harsh. Hamburg’s communist organisations had their activity suspended and property confiscated. On 23 November the KPD was banned as an organisation.
30. The most notable example was the demonstration in March 1921 by Hamburg’s dockers, which left Heiligengeistfeld to reach the cranes at the Blohm and Voss shipyards. After occupying the firm’s facilities and raising the red flag over the office building, the police confronted the workers and reimposed order. Overall the repression caused 19 deaths and over 40 injuries. Two years later a strike was called at the port against the ‘Great Inflation’ and unemployment, which ended with the workers looting the quays and the boats moored there. Rondinelli, Ribelli, Sociali e Romantici, pp. 35–6.
31. There were three tendencies in the Hamburg KPD: a moderate one led by teacher Hugo Urbanhns; the so-called ‘right-wing sector’ with an intellectual leaning and that advocated joining social-democrats in a coalition government (‘united front’); and the Thalmänn-led section, in favour of direct action, which was the bigger fraction in Hamburg. The failure of the revolutionary attempt in the Hanseatic city forced the KPD to go underground. Later, in 1924, the Red Front Fighters’ League (Rote Frontkämpferbund) was created. This had about 100,000 members and became the party’s armed wing. Its role was to protect demonstrators and strike pickets and block Nazi squads from acting in proletarian neighbourhoods, making it a kind of ‘working-class army’. In October 1928, Thalmänn supported a solidarity strike at the Hamburg docks in support of the British miners’ strike at the time. A year later, the Red Front Fighters’ League was banned by the Prussian interior minister, Albert Grzesinski, an SPD member.
32. Thälmann became an institution in the Hamburg communist movement. He was born and grew up in the port area. There he worked in different insecure jobs, first as a machinist in a fishmeal factory and later in a laundry. He was called up at the beginning of the First World War and fought on the Western Front. In 1917 he joined the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany, joining the pro-Communist wing that merged with the KPD three years later. In December 1920 he joined the KPD’s Central Committee. As a result of his political activity he was sacked from the company he worked for. In October 1923 he actively participated in the Hamburg Uprising, whose failure forced him underground. In February 1925 he was made president of the Red Front Fighters’ League. Months later he was elected as KPD leader. He was the party’s main candidate in the 1932 presidential elections, in which the Communists had as a slogan, ‘a vote for Hindenburg is a vote for Hitler. A vote for Hitler is a vote for war.’ On 3 March 1933 Thälmann was arrested by the Gestapo. After eleven years in the Bautzen prison he was taken to Buchenwald concentration camp where he was shot dead, on 18 August 1944, under direct orders from Hitler. R.J. Evans, La nascita del Terzo Reich (Milan: Mondadori, 2006), p. 273. See also R. Lemmons, Hitler’s Rival: Ernst Thälmann in Myth and Memory (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2013).
33. In January 1933 unemployment in Hamburg reached 30 per cent – compared to 22 per cent in the rest of the country.
34. In the September 1930 elections the Nazi Party won 18 per cent of the vote, making them the country’s second biggest political force. Just two years later, in June 1932, in the second round of the presidential elections the NSDAP obtained 38 per cent of the vote. This was the first time that they had won a parliamentary majority. On 5 March 1933, three months after Adolf Hitler became chancellor, the Nazi Party won 47.2 per cent of the vote. In all, 17,277,180 people cast a vote for them in the elections to the Reichstag (German parliament) and the party became the main political force there. A few days earlier, Hitler scrapped the Constitution and suspended civil liberties. Then he began mass arrests of Communist and Social Democrat members.
3
The Club’s Early Years
In the same period St. Pauli became an ‘elevator’ club, meaning it went up and down from different football divisions, chalking up top-flight promotions and relegations. Disappointments and celebrations were a constant occurrence. For that reason the period became popularly known as the ‘yoyo years’. All the same, it was then that the club’s administrative structure was consolidated. In the 1923–4 season, the sports team definitively opted to leave Hamburg-St. Pauli Turnverein to become an independent football team. It was then that the selection of St. Pauli’s board of directors was formalised. In its first meeting, held on 5 May 1924, trader Henry Rehder, one of the club’s pioneers, was chosen as president. He was accompanied on the board by fellow trader Johny Barghusen, and the ex-player and civil servant Amandus Vierth. We can say, therefore, that 1924 was the year in which Sankt Pauli was actually constituted as a football club, as its separation from gymnastic activity was completed. The decision was hastened by the German Gymnastics Association’s policy of prohibiting its members from taking part in other sports’ matches and clubs.
The 1924–5 season was the first in which the club competed under the official name of Fußball Club Sankt Pauli (FCSP). The entity was linked to the local bourgeoisie, while the local working-class community supported the teams in the Workers’ Gymnastics and Sports Association (Arbeiter-Turn- und Sport-bund, ATSB).1 Indeed, in those years the DFB refused membership to the workers’ clubs, to whom it contemptuously referred to as ‘gangs of independent workers’.2
It might sound surprising now that during the interwar years footballers in worker-related teams, such as Komet Blankenese and Billstedt-Horn – two historic Hamburg teams that still exist today – kicked and violently tackled St. Pauli players. Yet for the other teams the footballers in white and brown represented a right-wing bourgeois club.3
Until 1933 the club participated in different interregional leagues. Between 1922 and 1926 it played in the Nord-deutsche League; the following year in the A-Klasse Hamburg – a lower-level tournament. The team was built around young players, such as the skilled Richard Rudolph ‘Käppen’ (1895–1969).4 As we suggested previously the period was crucial for the club’s future as, finally, in 1924, its members left the shelter of the gymnastics association to form FC Sankt Pauli. The team’s historic eleven was made up of Sump, Bergemann, Hadlich, Spreckelsen, Röbe, Ralf, Nack, Soltwedel, Otto Schmidt, Schreiner and Jordan. Finally the run-ins the club had with different sporting bodies led to the official founding, on 5 May 1924, of FC St. Pauli – officially registered as FC St. Pauli von 1910.
The next year, which also saw the first striptease in St. Pauli and the police discovering that drugs were being trafficked locally,5 the team ended sixth with 17 points. The glory that year went to its arch-rival, HSV, which was proclaimed champion. St. Pauli’s key player was its right-winger, Berni Schreiner, a young journalist who usually played with a handkerchief in his hand, which he never lost despite his speed.
In the 1927–8 season the Hamburg team returned to the North German League. It only played there for a year because in 1928–9 it took part in the Toes Round (Runde der Zehen, with ‘Toes’ referring to the number ten – the amount of teams competing). This tournament was created because several northern clubs were unhappy about the fragmentation of football into different local leagues. The change became known as the Fußball-Revolution (Football Revolution). They had also come together to avoid being disadvantaged vis-à-vis the southern teams. St. Pauli was joined in the Toes Round by Hamburg SV, Holstein Kiel 07, SV St. Georg and SV Victoria Hamburg. By creating the new league the Northern German Football Association had to negotiate with these clubs. At the end of discussions, an agreement was reached to make several reforms to the competition system. As a result, six major leagues began playing in the 1929–30 season. In this fleeting adventure of the ‘ten chosen ones’ St. Pauli ended the season in sixth place after winning five out of nine matches, and losing four. Its goal balance was zero, having scored 37 goals and let in 37.
After a restructuring of the competition, St. Pauli played the 1929–30 season in the
