being notorious, Rozman tells us, is the chess champion’s “alleged” ties with Nazis and authorship of antisemitic newspaper articles, which circulated across Europe.

One problem with this video is that the behaviors in question are not up for serious debate. Overwhelming evidence is easily available on the web.  Rozman lionizes and celebrates a man who was highly complicit in the spread of Nazi propaganda on a massive scale.  Calling Alekhine “notorious” is more than inaccurate.  Try monstrous.  Diabolical. 

As well, Alekhine accepted a well-paying propaganda job arranged for him by Hans Frank, the leader of occupied Poland.  Frank, a chess enthusiast, was responsible for sending millions of people to concentration camps, such as Auschwitz.  He was sentenced for these heinous crimes at the Nuremberg Trials and hung to death. 

In addition to millions of Jews, Frank murdered hundreds of thousands of Polish citizens.  I am going to quote extensively from the US Holocaust Memorial Museum website.  It’s painful to read, but Nazism must be faced, not swept under the rug:

 

The Nazis considered Poles to be racially inferior. Following the military defeat of Poland by Germany in September 1939, the Germans launched a campaign of terror intended to destroy the Polish nation and culture and to reduce the Poles to a leaderless population of peasants and workers laboring for German masters.

In the weeks following the German attack on Poland, German SS, police, and military units shot thousands of Polish civilians, including many members of the Polish nobility, clergy, and intelligentsia. In the spring of 1940, the German occupation authorities launched AB-Aktion, a plan to systematically eliminate Poles considered to be members of the “leadership class.” The aim was to remove those Poles seen as most capable of organizing resistance to German rule and to terrorize the Polish population into submission. The Germans shot thousands of teachers, priests, and other intellectuals in mass killings. Nazi officials sent thousands more to the newly built Auschwitz concentration camp, to Stutthof, and to other concentration camps in Germany where non-Jewish Poles constituted the majority of inmates until March 1942.

 

A merry tone

Even if it were actually the case--which it is not--that there is uncertainty regarding Alekhine’s behavior, Rozman’s flippant tone is wholly inappropriate in dealing with the issues that he dangles before his audience.  The talented influencer does not take a single moment to memorialize the victims of the Holocaust.  Not one sentence to warn us about the evils of the Nazis and their collaborators.  “I love this story!” he effuses in his video, describing Alekhine’s life.  Near the end, he perkily remarks, “Yo, Netflix, pick this up, man!” and calls for “movies and documentaries” to be made about “one of the most fascinating chess players to ever walk the Earth, if not the most.”

With a silver-tongued wand of insouciant eloquence, Rozman buries the lessons of history and becomes a de facto apologist for a man deeply connected with a war criminal.

 

A not-so-deep dive

In the video, Rozman claims, more than once, to have done a “historical deep dive.”  With an upbeat tone, he describes the chess champion’s associations with Nazis as “alleged,” and suggests they are moot. But there is a solid bed of evidence for Alekhine’s malevolent acts.  Evidence that is excellent, unchallenged, and easily available on the internet.

Rozman is either unaware of the strong evidence against Alekhine, or chose not to present it. He spends a lot of time in the video chortling about roguish trivia.  Things like Alekhine’s four wives.  His lying about a PhD.  His cat named “Chess”  …

 

Parroting Alekhine’s own excuse

Rozman flippantly suggests that perhaps Alekhine aided the Nazis only to protect his wife and, as well, his “wealth and properties in France.”  Leaving aside the repugnant idea that it is acceptable to aid the Nazis to protect your foreign assets, the idea that Alekhine was focused on protecting his wife is contradicted by the in-depth research of Christian Rohrer, presented below. 

After WWII, Alekhine mobilized this very excuse--that he was protecting his wife (and protecting himself).  And yet it should go without saying that someone’s own denial is not a reason to exonerate them.

 

How could Rozman miss the evidence?

If I could find the information so fast, why not Rozman?  Rozman brings up a point that was first uncovered by Dr. Rohrer; namely, that Alekhine lied about having a PhD [5].  It's odd.  Was Rozman unaware?  It is standard research practice, as well as common sense, to know your source.

Rohrer’s work is  a tour de force, nonpareil on the topic of Alekhine and the Nazis.  He provides trenchant, meticulous, comprehensive coverage, over a hundred pages.  It comes up easily on an engine search.  So, again--

 Why did Rozman’s “historical deep dive” leave it all out, while including a single tidbit about Alekhine's fake PhD?

 

A deeper dive

It only took me only about five minutes on Google to find the Rohrer article and get a feel for its professionalism.  With a little more digging, I was able to see the respect and credibility the Stuttgart professor has garnered in the chess world, since publication in 2021.    

The launchpad for my investigation was simple.  I typed “Alexander Alekhine nazi articles,” into the search engine. 

 

Vetting Christian Rohrer’s work

Because Rohrer is the ultimate source for the damning claims against Alekhine, I took some effort to check the level of respect and acceptance it has received.  Within twenty minutes or so, I found several supportive articles.  At the same time, I found none whatsoever in rebuttal. [6]

 

For instance, in a 2021 article titled, “The wrong side of history:  racism, gender, Alekhine and the Nazis,” Raymond Keene writes:

Great controversy has arisen over the question of whether Alexander Alekhine, World Champion from 1927–1935 and again from 1937–1946, was a Nazi. Vast amounts of ink have been expended on this question, but now Dr Christian Rohrer of Stuttgart University has published a paper which must surely represent something approaching the last word on this sensitive matter.  [7]

 Keene goes on to discuss Rohrer’s analysis, including extensive quotes.

 

Ripples from 2021 to the present

Rohrer’s influence ripples beyond 2021 to the present.  In 2025, Jennifer Shahade cites Rohrer on her site.  While describing the contents of a linked video, she writes: 

Fabian and I [in the video] also talk about Alekhine’s unfortunate final chapter, in which he collaborated with Nazis and then died in mysterious circumstances in 1946. Alekhine claimed that he was compelled to align with Nazi ideology to survive. But 2021 research by historian Dr. Christian Rohrer, tells a detailed, evidence-rich story, which led me to another conclusion. [8]

 

The Johannes Fischer article

Again, in my quick vetting of the academic value, the intellectual heft, the chess-world cred of the Rohrer article, I found it has been accepted as impressive and definitive.   No one has outed it as wrong, or challenged the meticulous research.

The first article I found in relation to Rohrer was in Chess News, by Johannes Fischer.  It is titled, “Alekhine and the Nazis:  a historical investigation by Dr. Christian Rohrer” [9].   

It took me a moment to realize that this was indeed an article on an article, the former praising the latter.  Why write so specifically?  Johannes Fischer says of Rohrer’s work that it is “detailed, fascinating and well-worth reading.” 

In the summary, he remarks, “After research in archives all over Europe, Rohrer comes to a number of new insights into Alekhine's fate and personality … and at the same time provides a fine example of how the study of chess history can help to gain insights into larger historical contexts.”

 

Key points distilled by Fischer

The Rohrer article is actually the length of a short book, 99 pages without the bibliography and 123 pages with it.  The research is exquisitely detailed, well-organized and fine-toothed.   This broaches a question:   What did Fischer choose to highlight in his article in praise of Rohrer?

The title of Rohrer’s article is “World Chess Champion and Favorite of Hans Frank? Assessing Alexander Alekhine’s closeness to the National Socialist Regime” [10].   Not surprisingly, Fischer focuses on the Nazi criminal Hans Frank, drawing from the analysis by Rohrer:

In 1941, Alekhine played a tournament in German-occupied Krakow in Poland and came into contact with a number of influential Nazis, most notably Hans Frank, the Governor General of Poland. As Governor General, Frank was largely responsible for the persecution and murder of millions of Jews, and after the war he was sentenced to death at the Nuremberg War Crimes Trial and executed on 16 October 1946.

Frank was a great chess fan who maintained a friendly relationship with Alekhine, and these contacts helped Alekhine to get a well-paid job at the Institut für Deutsche Ostarbeit (Institute for German Work in the East), IDO for short.

 

Another point Fischer chose to emphasize was Alekhine’s willing participation in Nazi propaganda, various articles which reached audiences all over Europe and the world.  In regard to Alekhine’s guilt, Fischer choose a direct quote from Rohrer:

Alekhine, whether every word is his or not, bears responsibility for these articles. They appeared under his name in the German-language press and were able to develop their effect there with the weight of his name. I consider it impossible that the articles appeared against Alekhine's will. Alekhine himself boasted in Spanish newspapers in September 1941 about his treatment of chess from the 'racial point of view'.

 

The Rohrer article itself

Rohrer’s article linking Alekhine to Hans Frank is a nonesuch on the topic, a treasure trove of elaboration, enumeration, and well-supported conclusions.  Insights build through exacting steps, accompanied by punctilious use of references.  The main goal  is none other than the revelation of Alekhine’s intentions.  We can’t get inside anyone’s head, but Rohrer comes close.  What he concludes is that Alekhine was motived by two factors:  a desire to brandish his status as a chess champion and, secondly, to maintain the highbrow lifestyle he had enjoyed before WWII. 

In short, Alexander Alekhine worked with the Nazis for fame and luxury.

 A sample from Rohrer:

Like many of his colleagues, for example, players from Becker’s team, who remained there until 1945 and sometimes beyond, Alekhine could have waited in South America with his wife for the end of the war or gone north to the USA.  However, he returned to Europe in February 1940. Alekhine first stopped off in Portugal, where he gave simultaneous displays, still accompanied by his wife  Grace.  When he returned to Paris, his plans continued to revolve around chess. (p.17)

 

There are many other points of such nature, accumulating and connecting as Rohrer reinforces his thesis.  A full enumeration of the evidence is beyond this review, and would expand it by dozens of pages.  The following is from the concluding section of the article:

Leaving all open questions aside, the results of the present study provide a changed picture of Alekhine’s closeness to the National Socialist regime. Not least, the hermetic shield that first Alekhine himself and later his apologists had forged to exonerate him for his actions …  has been broken … This shield was a fallback position when other arguments were not convincing, and consisted of the diversely varied narrative that Alekhine had acted under duress from the National Socialist regime. This, of course, can be used to justify basically anything. … With source material used for the first time in this study, this fallback position can be considered obsolete: Alekhine certainly had room for manoeuvre vis-à-vis the National Socialist regime, and he used it … He did not behave like a prisoner of the National Socialist regime, but rather tactically and in the face of the GSB [Greater German Chess Federation] and Generalgouverneur [Hans] Frank, he sought the best solution for himself.

 In view of his room for manoeuvre, Alekhine’s anti-Semitic outbursts also appear in a different light. Such passages by Alekhine are nowhere to be found as programmatically as in the articles dated March–April 1941, which were first printed in the Pariser Zeitung. But they were also not an isolated case. Rather, with the exception of Portugal, such statements appeared in newspapers everywhere Alekhine stayed for a longer period of time … If Alekhine had room for manoeuvre, then he could at least have avoided publishing anti-Semitic passages from autumn 1941 onwards.” (p.97)

 

Hopefully, the admittedly terse summary above gives a sense of Rohrer's judicious rigor.

Too erudite to count?!

For the sake of argument, someone might try to defend Rozman, aka GothamChess, by claiming that Rohrer’s work is voluminous and erudite, and as such has yet to be properly investigated for its accuracy.  

In response to such a conjectural argument, I would say it is harder to build a case than to dispute one.  Similar to scientific experimentation, where a single empirical test can refute a hypothesis, all it would take to create skepticism for Rohrer’s claims is a well-researched counter to a single point. Since 2021, when the article was published, no one has presented a disputation, none that I could find.  

Moreover and critically, as discussed above, Rohrer’s work has been accepted as a worthy source by a number of well-regarded online authors, who publish on reputable sites like Chess News.

 

Wikipedia Fail

Perhaps Rozman used Wikipedia as the main source for his “deep dive.”

The Wikipedia entry on Alexander Alekhine does not include Rohrer’s discussion of Nazism or the authorship of the antisemitic articles.  Strangely, however, it includes Rohrer’s assertion that Alekhine lied about having a PhD--a point that Rozman includes in his video. 

Hans Frank, the war criminal hung at the Nuremberg Trials, is not even mentioned in the Wikipedia entry-- except in one place:  the title of Rohrer’s article, buried in the footnotes.  This amounts to a fail on Wikipedia’s part.  That said, dedicated scholars consider Wikipedia a starting point, a mediocre reference at best.

If Rozman relied on Wikipedia, I would say this to him:  using a site designed as a starting point as your end point is poor scholarship, a negligence of significant proportion.  

Whatever his methodology, Rozman missed the Rohrer material, easily available--it is, in fact, the source of one of Rozman's own claims--and so became a de facto apologist for enormously malign behavior.

 

Concluding Section

I was able to find a translation of one of the antisemitic articles that circulated widely with Alekhine’s blessing.  Whether Alekhine wrote the bulk of the racist articles or not, or whether instead it was the job of the Nazi official he worked with, Alfred Linder, is unknown [11].   That said, and as Rohrer argues, it makes no difference in terms of culpability.  Alekhine was willing and he boasted about it. 

The visual of the antisemitic article is here:

https://museum.fide.com/exhibits/jewish-and-aryan-chess-article-and-alekhines-open-letter-regaring-his-alledged-authorship

The link includes two images.  The first is Alekhine’s protestation, written in 1946, claiming he was coerced by the Nazis.  As discussed above, this has been debunked.  The second article, written in 1941, is titled, “Jewish and Aryan Chess.”  Here is a sample:

 

Reti was applauded by the plurality of Anglo-Jewish intellectuals for his work, “Modern Ideas in Chess” .. and these people were particularly impressed by the absurd cry Reti invented, namely “We, the young Masters (he was 34 then) are not interested in rules but in exceptions.” … This cheap bluff, this shameless half-attempt at self-boosting was swallowed without a struggle by a chess world already doped by Jewish journalists, the exulting cries of Jews and their friends.

 

 It pains me to include even this terse snippet.  You can feel the swell of hate, the gargantuan animosity that permeated the Nazi movement. 

Note well:  according to the Holocaust Museum Encyclopedia, Hitler, Himmler and other top Nazi officials decided to “physically annihilate the Jews of Europe” in 1941, around the time this article was circulating. 

A dreadful, ultimate legacy, relevant today

This is Alekhine’s dreadful and ultimate legacy.  The world of chess was right to ban him from participation after World War 2.

Levy Rozman either didn’t do his research, or he chose to omit major evidence for Alekhine’s guilt.  The latter is worse, but both are perilously negligent.  Both fascism and antisemitism are grave and exigent subjects.  Indeed, here in 2026, we are looking at the rise of a White Nationalist Movement in America.  Masked police have begun to round up people.  Concentration camps have begun to be built.   It is a deeply dangerous time. 

We can’t allow ourselves to dismally forget the past.  We should trumpet the similarities and learn its lessons.  One obvious resemblance is our own versions of saber-rattling, egotistic, bigoted, macho leaders, the sort of authoritarians--parasitic dictators--who drove humanity to World War 2 and its infernalities. 

If we don’t wake up and change course, World War 3 will be far worse, with a significant chance of the end of civilization itself, forged in detonations of nuclear fire.

Mention means responsibility

Rozman wove the Nazis into his glib narrative, and thus he took up a responsibility:  the moral requirement to warn his audience about fascism and antisemitism.  Instead, buoyed by a happy-peppy cadence, Rozman implied that he was oblivious or didn’t really care. 

Perhaps Rozman would argue that he was ‘just doing his job,’ which he might consider, in large part, to be maximizing audience for his own personal gain.  He could espouse the philosophy that one doesn’t have to be ethical while at work, only obey the law. 

Only obey the law.  Just follow the rules.  This is similar to “I was just obeying orders.” 

We all have a responsibility to keep culture and country from degrading into Darkness.  Powerful influencers have outsized responsibility.  In his “historical deep dive,” Rozman shirked easily obtainable evidence.  From the vital view of human rights--the baseline that protects each and every one of us from depravity--the “Internet’s Chess teacher” failed the chess community.  Indeed, by posturing gleeful and jolly over the history of the Holocaust, he failed the world.

 

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Footnotes

(1) https://owlwholaughs.blogspot.com/2024/02/ethics-review-game-of-chess.html

(2) I’ve theorized and elaborated on ethics as technology in numerous essays on this blog.  A good place to start is the Lightcraft essay (5/20/25).

(3) David Livingstone Smith, Less Than Human:  Why We Demean, Enslave, and Exterminate Others.

(4) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U9zG1AhmgK4

(5) https://en.chessbase.com/post/alekhine-and-the-nazis-a-historical-investigation-by-dr-christian-rohrer.  Wikipedia also attributes Rohrer as the source of this information.

(6) There are, of course, comments that anonymous people make under various articles on Alekhine and the Nazis.  From the perspective of legitimate and effective research, the value of such comments is negligible.  

(7) https://www.thearticle.com/the-wrong-side-of-history-racism-gender-alekhine-and-the-nazis

(8) https://jenshahade.substack.com/p/deepreads-the-capablanca-alekhine

(9) https://en.chessbase.com/post/alekhine-and-the-nazis-a-historical-investigation-by-dr-christian-rohrer.

(10) https://elib.uni-stuttgart.de/server/api/core/bitstreams/d83480dc-6de4-4b35-ad70-1aea8a861156/content

(11) https://elib.uni-stuttgart.de/server/api/core/bitstreams/d83480dc-6de4-4b35-ad70-1aea8a861156/content (p.34 et. al)

 

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