Joseph Mengale would line up all the workers and go along checking their buttocks.

And if you saw there was no flesh there, he would decide the prisoner was finished

and send them to a separate line to go to the gas chambers.

As Mengele continued down the line,

desocialty was able to save some prisoners

by pushing them back into the main line.

Welcome to It Was What It Was, and I'm Rob Draper,

and I'm here with Jonathan Wilson,

and that's a harrowing,

grotesque quote was from a film documentary about the life of desocialty, detailing his time at Auschwitz, false to work under the Nazi war criminal, Joseph Mengele. And that gives you an insight

into our topic today, an extraordinary dark and little-known story

about a character who I also guess will be a new name for some people, yet was hugely

significant in European football in the 1960s and 1970s. And if you had heard the name of Deso Sholte,

it would likely because he was probably football's most notorious and biggest match fixer in that era.

A man who had crossed swords with the likes of Brian Clough, Bill Shankly,

and who was responsible for thwarting their European ambitions in matches that they played against Italian clubs for Liverpool and Derby County.

And we will get into exactly what happened in those matches.

And generally, those dark arts of European football in the 60s and 70, which often involved

Italian clubs. But what I think is also significant and pretty much an untold story, I think,

Jonathan, until you uncovered it in one of your excellent books, the names heard

long ago, is Schulte's origin story and what led him to be in that position to be match-fixing

for big Italian clubs like Juventus and Inter. And that tale is both dramatic, extraordinary,

...