Auf Wiedersehen!!! Men's Soccer Journeys to Germany on Three-Game Tour

Photo to left: FC Bayern Munich in action in its native Germany

STORRS, Conn. (May 11, 2005) - The University of Connecticut men's soccer team will be traveling to Germany from May 12-23 for a four-game tour of the country.

The defending BIG EAST tournament champions will face three German soccer clubs and the Chinese National Under-20 team over the 12-day trip while also taking in sights of the country.

The first game for the Huskies will be against the FC Bayern Reserves on Tuesday, May 17. FC Bayern is one of the most successful and prestigious teams in the world. During the entire trip, UConn will be training at the home of Bayern Munich -- Sabener Strasse. On Saturday, May 14, the UConn team and staff will attend the Bayern Munich first division game against Nuremberg at Olympic Stadium -- which will be the final game played at the 69,000-seat facility.

On Thursday, May 19, UConn will travel to Aschheim to take on FC Aschheim.

UConn's final game of the trip will be played in Nuremberg, with the Huskies facing the Chinese National Under-20 team on Sunday, May 22. The Chinese Under-20 team is one of 24 clubs that have qualified for the 2005 FIFA World Championships in the Netherlands from June 10-July 2. This Chinese team will also play the United States Under-20 team on June 5.

When not practicing and playing, the men's soccer team will go sightseeing in several German and Austrian towns and cities.

UConn will visit Salzburg, Austria, on the trip. The famous movie "The Sound of Music" was filmed in Salzburg while the city is also the birthplace of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

The Husky team will also tour the remains of the Nazi concentration camps in Dachau, Germany and will visit sites in Nuremberg where the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials took place following World War II from 1945-46.

An interesting sidelight to the UConn team visiting Nuremberg has a connection to the Storrs campus and its Thomas J. Dodd Research Center. Dodd, who served Connecticut both as a United States Senator and Congressman, was a major part of the Nuremberg trials.

As World War II ended, the Allied Powers prepared to convene a military tribunal to prosecute accused Nazi war criminals. U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, the head of the American legal team, requested that Dodd join the jurists assembling at Nuremberg. Dodd served as Vice-Chairman of the Review Board and Executive Trial Counsel. The latter position rendered Dodd the second ranking U.S. lawyer and supervisor of the day-to-day management of the U.S. prosecution team. He shaped many of the strategies and policies through which this unprecedented trial took place and frequently dealt with other Allied legal notables.

Dodd's papers from the trials are housed at the research center on the UConn campus bearing his name.