St. Pauli. Carles VinasЧитать онлайн книгу.
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 finishing early. The reason was not the danger of bombing raids but lack of footballs. If the ball being used was damaged or lost there were no others available so play had to be abandonded.
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