St. Pauli. Carles Vinas

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      At the same time, although the war was increasingly evolving in favour of the Allies, the Nazi authorities continued to persecute those they called the asozialen (antisocial). This group spanned the unemployed to prostitutes, and included people with hereditary illnesses, disabilities or who had shown ‘irregular matrimonial and sexual behaviours’. It also included those that had repeatedly travelled on public transport without a ticket! According to the regime’s calculations, 40 per cent of St. Pauli residents were antisocial. Homosexuals, transvestites and transsexuals suffered repression. The ‘island of happiness’ that St. Pauli had been for them was consigned to history due to the ultra-conservative onslaught. In the Nazis’ first year in power they conducted 659 prosecutions of ‘perversions against nature’. Also notable was their persecution of the Chinese community, whose roots in the district dated back to the eighteenth century, when they came to work as furnace stokers or coal carriers after steam power was introduced. On 13 May 1944 they were victim to the Chinesenaktion. This was an operation in which the Gestapo arrested 130 Chinese people or people of Asian appearance that lived in Schmuckstraße – the so-called ‘Chinese street’ – a road parallel to the Reeperbahn. On that occasion the pretext used by the Nazis to act against this small community was their link with opium smokers, and trafficking of narcotics and contraband. Prostitutes, who had been hounded since the rise of Nazism, did not escape the raids either. In 1933 the Nazis arrested 1,500 women working as prostitutes. Their leaders’ aim, however, was not to eradicate prostitution but control it.

      Yet a few months later the Third Reich became besieged thanks to the Soviet forces’ advance on Berlin. On 30 April 1945, Chancellor Adolf Hitler took his life in his bunker in the centre of the German capital. In Hamburg, days later (on 3 May), after an emergency meeting with governor Karl Kaufmann, Luftwaffe Major General Alwin Wolz surrendered. He handed control of the city to David Spurling, the brigadier commanding the British troops. In Reims, just four days later, general Alfred Jodi signed the German army’s unconditional surrender before the Allies. The war had ended.

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      1. As a result of the Reichstag fire a decree was issued to ban the Communist KPD. A month after, the government ordered the dissolution of the SPD and a month later than that, the Social Democrat-affiliated unions.

      2. Hesse-Lichtenberger, Tor! The Story of German Football, p. 68.

      3. On 1 April 1937, the ‘Greater Hamburg Law’, which redefined planning for the city, came into effect. Karl Kaufmann, NSDAP founding member and Hamburg Gauleiter (Third Reich leader) since 1928, presented ‘visions for a new Hamburg’ Two years later, the architect Konstanty Gutschow was responsible for designing the details of the intervention. The plan envisaged replacing Hafenstraße’s overcrowded tenements with Gau-Hochhausesi: new offices, hotels and a skyscraper over 250 metres high. Its surroundings would be large enough for 100,000 people. Nagel and Pahl, FC St. Pauli, p. 66.

      4. Petroni, St. Pauli siamo noi, p. 40.

      5. On 1 April 1933, the German Boxing Federation excluded Jews from official fights. On 12 April, Daniel Prenn, a prominent Jewish tennis player, was removed from Germany’s Davis Cup team. Also that month, the German Swimming Federation expelled its Jewish members. For its part, the DFB published in Walther Bensemann’s Kicker magazine an advert in which it declared that ‘members of the Jewish race, and people that turn out to be members of the Marxist movement, are deemed unacceptable’. Hesse-Lichtenberger, Tor! The Story of German Football, p. 63 and Backes, ‘Mit Deustchen Sportgruss, Heil Hitler!’ pp. 50–2).

      6. Pioneers of rugby in the region, the Lang brothers came to FC Sankt Pauli in 1933 to create a team after being rejected by another club, SV St. Georg, because of their Jewish origins. Otto, born in 1906, left St. Pauli voluntarily it seems. A year later Otto left for exile, migrating – via Antwerp – to South America, where he died in 2003. His teammates had warned him of the very probable reprisals he would suffer after he punched an SS member. Despite dying his hair and changing his name, he decided to flee. Meanwhile, his brother Paul, born in 1908, decided to stay in Hamburg because he had married an ‘Aryan’ woman. His marriage did not stop him being sent to the Theresienstadt concentration camp. Eventually the younger Lang left the camp after the Soviet army liberated it. He then lived in Hamburg for the rest of his life; he died in the same year as his brother. In 2008, coinciding with the 75th anniversary of the club’s rugby section, St. Pauli’s directors placed a monolith at Millerntor stadium’s main entrance in order to pay homage to the two men. See Nagel and Pahl, FC St. Pauli, p. 91 and Backes, ‘Mit Deustchen Sportgruss, Heil Hitler!’ pp. 48–50.

      7. In Hamburg followers of jazz, and of artists such as Duke Ellington and Teddy Stauffer, were known as the Swingheinis or Swing Kids. They dressed in a particular style. Men wore sports jackets, chequered trousers, white scarves and – the most important accessory – a black umbrella. Women stood out due to their long hair and striking makeup. Their images were a contrast with the uniformed militarism of the Hitler Youth (Hitlerjugend). Consequently the nonconformists suffered attacks from the authorities and the Hitler Youth. Unsurprisingly, from 1936 the Reich’s Chamber of Culture banned swing. Despite the Second World War breaking out, the Swing Kids still organised private parties and dances – such as one held in an Altona hotel in February 1940. That year Karl Kaufmann, the Hamburg governor, helped set up the Work Group for War Child Protection. It was a body that, despite its name, was devoted to pursuing the Swing Kids’ activities. Similarly, in autumn 1940, the Gestapo created a department in Hamburg purely to monitor the same. That October, its agents began arresting their first swing lovers. Their last concert in the city was held on 28 February 1941. This was a performance by Dutch musician John Kristel at the Alsterpavillon – a spot the authorities pejoratively called the Judenaquariam (Jewish aquarium) and that was destroyed by shelling in 1942. That day, police surrounded the premises and arrested several audience members. At the police station they were beaten up and had their hair forcibly cut. The authorities’ repression, rather than weakening the movement, pushed the Swing Kids to take a stronger stand against the Third Reich. See J. Savage, Teenage: The Creation of Youth 1875–1945 (London: Chatto & Windus, 2007), pp. 378–83 and M. Zwerin, Swing frente al nazi (Madrid: EsPop Ediciones, 2016).

      8. Although the swing trend was initially restricted to bourgeois youth, from the late 1930s the style became more mixed, classwise. Because St. Pauli was a district with many dancehalls, swing there attracted dozens of young proletarians. This was the case in nightspots such as Ballhaus Alcazar, the Kaffeehaus Dietrich Menke and the Cafe Mehrer, all on the Reeperbahn; together with the Cap Norte club and Café Heinze elsewhere – in Große Freiheit and Millerntor Platz. All these became ‘bastions of cultural opposition to the regime. For this reason, from 1935 the Nazis banned radio stations from playing swing. But some fans of the genre still listened to it secretly on the BBC, an action that after 1939 was deemed a serious crime. From then, the activity was restricted to people’s private spaces. In their eagerness to hound swing fans, the authorities ended up arresting 500 young people in Hamburg for being ‘degenerates. Among the local Swing Kids arrested by the Gestapo was Tommie Scheel, who, after receiving a beating, was put into Fuhlsbüttel prison and made to do forced labour; and Kaki Georgiadi – put into solitary confinement for weeks. These were not one-off cases; other peers of theirs suffered repression from the regime: 380 young people were arrested in Hamburg between October 1940 and December 1942. Seen as anglophiles and traitors for listening to ‘perverted music’, they were tortured, beaten and sent to different concentration camps (such as Uckermark, Neuengamme, Buchenwald, Auschwitz and Moringen). There they had to wear a red triangle to be identifiable as political prisoners. Other Swing Kids were labelled ‘effeminate cowards’ and sent straight to the front, where they suffered abuses. Despite all this, new Swing Kid groups continued to emerge in the city. See Rondinelli, Ribelli, Sociali e Romantici, p. 41 and Backes, ‘Mit Deustchen Sportgruss, Heil Hitler!’, pp. СКАЧАТЬ