workers’ clubs refused to enter competitive tournaments but changed their stance after the Great War. The ATSB involved 1.4 million sports practitioners across seven mainly northern districts. It was linked to the SPD, which led 32,000 members to be excluded for being Communist Party members. With the Nazis rise to power, most of its clubs disappeared, while some leading members, such as Karl Bühren and Max Schulze, fled to the USSR. In 1936 the Gestapo arrested other SPD cadre. The SA occupied the school it had created in Leipzig and confiscated its funds and assets. After the Second World War the ATSB did not manage to rebuild its structures across the country. Indeed it was not until 1993 that it was registered as a federation, and it was definitively dissolved in 2008. To know more about the ATSB’s genesis and evolution see A. Kruke, Arbeiter-Turn-und Sportbund (18932009) (Bonn: Archiv der sozialen Demokratie der Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, 2012) and T. González Aja (ed.), Sport y autoritarismos: La utilización del deporte por el comunismo y el fascism (Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 2002), pp. 123–6.
2. Hesse-Lichtenberger, Tor! The Story of German Football, p. 37.
3. Komet Blankenese, a team created in 1907, was linked to the left thanks to its working-class base. Consequently, since that decade, it was subject to constant surveillance by the authorities, which saw it more as a political association than a sports club.
4. Kappen, as he became popularly known, had been born in 1895. He worked in Hamburg manning a barge down the Elbe. He was discovered by a club member while playing football at school. As well as playing at Sankt Pauli, he had several club responsibilities, such as being treasurer and technical assistant. He also took charge of scouting and signing up young players that excelled in talent.
5. In one operation the security forces seized 114 kg of heroin hidden in a cemetery. Shortly after, St. Pauli became the second biggest crime hotspot in Europe after London’s Whitechapel. Petroni, St. Pauli siamo noi, p. 36.
6. Born in Kiel (Schleswig-Holstein) in 1907 to a middle-class family, Wolff gained a degree in economics at the University of Hamburg. Between 1940 and 1945 he became economics advisor for the Hamburg region NSDAP. In 1940 he was appointed head of the Reich commissar’s Economics Department in Norway. Ten years earlier he had joined the Nazi Party, and in 1943 joined the SS (Schutzstaffel or Protection Squadron, a Nazi paramilitary organisation). During the Second World War he directed expropriating Jewish property and commissioning forced labour. Furthermore, he collaborated with the head of the Neuengamme extermination camp – 15 kilometres to the south east of Hamburg. During the war there were 100,000 prisoners in the camp, of which 40,000 were killed. Wolff was one of the highest-ranking NSDAP officials in Hamburg. He took advantage of his position to acquire two Jewish family properties between 1939 and 1942, and attained the rank of regiment leader (Standartenführer) in the SS. In sporting terms, he wore the St. Pauli shirt from 1925 to 1935. In the 1939–40 season he went back to play for the club on the right wing. After the war he was imprisoned by the allies. He was freed and reincorporated into society in April 1948. Then he founded an insurance company KG Otto, which was partnered by the ex-governor of Hamburg Karl Kaufmann. In the 1950s he combined his professional activity with matches for the St. Pauli veterans team. In 1951 he was even put forward to be club vice-president. Two decades later, in 1971, he was made a life member of the association. He died in 1992. Because of his past in the Nazi Party, in 2010 the St. Pauli General Assembly voted to strip him, posthumously, of the Gold Decoration (Goldenen Ehrennadel) that the club had awarded him in 1960. St. Pauli’s biggest rival, HSV, also included a prominent Nazi in its ranks: Otto ‘Tull’ Harder, club forward between 1913 and 1930, and German squad player with fifteen caps. An NSDAP member since 1930, the subsequent year he joined the SS. As a member of the paramilitary organisation he worked as a guard at the Ahlem-Hannover extermination camp. Three years after the fall of the Third Reich, on 24 January 1948, he was tried in Bielefeld for belonging to the SS. He was sentenced to two and a half years prison and fined 50,000 reichsmark (later reduced to 5,000 marks). He was freed in 1951, after being pardoned by the British government, and lived in Bendestorf until he died five years later. On Otto Wolf see Nagel and Pahl, FC St. Pauli, p. 90 and G. Backes, ‘Mit deutschen sportgruss, Heil Hitler!’ Der FC St. Pauli im Nationalsozialismus (Hamburg: Hoffmann und Campe, 2010), pp. 148–57.
7. The number of dock workers in the city fell from 28,000 in 1923 to 12,500 a decade later. In January 1933, unemployment in Hamburg reached 30 per cent, while it was 23 per cent in the rest of the country. Rondinelli, Ribelli, Sociali e Romantici, p. 37.
8. One of the bloodiest clashes took place on 17 July 1932: ‘Bloody Sunday in Altona’. In the middle of the election campaign around 800 workers and Communist members (who attended events with lead piping attached to their waists and stones in their pockets) tried to stop a Nazi march and rally in the working-class Altona district. Around 7,000 NSDAP members and sympathisers turned out. In the following clashes 18 people were killed (including two SA members) and a hundred were injured. A subsequent police raid saw the arrest of dozens of communists, four of whom were executed on 1 August 1933. Years earlier, in 1927, conflicts had begun in the streets of St. Pauli. These involved the SA, which aimed to infiltrate the neighbourhood to take over the taverns and thereby attract and recruit workers and Communist and Social Democrat supporters. Finally, in November 1932, the Nazis gained a pub in Breitestraße, a few hundred metres from the port. They were not made welcome in the neighbourhood, however, as was shown by the repeated smashing of the tavern’s windows. As a result of this, they had to keep constant guard at its entrance. On 20 December that year the premises were stormed by pistolcarrying Communist members who wreaked considerable havoc and injured several of the bar’s customers.
9. In 1933, soon after Hitler rose to power, Koch took over managing the company he worked in after its two Jewish owners fled to Sweden fearful of Nazism and anti-Semitism, combining this professional activity with being St. Pauli president. This management role ended when, at the end of the war, he was dismissed in the Alliedled purges of NSDAP members in positions of power. Only two years later he was once again chosen as president, a role he continued exercising until his death in 1969.
10. A trophy devised by the Nazi regime in order to restructure German sports, for which Hamburg, Schleswig-Holstein and Mecklenburg-Lüben competed. St. Pauli played in the tournament in the 1934–5 season, coming tenth. Yet the club’s biggest success was during the 1936–7 and 1937–8 seasons, when it came fourth. In the 1938–9 and 1939–40 seasons it came fifth and sixth respectively.
11. The Gauliga were competitions intended by the Nazis to restructure German football, created in 1933. They meant the division of the country into 16 Gaue (an old German term effectively meaning tribes). In this system the 16 winners of the different tournaments were divided into four groups. The subsequent champions in each group went on to play in the national semi-finals. In the later part of the Second World War this system was replaced by knock-out rounds. Hesse-Lichtenberger, Tor! The Story of German Football, p. 66.
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