Читать книгу St. Pauli - Carles Vinas - Страница 16

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 members, introducing totalitarianism meant spreading state control to all aspects of life – including social activity. Sport obviously could not escape the new authoritarianism under Hitler’s chancellorship. The DFB’s press officer, Guido von Mengde, demonstrated this by stating: ‘Footballers are the Führer’s political soldiers’.² All of this was quite paradoxical bearing in mind that Hitler was known for his dislike of sport. He only attended one football match in his life (Germany’s defeat at the hands of Norway in the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games).

Despite this aversion, Nazi chiefs tried to exploit football for propaganda purposes. For them sport was a powerful tool that they could ill afford to squander. The cult of the body and physical activity were related, according to the Third Reich theses, with racial thinking and the national community – the Volksgemeinschaft.

In the Third Reich, St. Pauli, like most clubs, complied with orders issued by the sporting, social and political authorities. Hamburg was not only a city controlled by Nazis but was one of the ‘Führer’s five cities’. The Nazis picked these for redevelopment so they could show the world the country’s competitiveness and modernity. Hamburg would be a mirror reflecting the Third Reich’s best image to the outside world. Among the different regeneration projects planned was the building of the ‘Manhattan of the Elbe’: a landscape of skyscrapers, squares, long avenues, monuments and palaces in a residential area aiming to accommodate 50,000 people.³ Moreover, on the Führer’s own request, the project had to include a new bridge crossing the Elbe and newly designed riversides. This metamorphosis would greatly affect different historical spots, such as the historic St. Pauli fish market and the port area (Hafenstraße). The city would become ‘a ticket to tour an Empire open to the world’.⁴ Eventually the project was halted by the start of the Second World War, thwarting such plans.

The NSDAP won a majority in Hamburg’s Senate in the elections on 8 March 1933. Overnight, all the unions and political associations linked to the SPD were banned. In one year 2,400 members of the Hamburg opposition were arrested, demonstrating an iron grip that also spread to the local media.

In the club, however, life continued fairly smoothly. The country’s new administration had issued orders as part of the Gleichschaltung (the Third Reich’s Nazification process to implement a totalitarian system, grouped together in the ‘Aryan clause’ of the Civil Service Law that came into effect in April 1933). The clause forced the purging of Jews from the civil service, universities, associations and sports organisations.⁵ Yet St. Pauli did not follow the regulations to the letter. Unlike other clubs, such as 1 FC Nürnberg or Frankfurt’s Eintracht, St. Pauli allowed membership to those of a Jewish background for that year. Club members included the Jewish brothers Otto and Paul Lang who joined St. Pauli to found its rugby section in 1933. The fates of both were different. While Otto managed to flee the country, his brother ended up interned in the Theresienstadt concentration camp.⁶ St. Pauli did not incorporate the Aryan clause’ into its statutes until as late as 1940. The year the decree was issued, seven years earlier, over a quarter of the Jewish community resident in Hamburg had fled the city. Three years later, in November 1938, coinciding with the pogrom by the SS known as the Night of Broken Glass, the city’s synagogue was destroyed and its Jewish cemetery desecrated. The Nazi raid led to the death of nearly a hundred Jews in Hamburg.

In the early 1930s the club overlooked party affiliation, ethnic origins or the religion of its players and associates. As the Nazification process was already in full swing, this stance would today be branded as disobedience, yet at the time it was an unconscious act. All the same, there is a debate surrounding the degree to which the club collaborated with the Third Reich. This revolves around the role of its management and whether it acted out of opportunism or conviction. In this regard, the following information might be revealing: in 1934 there was only one member of the Nazi Party on St. Pauli’s board: Walter Koehler, who was in the SA. He was the only direct link between the authorities and the club in those years. Indeed, FC St. Pauli had not shown any nationalistic or militaristic inclination in its early decades, unlike that demonstrated by other football clubs.

Despite perceptions to the contrary, not everyone in Germany sided with the Nazis. This was so at St. Pauli. In the 1930s a group of young people that loved swing (as well as football)⁷ was 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 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.

_______________

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. 97–118.

9. Paradoxically the Reich minister of propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, decided to increase the participation of swing bands during the Berlin Olympic Games in 1936. This was to transmit an image of tolerance and normality. Backes, ‘Mit Deustchen Sportgruss, Heil Hitler!’, p. 115.

10. The Swing Kids would mock Hitler Youth when they came across them in the street by shouting ‘Swing Heil!’. Rondinelli, Ribelli, Sociali e Romantici, p. 41.

11. One of these swing fans was a 19-year-old player of in the St. Pauli rugby team. He was not the only one. Passion for the musical genre also was shared by a club football player, Heiner Nelles. The footballer was born in the neighbourhood in 1926 and joined the lower-team levels at the age of ten. At night, the young player would meet up secretly with his friends to listen and dance to swing. During the war, Nelles avoided being drafted to the SS by first signing up to be a volunteer Luftwaffe pilot. See Backes, ‘Mit Deustchen Sportgruss, Heil Hitler!’, pp. 117–18 and F. Boll and A. Kaminsky, Gedenkstättenarbeit und Oral History: Lebensgeschichtliche Beiträge zur Verfolgung in zwei Diktaturen (Berlin: Arno Spitz, 1999), pp. 27–40.

12. The club tried to keep in touch with the players sent to the front (Soldaten-St. Paulianer) through liaising with the person responsible for getting the club’s publication to them. The paper included a space to print greetings that their families sent to them. Nagel and Pahl, FC St. Pauli, p. 78.

13. Jürs was born on 26 April 1889 and joined St. Pauli Turnverein to play football at the age of nine. Three of his eight brothers died during the First World War, while he suffered serious injuries fighting in Russia. In January 1941 he was condemned to death by the second chamber of the Special Hanseatic Court for jeopardising military force, bribery and falsifying documents. Four months later, the state prosecutor reduced his sentence to 15 years. After being imprisoned in Bremen, he was put into the Neuengamme concentration camp until it was vacated on 20 April 1945. Along with the other prisoners, he was taken to Lübeck to be shut into the Cap Arcana boat moored at the city’s port. Five days before the end of the war, the ship was confused with a troop transporter and bombarded by the Royal Air Force. Jürs, along with 4,000 other prisoners, died during the British air raid. His name is engraved on a plaque for the Neuengamme memorial devoted to the Hamburg resistance fighters killed or persecuted between 1933 and 1945. Nagel and Pahl, FC St. Pauli, pp. 88–9.

14. The name came from the group’s founders, Bernhard Bästlein, Franz Jacob and Robert Abshagen. After they were freed from the Sachsenhausen camp they set up an armed resistance group. Its structure consisted of 300 fighters (Communists, Social Democrats, independents, and foreign workers), divided into small squads (cells of three people operating independently) that were present in more than 30 factories in the city. Even so, most of their clandestine activity was carried out in Altona and St. Pauli’s shipyards and docks. Nearly a hundred workers from the Blohm and Voss shipyard joined the group. The group prioritised mobilising workers, giving solidarity to the foreigners forced to work to build a bunker to protect German war production, giving support to Soviet prisoners of war and doing anti-Nazi propaganda and sabotage. On October 1942 the Gestapo found them out and nearly 200 participants were arrested. Despite that the group was crucial at providing a network of resistance fighters that later spread to other northern industrial cities, and which kept fighting until the Allied troops arrived. In May 1944, in the so-called ‘Hamburg communist trials’, seventy of their members were given the death sentence and executed. See Rondinelli, Ribelli, Sociali e Romantici, p. 43 and U. Puls, Die Bästlein-Jacob -Abshagen-Gruppe: Bericht über den antifaschistischen Widerstandskampf in Hamburg und an der Waterkante während des zweiten Weltkrieges (Berlin: Dietz Verlang, 1959).

15. A butcher’s son, Miller debuted with St. Pauli in the 1932–3 season. At first he had to play secretly because his father had banned him from playing football. Later, however, his dad became one of his biggest fans. In 1935 Miller was selected to play for North Germany. His good performance did not go unnoticed by the all German team coach Sepp Herberger. In 1940 Miller was called up and stationed at a Luftwaffe unit in Saxony. He combined his military activity with playing some matches as a ‘guest player’ for Dresdner SC. On 7 April 1940 he made his debut for Germany against Hungary, a match that ended in a 2–2 draw. He also played in the German team’s last match during the Second World War, which took place in Bratislava on 22 November 1942. Germany’s rivals were Slovakia, who beat the home team 5–2. Between 1940 and 1942, Miller wore the national shirt on twelve occasions – making him the St. Pauli player with the most caps. Additionally, Miller starred – together with his teammates – in a film, Das große Spiel (The Big Game), which recreated the 1941 German Cup Final between Schalke 04 and SK Rapid. Shortly after, Miller returned to his hometown to play for Luftwaffen-Sportverein Hamburg – the local air-force team. He was promoted to sergeant and later became gunner. Due to his ‘efforts against Soviet Russians’ he received the Iron Cross (of the second-highest level). He continued playing at Dresdner FC until, after the war ended, he convinced some teammates to all go to St. Pauli. His main argument to them was that they would get provisions from his father’s butchers shop. That is how The Wonderful Eleven, who dominated Hamburg football in the late 1940s and is believed to be the best team in the club’s history, came to be formed. Miller retired after the 1949–50 season, aged 37. After hanging up his boots he remained linked to St. Pauli, representing the club on the League Committee. He died in 1967 at the age of 54. Nagel and Pahl, FC St. Pauli, p. 92.