About 100 years ago, Otto Harder became one of Germany’s first star footballers. He played for the national team fifteen times, and won two German cups with HSV in the 1920s. Harder knew how to market himself; there was even a brand of cigarettes named after him. A biopic was made about him, the silent movie King of the Centre Forwards. He is still the second-best striker ever to play with HSV, after Uwe Seeler. But while the HSV is proud to honour Seeler’s memory, the club no longer holds Harder in high esteem.

Otto Harder became a member of the Nazi Party and the SS even before 1933. During the Nazi era, he worked as a guard in Neuengamme concentration camp; near the end of the war he was commandant of the satellite camp Hannover-Ahlem. Otto Harder was an ardent Nazi.  

Survivors have testified that conditions in the Hannover-Ahlem camp were particularly horrendous, even in comparison to other Nazi camps. Most prisoners were Polish Jews or Soviet prisoners of war. They were forced to do hard physical labour in underground tunnels for the manufacturers Continental Gummiwerke and Maschinenfabrik Niedersachsen. The death rate was high; it was cold and wet in the tunnels, and prisoners did not receive enough food.

After 1945, the allies brought very few perpetrators to court. Harder was one of those who had to answer for his deeds. At first, he claimed that he had always treated the prisoners well. He also pretended not to have known about conditions in the camps. Friends from his German football days came to his defence: Harder was simply too good-natured, they said, to turn down his promotion to commandant of the satellite concentration camp Hannover-Ahlem. Furthermore, as an SS Hauptscharführer, he was able to help many prisoners. Peco Bauwens, the former president of the German Football Association, called him a sportsman par excellence. The Jewish football functionary and Holocaust survivor Abraham Stock testified that Harder had pushed for his release from Fuhlsbüttel concentration camp. Unlike his co-defendants, Harder was not sentenced to death, but to fifteen years imprisonment. He only served four before he was pardoned by the British government. Harder died a free man in 1956. In the post-war era, HSV celebrated him as a legend and even as a role model for young people. In the meantime, that assessment of Otto Harder has changed. His crimes are no longer ignored in favour of his football successes. Harder’s hometown club now casts a critical eye at both its own past and at the history of the city of Hamburg under the Nazis.