St. Pauli. Carles Vinas

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. Pauli. In the 1930s a group of young people that loved swing (as well as football)⁷ was formed at the club. By doing so they entered into direct confrontation with the new authorities.⁸ This was because the Nazi leaders⁹ derogatorily labelled this music genre Negermusik (negro music).¹⁰ This was enough to provoke angry collective complaints at more than one club meeting.¹¹ The club was characterised by its opposition to the monopoly that the Hitler Youth aimed to have in education and sport. Therefore its board of directors, while trying to comply with regulations to keep the NSDAP leaders happy, did not unconditionally side with the regime. Even though the club was notably ‘petit-bourgeois’, like most teams in that period, the St. Pauli directors did not like the Nazis’ plan to merge all of Hamburg’s football teams into one (which would be SV Hamburg Mitte). By opposing this, the club’s heads were mainly acting to guarantee the club’s continuity and, by doing so, preserve their status. In other words, there was no resistance or heroism but neither was there fanaticism or blind allegiance. We could say that St. Pauli remained in those years a conservative institution that adapted to the period. That would explain, in part, why the club’s attitude towards the Nazi authorities was sometimes ambivalent. Throughout it attempted to avoid taking sides and making enemies but did not adapt to every Nazi whim either. That said, from 1933 its directors tried to maintain good relations with the local Nazi power structure. In 1935 the Millerntor stadium hosted different NSDAP propaganda exhibitions. This incidentally damaged the grass on the pitch, which did not fully recover for nearly a year and a half. For that reason, in that period St. Pauli had to play some matches at Altona’s Exerzierweide stadium – or the Exer as it was commonly known.

      On 16 March that year, Hitler, contravening the Versailles Treaty (1919), announced that the country was rearming and, furthermore, that military service would be reintroduced. The war machinery was being reactivated. Within three years German troops had occupied Austria, annexing it de facto into the Third Reich. Greater Germany was re-emerging.

      Away from this pre-war atmosphere, St. Pauli had a good 1935–6 season, made possible by its coach, Otto Schmidt – an ex-player for the club who made his living as a coal merchant. The club won promotion to the first division. The following year, in 1937, the Hamburg team came fourth in the Gauliga, drawing on points with second-place Holstein Kiel and third-place SC Victoria. That was its biggest sporting achievement of the decade. The same year, most St. Pauli directors joined the NSDAP, probably believing that this was the best way to serve the club’s interests.

      The team ended the next two seasons towards the top of the Gauliga table in a solid fifth place. Things changed, however, with the outbreak of war in 1939. That year St. Pauli could not avoid relegation. Institutionally the club’s directors, despite their initial indifference, aligned themselves with the authorities following a propaganda campaign begun by the Nazis after the occupation of the Sudetes (in October 1938). These territories were part of Czechoslovakia (made up of minor parts of Bohemia, Moravia and Eastern Silesia). They were inhabited by a German-speaking minority and had been claimed by the Nazis during the interwar period.

      In the summer of 1939, all men of between 18 and 45 years of age were called up to be army reservists. They all had to be able to fight in future operations led by the Reich’s chief of staff. Conscription affected 120 players from different St. Pauli sporting branches, among which were eight starting players from FC St. Pauli’s first team. By 1941 the figure had increased to 200 sportsmen.¹² As well as those called up, the club also suffered losses from Nazi repression. An example was the internment of a member of the coaching staff, Peter Julius Jürs,¹³ at the Neuengamme death camp, where he came across Otto ‘Tull’ Harder – the ex-HSV forward who helped administer the grounds as an SS member.

      In the end, Germany invaded Poland at dawn on 1 September 1939. The Second World War had started. For the first weeks of the conflict football was stopped across the country. The Nazi hierarchy had decided to indefinitely suspend all sporting contests. Two months later, matches resumed as the regime wished to transmit to its people a feeling of normality. The war’s outbreak led to players going back and forth between playing and fighting at the front.