division. The team managed by Richard Sumps strolled through the tournament, coming top, five points ahead of the runner up. It was a winning team featuring footballers like Alex Guiza, Jonny Salz and Oschi Stamer. In March 1931, St. Pauli beat Eimsbütteler TV and was pronounced champion of northern Germany. This was the most important victory in the footballing career of Otto Wolff, a forward for St. Pauli, who would became a central agent in the Nazi repression in Hamburg.6 That year a significant change took place in the club’s directorate. For professional reasons Henry Rehder moved to Berlin and was replaced by the historic figure Wilhelm Koch – an ex-goalkeeper at the club. A 1933 board meeting chose Koch to be club president (Vereins- führer). At the same meeting Eduard Stülcken was appointed vice president. Additionally the club gained its first sponsors. These were the brothers Carl and Alexander Richte, two businessmen owning several Hamburg theatres and gambling houses, who provided a donation. This contrasted with the plight of many of the city’s inhabitants, who lacked financial means. Indeed, 40 per cent of the population was unemployed.7 Undoubtedly this was the perfect storm for parties putting forward radical political solutions, such as the Nazi NSDAP. In Hamburg their growth became noticeable in 1927. That year they created a squad to fight communists and social democrats on the street and came up with a strategy to control the taverns (kneipen) – the meeting point for the area’s sailors and workers. The following year, in 1928, the party gained three seats in the Hamburg assembly. Within four years its electoral support had grown considerably: the Nazis went from having three to 51 seats out of a total of 160. Of course Nazi presence in the institutions was replicated in the streets, where clashes with members of communist and left-wing parties were constant.8 Between 1924 and 1929, attacks by SA (Sturmabteilung, Stormtroopers or Brownshirts) paramilitary squads led to the death of 29 communists across the country. In the next three years the figure reached 92. This was not surprising if we bear in mind that the communists were the only group that confronted the SA on the streets.
Initially the impact of Nazism on FC St. Pauli was insignificant, as it was on other clubs. It was limited to a couple of players, such as the aforementioned Wolff or the young Walter Koehler (an SA member), the odd director that joined the Nazis and Wilhelm Koch reaching the presidency. Koch’s Nazi membership was revealed many years later and caused controversy. He was the club’s longest-serving president and the stadium was named after him (the Wilhelm Koch Stadion) for many years in recognition of his work. Yet he had been a member of the Nazi Party from 5 July 1937. This was not an isolated case. That same year one and a half million Germans joined the National Socialists, including staff at the DFB and numerous heads of other sports clubs. All the same, the fact that Koch did not join the NSDAP until 1937 suggests that he signed up more out of opportunism than conviction, which would also explain why he never played a leading role in the party. Despite his Nazi membership, he tried as much as he could to keep the club at a distance from the growing politicisation at the time. For that reason he was reluctant to allow the Nazis to use the club’s facilities for their own sporting or propaganda activities. Koch wanted the St. Pauli stadium to only be used for playing football.9
In that turbulent period, before the outbreak of the Second World War, German football had been dominated by Schalke – the winner of five titles between 1934 and 1940. St. Pauli competed in the Nord-deutsche Oberliga, although it also combined playing in the Gauliga Nordmark10 and the Gauliga Hamburg with competing in other regional contests.11
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1. This was founded in 1893 in Gera, in the east of Thuringia state. The federation changed its name in 1919 when incorporating sports such as athletics and soccer. Until 1914, the workers’ clubs refused to enter competitive tournaments but changed their stance after the Great War. The ATSB involved 1.4 million sports practitioners across seven mainly northern districts. It was linked to the SPD, which led 32,000 members to be excluded for being Communist Party members. With the Nazis rise to power, most of its clubs disappeared, while some leading members, such as Karl Bühren and Max Schulze, fled to the USSR. In 1936 the Gestapo arrested other SPD cadre. The SA occupied the school it had created in Leipzig and confiscated its funds and assets. After the Second World War the ATSB did not manage to rebuild its structures across the country. Indeed it was not until 1993 that it was registered as a federation, and it was definitively dissolved in 2008. To know more about the ATSB’s genesis and evolution see A. Kruke, Arbeiter-Turn-und Sportbund (18932009) (Bonn: Archiv der sozialen Demokratie der Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, 2012) and T. González Aja (ed.), Sport y autoritarismos: La utilización del deporte por el comunismo y el fascism (Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 2002), pp. 123–6.
2. Hesse-Lichtenberger, Tor! The Story of German Football, p. 37.
3. Komet Blankenese, a team created in 1907, was linked to the left thanks to its working-class base. Consequently, since that decade, it was subject to constant surveillance by the authorities, which saw it more as a political association than a sports club.
4. Kappen, as he became popularly known, had been born in 1895. He worked in Hamburg manning a barge down the Elbe. He was discovered by a club member while playing football at school. As well as playing at Sankt Pauli, he had several club responsibilities, such as being treasurer and technical assistant. He also took charge of scouting and signing up young players that excelled in talent.
5. In one operation the security forces seized 114 kg of heroin hidden in a cemetery. Shortly after, St. Pauli became the second biggest crime hotspot in Europe after London’s Whitechapel. Petroni, St. Pauli siamo noi, p. 36.
6. Born in Kiel (Schleswig-Holstein) in 1907 to a middle-class family, Wolff gained a degree in economics at the University of Hamburg. Between 1940 and 1945 he became economics advisor for the Hamburg region NSDAP. In 1940 he was appointed head of the Reich commissar’s Economics Department in Norway. Ten years earlier he had joined the Nazi Party, and in 1943 joined the SS (Schutzstaffel or Protection Squadron, a Nazi paramilitary organisation). During the Second World War he directed expropriating Jewish property and commissioning forced labour. Furthermore, he collaborated with the head of the Neuengamme extermination camp – 15 kilometres to the south east of Hamburg. During the war there were 100,000 prisoners in the camp, of which 40,000 were killed. Wolff was one of the highest-ranking NSDAP officials in Hamburg. He took advantage of his position to acquire two Jewish family properties between 1939 and 1942, and attained the rank of regiment leader (Standartenführer) in the SS. In sporting terms, he wore the St. Pauli shirt from 1925 to 1935. In the 1939–40 season he went back to play for the club on the right wing. After the war he was imprisoned by the allies. He was freed and reincorporated into society in April 1948. Then he founded an insurance company KG Otto, which was partnered by the ex-governor of Hamburg Karl Kaufmann. In the 1950s he combined his professional activity with matches for the St. Pauli veterans team. In 1951 he was even put forward to be club vice-president. Two decades later, in 1971, he was made a life member of the association. He died in 1992. Because of his past in the Nazi Party, in 2010 the St. Pauli General Assembly voted to strip him, posthumously, of the Gold Decoration (Goldenen Ehrennadel) that the club had awarded him in 1960. St. Pauli’s biggest rival, HSV, also included a prominent Nazi in its ranks: Otto ‘Tull’ Harder, club forward between 1913 and 1930, and German squad player with fifteen caps. An NSDAP member since 1930, the subsequent year he joined the SS. As a member of the paramilitary organisation he worked as a guard at the Ahlem-Hannover extermination camp. Three years after the fall of the Third Reich, on 24 January 1948, he was tried in Bielefeld for belonging to the SS. He was sentenced to two and a half years prison and fined 50,000 reichsmark (later reduced to 5,000 marks). He was freed in 1951, after being pardoned by the British government, and lived in Bendestorf until he died five years later. On Otto Wolf see Nagel and Pahl, FC St. Pauli, p. 90 and G. Backes, ‘Mit deutschen sportgruss, Heil Hitler!’ Der FC St. Pauli im Nationalsozialismus (Hamburg: Hoffmann und Campe, 2010), pp. 148–57.
7. The number of dock workers in the city fell from 28,000 in 1923 to 12,500 a decade later. In January 1933, unemployment in Hamburg reached 30 per
