Goebbels, decided to increase the participation of swing bands during the Berlin Olympic Games in 1936. This was to transmit an image of tolerance and normality. Backes, ‘Mit Deustchen Sportgruss, Heil Hitler!’, p. 115.
10. The Swing Kids would mock Hitler Youth when they came across them in the street by shouting ‘Swing Heil!’. Rondinelli, Ribelli, Sociali e Romantici, p. 41.
11. One of these swing fans was a 19-year-old player of in the St. Pauli rugby team. He was not the only one. Passion for the musical genre also was shared by a club football player, Heiner Nelles. The footballer was born in the neighbourhood in 1926 and joined the lower-team levels at the age of ten. At night, the young player would meet up secretly with his friends to listen and dance to swing. During the war, Nelles avoided being drafted to the SS by first signing up to be a volunteer Luftwaffe pilot. See Backes, ‘Mit Deustchen Sportgruss, Heil Hitler!’, pp. 117–18 and F. Boll and A. Kaminsky, Gedenkstättenarbeit und Oral History: Lebensgeschichtliche Beiträge zur Verfolgung in zwei Diktaturen (Berlin: Arno Spitz, 1999), pp. 27–40.
12. The club tried to keep in touch with the players sent to the front (Soldaten-St. Paulianer) through liaising with the person responsible for getting the club’s publication to them. The paper included a space to print greetings that their families sent to them. Nagel and Pahl, FC St. Pauli, p. 78.
13. Jürs was born on 26 April 1889 and joined St. Pauli Turnverein to play football at the age of nine. Three of his eight brothers died during the First World War, while he suffered serious injuries fighting in Russia. In January 1941 he was condemned to death by the second chamber of the Special Hanseatic Court for jeopardising military force, bribery and falsifying documents. Four months later, the state prosecutor reduced his sentence to 15 years. After being imprisoned in Bremen, he was put into the Neuengamme concentration camp until it was vacated on 20 April 1945. Along with the other prisoners, he was taken to Lübeck to be shut into the Cap Arcana boat moored at the city’s port. Five days before the end of the war, the ship was confused with a troop transporter and bombarded by the Royal Air Force. Jürs, along with 4,000 other prisoners, died during the British air raid. His name is engraved on a plaque for the Neuengamme memorial devoted to the Hamburg resistance fighters killed or persecuted between 1933 and 1945. Nagel and Pahl, FC St. Pauli, pp. 88–9.
14. The name came from the group’s founders, Bernhard Bästlein, Franz Jacob and Robert Abshagen. After they were freed from the Sachsenhausen camp they set up an armed resistance group. Its structure consisted of 300 fighters (Communists, Social Democrats, independents, and foreign workers), divided into small squads (cells of three people operating independently) that were present in more than 30 factories in the city. Even so, most of their clandestine activity was carried out in Altona and St. Pauli’s shipyards and docks. Nearly a hundred workers from the Blohm and Voss shipyard joined the group. The group prioritised mobilising workers, giving solidarity to the foreigners forced to work to build a bunker to protect German war production, giving support to Soviet prisoners of war and doing anti-Nazi propaganda and sabotage. On October 1942 the Gestapo found them out and nearly 200 participants were arrested. Despite that the group was crucial at providing a network of resistance fighters that later spread to other northern industrial cities, and which kept fighting until the Allied troops arrived. In May 1944, in the so-called ‘Hamburg communist trials’, seventy of their members were given the death sentence and executed. See Rondinelli, Ribelli, Sociali e Romantici, p. 43 and U. Puls, Die Bästlein-Jacob -Abshagen-Gruppe: Bericht über den antifaschistischen Widerstandskampf in Hamburg und an der Waterkante während des zweiten Weltkrieges (Berlin: Dietz Verlang, 1959).
15. A butcher’s son, Miller debuted with St. Pauli in the 1932–3 season. At first he had to play secretly because his father had banned him from playing football. Later, however, his dad became one of his biggest fans. In 1935 Miller was selected to play for North Germany. His good performance did not go unnoticed by the all German team coach Sepp Herberger. In 1940 Miller was called up and stationed at a Luftwaffe unit in Saxony. He combined his military activity with playing some matches as a ‘guest player’ for Dresdner SC. On 7 April 1940 he made his debut for Germany against Hungary, a match that ended in a 2–2 draw. He also played in the German team’s last match during the Second World War, which took place in Bratislava on 22 November 1942. Germany’s rivals were Slovakia, who beat the home team 5–2. Between 1940 and 1942, Miller wore the national shirt on twelve occasions – making him the St. Pauli player with the most caps. Additionally, Miller starred – together with his teammates – in a film, Das große Spiel (The Big Game), which recreated the 1941 German Cup Final between Schalke 04 and SK Rapid. Shortly after, Miller returned to his hometown to play for Luftwaffen-Sportverein Hamburg – the local air-force team. He was promoted to sergeant and later became gunner. Due to his ‘efforts against Soviet Russians’ he received the Iron Cross (of the second-highest level). He continued playing at Dresdner FC until, after the war ended, he convinced some teammates to all go to St. Pauli. His main argument to them was that they would get provisions from his father’s butchers shop. That is how The Wonderful Eleven, who dominated Hamburg football in the late 1940s and is believed to be the best team in the club’s history, came to be formed. Miller retired after the 1949–50 season, aged 37. After hanging up his boots he remained linked to St. Pauli, representing the club on the League Committee. He died in 1967 at the age of 54. Nagel and Pahl, FC St. Pauli, p. 92.
5
Postwar Successes and the Magnificent Eleven
The conflict’s end was a fact. Little by little everything returned to normal in the midst of the ruins and hardships – including much of the population starving. There was a lack of consumer goods – food and clothing – while epidemics spread among those that were barely surviving housed in ruins and basements. More than twelve million people were forced to flee or were evicted. The Third Reich’s military defeat was a psychological blow to citizens that had seen themselves as invincible. The Allied occupation, militarisation and division of the country were followed by the re-establishment of the German government and institutions. In the first municipal elections held after the war, the SPD won in Hamburg and retook control of the city. Indeed they have been in power for much of the twentieth century.
The city’s economy was quickly rebuilt, as happened in the rest of the country. This was thanks to the so-called ‘economic miracle’ that once again, in the 1950s and 1960s, made Germany a financial hub for the continent. The economic good times also had an impact on St. Pauli. The shipyards went back to operating at peak performance and dockers and sailors, with money in their wallets, sought all kinds of amusement in the neighbourhood. In the early 1950s, the Reeperbahn – known as ‘the most sinful mile’ – flourished, setting itself up as St. Pauli’s cultural and social epicentre where ‘sailors, creatives, strippers, prostitutes, homosexuals and gangsters co-habited freely’. Undoubtedly it was St. Pauli’s golden era. The district was a space of leisure and tolerance where everything normally prohibited took place. Local actor and singer Hans Albers invoked its essence in his tune Auf der Reeperbahn nacht un halb eins’ (‘In the Reeperbahn at Half Past Twelve’) – popularised in 1954 after the film of the same name was released. The song included the words, ‘He who on a joyous night has never gone for a good time in the Reeperbahn is a poor soul because he does not know St. Pauli.’1 This explains why the striptease clubs, the brothels and the pubs became the district’s most lucrative businesses. Together they became a big opportunity for some, such as entrepreneur Willi Bartels – known as the ‘King of St. Pauli’ – who went from working in his mother’s butchers to being the pioneer of modern brothels. One of these was the Eros Centre, which opened in 1967 next to the Palais d’Amour, one of the big brothels at that time. Bartels also worked out that he could do speculative business in real estate. Not for nothing, he acquired on the cheap different bomb-damaged buildings: turning them into hotels, restaurants and fashionable nightspots. The port district was transformed into a tourist attraction park aimed at visitors from Scandinavia
