Читать книгу St. Pauli - Carles Vinas - Страница 14

In the same period St. Pauli became an ‘elevator’ club, meaning it went up and down from different football divisions, chalking up top-flight promotions and relegations. Disappointments and celebrations were a constant occurrence. For that reason the period became popularly known as the ‘yoyo years’. All the same, it was then that the club’s administrative structure was consolidated. In the 1923–4 season, the sports team definitively opted to leave Hamburg-St. Pauli Turnverein to become an independent football team. It was then that the selection of St. Pauli’s board of directors was formalised. In its first meeting, held on 5 May 1924, trader Henry Rehder, one of the club’s pioneers, was chosen as president. He was accompanied on the board by fellow trader Johny Barghusen, and the ex-player and civil servant Amandus Vierth. We can say, therefore, that 1924 was the year in which Sankt Pauli was actually constituted as a football club, as its separation from gymnastic activity was completed. The decision was hastened by the German Gymnastics Association’s policy of prohibiting its members from taking part in other sports’ matches and clubs.

The 1924–5 season was the first in which the club competed under the official name of Fußball Club Sankt Pauli (FCSP). The entity was linked to the local bourgeoisie, while the local working-class community supported the teams in the Workers’ Gymnastics and Sports Association (Arbeiter-Turn- und Sport-bund, ATSB).¹ Indeed, in those years the DFB refused membership to the workers’ clubs, to whom it contemptuously referred to as ‘gangs of independent workers’.²

It might sound surprising now that during the interwar years footballers in worker-related teams, such as Komet Blankenese and Billstedt-Horn – two historic Hamburg teams that still exist today – kicked and violently tackled St. Pauli players. Yet for the other teams the footballers in white and brown represented a right-wing bourgeois club.³

Until 1933 the club participated in different interregional leagues. Between 1922 and 1926 it played in the Nord-deutsche League; the following year in the A-Klasse Hamburg – a lower-level tournament. The team was built around young players, such as the skilled Richard Rudolph ‘Käppen’ (1895–1969).⁴ As we suggested previously the period was crucial for the club’s future as, finally, in 1924, its members left the shelter of the gymnastics association to form FC Sankt Pauli. The team’s historic eleven was made up of Sump, Bergemann, Hadlich, Spreckelsen, Röbe, Ralf, Nack, Soltwedel, Otto Schmidt, Schreiner and Jordan. Finally the run-ins the club had with different sporting bodies led to the official founding, on 5 May 1924, of FC St. Pauli – officially registered as FC St. Pauli von 1910.

The next year, which also saw the first striptease in St. Pauli and the police discovering that drugs were being trafficked locally,⁵ the team ended sixth with 17 points. The glory that year went to its arch-rival, HSV, which was proclaimed champion. St. Pauli’s key player was its right-winger, Berni Schreiner, a young journalist who usually played with a handkerchief in his hand, which he never lost despite his speed.

In the 1927–8 season the Hamburg team returned to the North German League. It only played there for a year because in 1928–9 it took part in the Toes Round (Runde der Zehen, with ‘Toes’ referring to the number ten – the amount of teams competing). This tournament was created because several northern clubs were unhappy about the fragmentation of football into different local leagues. The change became known as the Fußball-Revolution (Football Revolution). They had also come together to avoid being disadvantaged vis-à-vis the southern teams. St. Pauli was joined in the Toes Round by Hamburg SV, Holstein Kiel 07, SV St. Georg and SV Victoria Hamburg. By creating the new league the Northern German Football Association had to negotiate with these clubs. At the end of discussions, an agreement was reached to make several reforms to the competition system. As a result, six major leagues began playing in the 1929–30 season. In this fleeting adventure of the ‘ten chosen ones’ St. Pauli ended the season in sixth place after winning five out of nine matches, and losing four. Its goal balance was zero, having scored 37 goals and let in 37.

After a restructuring of the competition, St. Pauli played the 1929–30 season in the Bezirksliga Hamburg, a kind of local second division. The team managed by Richard Sumps strolled through the tournament, coming top, five points ahead of the runner up. It was a winning team featuring footballers like Alex Guiza, Jonny Salz and Oschi Stamer. In March 1931, St. Pauli beat Eimsbütteler TV and was pronounced champion of northern Germany. This was the most important victory in the footballing career of Otto Wolff, a forward for St. Pauli, who would became a central agent in the Nazi repression in Hamburg.⁶ That year a significant change took place in the club’s directorate. For professional reasons Henry Rehder moved to Berlin and was replaced by the historic figure Wilhelm Koch – an ex-goalkeeper at the club. A 1933 board meeting chose Koch to be club president (Vereins- führer). At the same meeting Eduard Stülcken was appointed vice president. Additionally the club gained its first sponsors. These were the brothers Carl and Alexander Richte, two businessmen owning several Hamburg theatres and gambling houses, who provided a donation. This contrasted with the plight of many of the city’s inhabitants, who lacked financial means. Indeed, 40 per cent of the population was unemployed.⁷ Undoubtedly this was the perfect storm for parties putting forward radical political solutions, such as the Nazi NSDAP. In Hamburg their growth became noticeable in 1927. That year they created a squad to fight communists and social democrats on the street and came up with a strategy to control the taverns (kneipen) – the meeting point for the area’s sailors and workers. The following year, in 1928, the party gained three seats in the Hamburg assembly. Within four years its electoral support had grown considerably: the Nazis went from having three to 51 seats out of a total of 160. Of course Nazi presence in the institutions was replicated in the streets, where clashes with members of communist and left-wing parties were constant.⁸ Between 1924 and 1929, attacks by SA (Sturmabteilung, Stormtroopers or Brownshirts) paramilitary squads led to the death of 29 communists across the country. In the next three years the figure reached 92. This was not surprising if we bear in mind that the communists were the only group that confronted the SA on the streets.

Initially the impact of Nazism on FC St. Pauli was insignificant, as it was on other clubs. It was limited to a couple of players, such as the aforementioned Wolff or the young Walter Koehler (an SA member), the odd director that joined the Nazis and Wilhelm Koch reaching the presidency. Koch’s Nazi membership was revealed many years later and caused controversy. He was the club’s longest-serving president and the stadium was named after him (the Wilhelm Koch Stadion) for many years in recognition of his work. Yet he had been a member of the Nazi Party from 5 July 1937. This was not an isolated case. That same year one and a half million Germans joined the National Socialists, including staff at the DFB and numerous heads of other sports clubs. All the same, the fact that Koch did not join the NSDAP until 1937 suggests that he signed up more out of opportunism than conviction, which would also explain why he never played a leading role in the party. Despite his Nazi membership, he tried as much as he could to keep the club at a distance from the growing politicisation at the time. For that reason he was reluctant to allow the Nazis to use the club’s facilities for their own sporting or propaganda activities. Koch wanted the St. Pauli stadium to only be used for playing football.⁹

In that turbulent period, before the outbreak of the Second World War, German football had been dominated by Schalke – the winner of five titles between 1934 and 1940. St. Pauli competed in the Nord-deutsche Oberliga, although it also combined playing in the Gauliga Nordmark¹⁰ and the Gauliga Hamburg with competing in other regional contests.¹¹

_______________

1. This was founded in 1893 in Gera, in the east of Thuringia state. The federation changed its name in 1919 when incorporating sports such as athletics and soccer. Until 1914, the 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.