Romantici, p. 37.
8. One of the bloodiest clashes took place on 17 July 1932: ‘Bloody Sunday in Altona’. In the middle of the election campaign around 800 workers and Communist members (who attended events with lead piping attached to their waists and stones in their pockets) tried to stop a Nazi march and rally in the working-class Altona district. Around 7,000 NSDAP members and sympathisers turned out. In the following clashes 18 people were killed (including two SA members) and a hundred were injured. A subsequent police raid saw the arrest of dozens of communists, four of whom were executed on 1 August 1933. Years earlier, in 1927, conflicts had begun in the streets of St. Pauli. These involved the SA, which aimed to infiltrate the neighbourhood to take over the taverns and thereby attract and recruit workers and Communist and Social Democrat supporters. Finally, in November 1932, the Nazis gained a pub in Breitestraße, a few hundred metres from the port. They were not made welcome in the neighbourhood, however, as was shown by the repeated smashing of the tavern’s windows. As a result of this, they had to keep constant guard at its entrance. On 20 December that year the premises were stormed by pistolcarrying Communist members who wreaked considerable havoc and injured several of the bar’s customers.
9. In 1933, soon after Hitler rose to power, Koch took over managing the company he worked in after its two Jewish owners fled to Sweden fearful of Nazism and anti-Semitism, combining this professional activity with being St. Pauli president. This management role ended when, at the end of the war, he was dismissed in the Alliedled purges of NSDAP members in positions of power. Only two years later he was once again chosen as president, a role he continued exercising until his death in 1969.
10. A trophy devised by the Nazi regime in order to restructure German sports, for which Hamburg, Schleswig-Holstein and Mecklenburg-Lüben competed. St. Pauli played in the tournament in the 1934–5 season, coming tenth. Yet the club’s biggest success was during the 1936–7 and 1937–8 seasons, when it came fourth. In the 1938–9 and 1939–40 seasons it came fifth and sixth respectively.
11. The Gauliga were competitions intended by the Nazis to restructure German football, created in 1933. They meant the division of the country into 16 Gaue (an old German term effectively meaning tribes). In this system the 16 winners of the different tournaments were divided into four groups. The subsequent champions in each group went on to play in the national semi-finals. In the later part of the Second World War this system was replaced by knock-out rounds. Hesse-Lichtenberger, Tor! The Story of German Football, p. 66.
4
Sankt Pauli under the Swastika
On 28 January 1933, St. Pauli beat Victoria 1–8, with Erwin Seeler notching six goals. That year, however, did not go down in history because of the Hamburg team’s sporting milestone. The day after the goal spree, Field Marshal Hindenburg appointed Hitler, leader of the NSDAP, as chancellor. Thus was completed the so-called ‘seizing of power’. This had started a year and a half earlier when the Nazis took over the two pillars of state: the administration and the army. Shortly after, on 27 February, a fire at the Reichstag (the German parliament) facilitated passing the Decree for the Protection of the People and the State, which left the Weimar Constitution suspended and ‘laid the foundation for a permanent state of emergency’.1 In that period around 10,000 Communist Party members were arrested. That was the intimidating atmosphere in which, on 5 March, the last multiparty elections were held in the country. In them the National Socialists won 43.9 per cent of the vote.
The Nazis’ rise to power meant the persecution of their political opponents. As well as attacking and imprisoning Communist and Social Democrat members, introducing totalitarianism meant spreading state control to all aspects of life – including social activity. Sport obviously could not escape the new authoritarianism under Hitler’s chancellorship. The DFB’s press officer, Guido von Mengde, demonstrated this by stating: ‘Footballers are the Führer’s political soldiers’.2 All of this was quite paradoxical bearing in mind that Hitler was known for his dislike of sport. He only attended one football match in his life (Germany’s defeat at the hands of Norway in the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games).
Despite this aversion, Nazi chiefs tried to exploit football for propaganda purposes. For them sport was a powerful tool that they could ill afford to squander. The cult of the body and physical activity were related, according to the Third Reich theses, with racial thinking and the national community – the Volksgemeinschaft.
In the Third Reich, St. Pauli, like most clubs, complied with orders issued by the sporting, social and political authorities. Hamburg was not only a city controlled by Nazis but was one of the ‘Führer’s five cities’. The Nazis picked these for redevelopment so they could show the world the country’s competitiveness and modernity. Hamburg would be a mirror reflecting the Third Reich’s best image to the outside world. Among the different regeneration projects planned was the building of the ‘Manhattan of the Elbe’: a landscape of skyscrapers, squares, long avenues, monuments and palaces in a residential area aiming to accommodate 50,000 people.3 Moreover, on the Führer’s own request, the project had to include a new bridge crossing the Elbe and newly designed riversides. This metamorphosis would greatly affect different historical spots, such as the historic St. Pauli fish market and the port area (Hafenstraße). The city would become ‘a ticket to tour an Empire open to the world’.4 Eventually the project was halted by the start of the Second World War, thwarting such plans.
The NSDAP won a majority in Hamburg’s Senate in the elections on 8 March 1933. Overnight, all the unions and political associations linked to the SPD were banned. In one year 2,400 members of the Hamburg opposition were arrested, demonstrating an iron grip that also spread to the local media.
In the club, however, life continued fairly smoothly. The country’s new administration had issued orders as part of the Gleichschaltung (the Third Reich’s Nazification process to implement a totalitarian system, grouped together in the ‘Aryan clause’ of the Civil Service Law that came into effect in April 1933). The clause forced the purging of Jews from the civil service, universities, associations and sports organisations.5 Yet St. Pauli did not follow the regulations to the letter. Unlike other clubs, such as 1 FC Nürnberg or Frankfurt’s Eintracht, St. Pauli allowed membership to those of a Jewish background for that year. Club members included the Jewish brothers Otto and Paul Lang who joined St. Pauli to found its rugby section in 1933. The fates of both were different. While Otto managed to flee the country, his brother ended up interned in the Theresienstadt concentration camp.6 St. Pauli did not incorporate the Aryan clause’ into its statutes until as late as 1940. The year the decree was issued, seven years earlier, over a quarter of the Jewish community resident in Hamburg had fled the city. Three years later, in November 1938, coinciding with the pogrom by the SS known as the Night of Broken Glass, the city’s synagogue was destroyed and its Jewish cemetery desecrated. The Nazi raid led to the death of nearly a hundred Jews in Hamburg.
In the early 1930s the club overlooked party affiliation, ethnic origins or the religion of its players and associates. As the Nazification process was already in full swing, this stance would today be branded as disobedience, yet at the time it was an unconscious act. All the same, there is a debate surrounding the degree to which the club collaborated with the Third Reich. This revolves around the role of its management and whether it acted out of opportunism or conviction. In this regard, the following information might be revealing: in 1934 there was only one member of the Nazi Party on St. Pauli’s board: Walter Koehler, who was in the SA. He was the only direct link between the authorities and the club in those years. Indeed, FC St. Pauli had not shown any nationalistic or militaristic inclination in its early decades, unlike that demonstrated by other football clubs.
Despite perceptions to the contrary, not everyone in Germany sided with the Nazis. This was so at St.
