St. Pauli. Carles Vinas
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.