St. Pauli. Carles Vinas

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      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. СКАЧАТЬ