St. Pauli. Carles Vinas

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ 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. This explains why it was impossible for St. Pauli to keep a stable team – the reason it was not able to play in local championships in the 1940–1 and 1941–2 seasons. In the latter season military teams proliferated, such as FC LSV Pütnitz (Pütnitz Air Force FC) or the SS Strasbourg Sports Union; and the sanktpaulianer shirt was worn for a few months by the Czech international Rudolf Krcil, a midfielder who had stood out while playing for Slavia Prague. During the first years of the conflict, the directors were almost exclusively occupied with overcoming the hurdles created by the war and managing the club as best as possible. Meanwhile the city’s port became a strategic centre for the German navy fleet. Warships and submarines were built in the local shipyards.

      It was precisely in the St. Pauli and Altona shipyards that clandestine anti-Nazi resistance groups operated, such as the Bästein-Jacobs-Abshagen-Gruppe – one of the most active in the city.¹⁴ Their most notable actions involved war-industrial sabotage in which they managed to slow manufacturing or make it less efficient. They also produced defective materials, destroyed machinery, burned out boilers and put empty capsules in the anti-tank grenades to disable them. All workers that were believed to have voluntarily hindered production were interned in re-education camps or had their wages docked. The group also produced propaganda and gave support to prisoners, many of which were foreign (French, Dutch and Polish) and being forced to produce armaments.

      Hamburg had been preparing for the worst for some time. Since the beginning of the war the city had suffered recurrent air raids. For that reason shelters and refuges were ordered to be built. In 1941, the year of the Nazi offensive against the Soviet Union (Operation Barbarossa), the city had around 1,700 such buildings – giving protection to 250,000 people. The following year, a giant bunker was created at Heiligengeistfeld (St. Pauli), next to Feldstraße, to accommodate 18,000 people. This was a large construction that can be seen standing to this day from the Millerntor stadium. A year later, between 24 and 27 July 1943, this bunker was more necessary than ever as a result of the Allies’ ‘Operation Gomorrah’. This was an offensive that consisted of seven systematic air raids on the city, which destroyed 75 per cent of Hamburg’s urban zone and 80 per cent of its port. Around 31,000 people lost their lives – a figure double that of Berlin – and 125,000 were injured, because the British air force dropped 1.7 million bombs on the area. Around 900,000 people were made homeless. In the following weeks the authorities evacuated almost a million people. The devastation was such that Hamburg became known as ‘the city of death’.

      One of the places that was least affected at first by the shelling was St. Pauli, of which only a third was destroyed. This was possible partly because of the placing of two Fläkturme (anti-aircraft towers) in the north of the district. However, later attacks on Hamburg, which targeted the Heiligengeistfeld bunkers, damaged parts of the St. Pauli stadium as it is near to the anti-aircraft site. With ruins and missile craters around them, the club’s board of directors made the decision to rebuild the ground straightaway. Yet this was not finished until late in 1946 – a year and a half after the end of the war. According to Wilhelm Koch, one of the Allied air raids that wiped out half of the city also damaged the club’s main office. However, the worst damage was suffered by the Glacischausee building that usually housed the team, which was razed to the ground. Matches could not be played at the Millerntor for four weeks. But the worst loss was of the club’s documents, as the raids led to the loss of the club’s archive, which included its membership list.

      The club’s football results for those years were erratic. In October 1943, St. Pauli managed to beat HSV 8–1. That way it gained vengeance for the painful defeat its eternal rival had inflicted on it just months before (when St. Pauli lost 0–9). Among the footballers that left the club then was Karl Miller, one of the team’s best. With good reason he became the first St. Pauli player to be picked for the national squad.¹⁵ The defender, an international between 1940 and 1942, played as a ‘guest’ for Dresdner SC and in the next two years was in Luftwaffen-Sportverien Hamburg (LSV) – the local German Air Force team. The 1943–4 season was characterised by many matches СКАЧАТЬ