In Hamburg there was a complete breakdown of the social order. Gangs roamed the city, and there were frequent gun battles in the streets after dark. One British observer witnessed a particularly brutal scene at around this time. Leslie Hollis was a Royal Marine stationed in Hamburg as part of a force brought in to oversee German war reparations in the city, when he found himself caught up in the chaos.

Communist riots under a man named Spartacus had broken out in the city. The weak German government was powerless to restore order. Disgraceful scenes were witnessed. People suspected of being war profiteers were paraded naked round the city in tumbrils, the womenfolk being allowed the dignity of girdles of dead rats. I remember a deplorable scene by the beautiful Alster Lake in the centre of the city. The Spartacists had captured some of their political opponents. They were thrown into the lake and told to swim for it. As soon as they had reached a distance of imagined safety they were shot from the shore. We were powerless to act because this was a domestic affair. Retribution for the Spartacists was very swift. ⁴

By April 1919 food was so hard to come by that people began breaking into shops and storehouses to feed themselves. On one occasion some two thousand men tried to storm a warehouse on Markusstrasse, and had to be fought back by policemen under the cover of machine-gun fire. Police stations came under attack by gangs trying to obtain firearms. On 23 June, after learning that one of the city’s factories had been manufacturing products with rotten meat, thousands rioted in the streets, looted shops, and even tried to storm the town hall. Hamburg was in a state of virtual siege, and relative order was not properly restored until General LettowVorbeck’s Freikorps occupied the city in July and imposed martial law. ⁵

In such an atmosphere, it is not surprising that political extremism gained a strong foothold in the city. When so much of the city was going hungry, groups from the far left felt they had a perfect right to plunder stockpiles of food and fuel in the city’s warehouses. Conversely, groups on the far right were in favour of extreme measures to bring the looters under control. The Freikorps, for example, had no compunction about suppressing real or supposed threats to the government in an extremely brutal and bloody manner. Originally set up to bolster the police, the Freikorps was a volunteer military organization that was often little better than a coalition of vigilante groups: it was a magnet for disaffected youth and bitter ex-soldiers, and served as a training ground for many who would reappear as Nazis in the following years. ⁶

However, the extremist group with by far the largest following in Hamburg was the Communist Party. Political groups of the far left had a long history in the city. While the union movement had been fighting for important labour reforms in the second half of the nineteenth century, there were always more radical wings that believed the only way for workers to win a fair deal was to seize power. With the revolution of November 1918 they finally had their way, and ruled the city for several months as the Workers’ and Soldiers’ Council. After the election of 16 March 1919, they handed power back to the city parliament, but there were always radical groups who wanted to seize it again, and it was not long before they tried. On 23 October 1923, at around five o’clock in the morning, hundreds of Communists attacked Hamburg police stations in a desperate attempt to gain control of the city by force. Led by Ernst Thälmann, the uprising centred on the workers’ suburbs of Eimsbüttel, Barmbek, Schiffbek and Bergedorf. In the end they failed, but not without much loss of life on both sides: seventeen policemen and sixty-one Communists were killed in the fighting, and a further 321 people were wounded. In the aftermath of the rebellion almost a thousand people were arrested. ⁷

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In the following years the atmosphere in Hamburg began at last to calm down. Although Ernst Thälmann retained his seat in the Hamburg parliament, the Communists never came close to ousting the more moderate Social Democratic Party (SPD), and the traditional conservatism of the Hanseatic temperament gradually reasserted itself. Slowly but surely prosperity returned to the city. Despite the severe restrictions of the treaty of Versailles, ⁸Hamburg’s firm links with Britain and America gave it access to capital on favourable terms, and the city recovered much more quickly than the rest of Germany. By the end of the 1920s company business was flourishing once more, and the average worker was back to earning pre-war wages. While a current of radicalism still flowed beneath the surface, an air of relative contentment had returned to the city.

Unfortunately this period of relative stability came to an end during the winter of 1929–30 when the whole world was plunged into an economic slump. As global prices went into free-fall, and exports shrank to almost nothing, Hamburg’s fragile economy began once more to collapse. Within two years unemployment had reached almost 40 per cent, and political radicalism returned. The only difference was that this time it was not the Communists who attracted the protest vote. Radicalism in the 1930s would wear an altogether different face.

4. The Rise of the Nazis

Clear the streets for the brown battalions, clear the streets for the Storm Trooper …

1930s Nazi Party song ¹

In the summer of 1930 an event took place in Hamburg that would soon become a local legend. On 19 August about two hundred people gathered at the ‘Am Stadtpark’ beer hall in Winterhude to attend an election meeting of the Nazi Party. It was an impressive turnout for a minority party. Ever since the recession had taken hold, the Nazis had been enjoying increasing support in Hamburg, and people came from all different sections of society. They were expecting speeches – the usual anti-Semitic, anti-Marxist, antiliberal invective – followed by a debating session, then perhaps a drink in the adjoining pub before they went home to bed. That night, however, there had been rumours that the local Communist Party were planning to disrupt the meeting. As a consequence the arriving audience was greeted by bands of Nazi storm troopers, who had been called in to ‘protect’ the meeting in case of a fracas. As the audience took their seats unease hung in the air.

The meeting started without any disturbance, and for a while it looked as though the rumours were unfounded. But at nine o’clock the door of the beer hall flew open and a large man entered, claiming to be a member of the ‘Red Front’ – a militant wing of the Communist Party. He was followed by a long chain of others: ‘Tall chaps; fists of iron; splendid men. The best of the Hamburg Communist Party.’ ²Fifty or so of these ‘Red Marines’ took their seats in the audience, and a similar number went to stand in a corner at the back of the room, beside an open window.

At first their presence did little to disrupt the meeting, and the speeches went ahead. The trouble began during the questionand-answer session, when the chairman challenged the visitors to announce whether their presence was peaceful or not. He was answered by a flying beer glass, which smashed on the wall behind him. Within moments a storm broke loose across the room. Communists and Nazis attacked one another with whatever weapons came to hand: knives, glasses, bottles, even chairs. In panic, most of the audience fled for the door, but some stayed to join the storm troopers in a desperate battle. An old man used his cane to strike repeatedly at the Red Marines and when it broke he picked up a chair leg and used that instead. His white beard was soon flecked with blood.

The Communists outnumbered the Nazis almost two to one, and they also had a large mob outside who were trying to break down the door. Despite this, the Nazis forced them into a corner, and one by one the Red Marines fell. Of the hundred or so men who had interrupted the meeting, at least eighty were battered to the floor, and those remaining were eventually forced to escape through the open window at the back of the beer hall.