Harald Stender

Harald Stender (1940s)

Harald Stender (born December 18, 1924 in Altona / Elbe , † August 1, 2011 in Hamburg ) was a German football player . With a total of 336 point games between 1947 and 1960, he is the player with the second-most appearances in what was then the first-class soccer Oberliga Nord , all of which he played for FC St. Pauli .

Career

An Altona on St. Pauli

On April 1, 1933, Harald Stender's father registered the eight-year-old not with a large club in his then independent hometown, Altona 93 or the almost equally strong Union 03 , but with Hamburg's FC St. Pauli - because its venue was across from Heiligengeistfeld and was only a stone's throw away from the family's Altona apartment. In St. Pauli's youth he developed into a strong, persevering right runner who also did a lot to build up the game and was later used on half right .

The immediate post-war period

The Second World War prevented Stender from playing himself in the field of vision before 1945. But immediately after the liberation, games could be resumed in Hamburg , although the city was still in ruins due to the air raids . And right in the 1945/46 season, FC St. Pauli took second place in the Hamburg City League, which allowed them to participate in the championship of the British zone of occupation , which the club then waived. In terms of footballing strength, this waiver would not have been necessary, because as early as 1945 the club recorded an influx of high-performing players such as Helmut Schön , Heiner Schaffer , Fritz Machate , Walter Dzur from Dresdner SC , Heinz Hempel , Hans Appel , Willi Thiele and "Tute" Lehmann from Berlin and Josef Famula from Silesia. They all came because the father of the original Paulian Karl Miller owned a slaughterhouse where the players were regularly fed when there was a general lack of food - "All strength came from Miller's sausage kettle" , as chronicler Jan Feddersen put it. Otherwise, the team traveled through the British zone and played in all your kind were offered for it. Harald Stender was one of only three Hamburgers who were able to assert themselves in this group of national players and German champions, which was quickly dubbed the “wonder team”.

1946/47 the FC finished the season as city league champions, which qualified him for the Oberliga Nord, which started in the summer of 1947, and this time also took part in the zone championship . After victories over STV Horst-Emscher (3: 1 in Hamburg) and Borussia Dortmund (2: 2 a. V. in Gladbeck, 1: 0 in Braunschweig), the final opponent was called Hamburger SV of all things . In the city league games, St. Pauli still had the upper hand (3: 2 and 2: 2), but on June 13, 1947, 37,000 spectators at the Hoheluft saw a very strong team from Rothenbaum , who defeated Harald Stender 6: 1 outclassed.

St. Pauli played in the following line-up: Thiele - Miller, Hempel - Stender, Dzur, Appel - Lehmann, Machate, Famula, Schaffer, Michael .

The league years

1947–1951: Every year for the German championship

In the 1947/48 season, the Oberliga Nord began playing with only twelve clubs; In the end, two Hamburg teams, St. Pauli and HSV, were tied at the top. Both clubs thus qualified for participation in the final round of the German championship , but HSV became the north champion with a 2-1 win in the playoff , as the goal difference did not count at the time. For Harald Stender, the finals brought the first two appearances at this highest German level; After a 7-0 win at Union Oberschöneweide, FC lost to 1. FC Nürnberg after extra time with 2: 3 in the Mannheim semifinals .

In 1948/49 almost the same situation arose: St. Pauli lost the decider for the league championship this time with 3: 5 against HSV, so they even had to play qualifying games in order to be able to participate in the German finals (4: 1 against RW Essen , 1: 1 a.s. and 2: 0 against Bayern Munich ) and then failed at 1. FC Kaiserslautern (1: 1 a.s. and 1: 4). In the following two years too, Harald Stender won the northern runner-up, but retired early in the final round for the "German": 1949/50 after a 4-0 win over TuS Neuendorf with 1: 2 against SpVgg Fürth , 1950 / 51 - the final round was held in two groups for the first time - St. Pauli took fourth place behind Kaiserslautern, Schalke 04 and Fürth.

The face of the team slowly changed because some of the "wonder eleven" members were approaching 40 or had left the club again; Harald Stender grew into a leadership role and guided new, younger players such as Fred Boller , Harry Wunstorf and Otmar Sommerfeld on the field. His constant performance did not go unnoticed by the national coach Sepp Herberger , who then invited the Paulian to a national team course in the winter of 1950/51 . Shortly thereafter, one of the blackest hours in Harald Stender's life followed: in February 1951 he collided with Bremen's goalkeeper Dragomir Ilic and hit his head on the frozen ground. He recovered surprisingly quickly from the double fracture of the base of the skull - although not quickly enough: he only experienced the 5-0 win at Millerntor against HSV as one of 30,000 spectators - and was back in the Oberligaelf almost three months later, but he heard from the national coach afterwards nothing more. He was all the more important to FC St. Pauli for this: they had given him the opportunity to lease a gas station on Stresemannstrasse near his parents' house and thus also close to the stadium (which was not the Millerntor Stadium , which was only inaugurated in 1963 ), which was a great one This was a popular method in the early economic boom to discourage gamers from churning through this additional source of income.

1951–1960: In an only mediocre team

In 1952 as third and 1953 as ninth in the league, FC St. Pauli had little to do with the fight for participation in the championship finals. But in 1954 the team in which Harald Stender was now wearing the captain's armband came second behind Hannover 96  - but Stender was deprived of another participation in the finals of the German championship , because this season, due to the early start of the World Cup in Switzerland, only exceptionally the league champions qualified for it. In the following six seasons his team never did better than fourth, and in 1959/60 there was a new generation next to Stender, except for coach Heinz Hempel and goalkeeper Wunstorf, from whom Horst Haecks , "Oschi" Osterhoff , in particular and Ingo Porges should make a good name.

With a 2-0 win against Eintracht Osnabrück on April 24, 1960, the "soul of the Millerntor" said goodbye after 336 league games - only Otmar Sommerfeld , who played in a team with Harald Stender for eight years, achieved 22 goals the contract player eleven. In the past 15 years he had completed almost 500 matches in the "First", including 15 final round matches for the German championship (one goal) and an additional three matches with the North German (NFV) selection, making him still St. Pauli's record player all time is. Allegedly that was "not even worth a bouquet of flowers to the club".

Life after the active time

Harald Stender played in the old league team of FC St. Pauli until 1994; In 2003 he was honored for his 70-year membership in the association. His gas station has long since ceased to exist, and until his death he lived in the north of Hamburg, far from the border area between Altona and St. Pauli, where a large part of his life took place. That did not prevent him from working as honorary chairman of another traditional club, Union 03 , on whose sports field the amateurs of FC St. Pauli sometimes played their home games. On the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the FC St. Pauli club, he was elected into his club's “eleven of the century” in May 2010 by the readers of a Hamburg daily newspaper. In his honor, two years after his death on August 11, 2013, the southern curve forecourt of the Millerntor Stadium was renamed Harald-Stender-Platz.

literature

• Ralf Hohmann / German Sports Club for Football Statistics e. V .: Football in Hamburg 1945 to 1963. All leagues, all tables, all results. AGON, Kassel 2007, ISBN 978-3-89784-333-2 .
• Bernd Jankowski, Harald Pistorius, Jens Reimer Prüß : Football in the North. 100 years of the North German Football Association. History, chronicle, names, dates, facts, figures. AGON Sportverlag, Kassel 2005, ISBN 3-89784-270-X .
• René Martens: Miracles always happen. The history of FC St. Pauli. The workshop, Göttingen 2002 ISBN 3-89533-375-1 .
• Jens Reimer Prüß (Ed.): Bung bottle with flat pass cork. The history of the Oberliga Nord 1947–1963. Klartext, Essen 1991, ISBN 3-88474-463-1 .

credentials

1. ↑ And some of them stayed for a long time, like Walter Dzur, who lived in Hamburg's Neustadt until his death in 1999 .
2. ↑ Prüß, p. 48.
3. ↑ Hohmann / DSFS, p. 12.
4. ↑ Prüß, p. 195.
5. ↑ Prüß, p. 55.
6. ^ ^{A b c} Andreas Meyer, Volker Stahl, Uwe Wetzner: Fußball-Lexikon Hamburg . Die Werkstatt , Göttingen 2007, ISBN 978-3-89533-477-1 , p. 191 (396 pages).
7. ↑ Martens, p. 78.
8. ↑ Lorenz Knieriem, Hardy Grüne : Spiellexikon 1890 - 1963 . In: Encyclopedia of German League Football . tape 8 . AGON, Kassel 2006, ISBN 3-89784-148-7 , p. 377 .
9. ↑ Jankowski / Pistorius / Prüß, p. 372.
10. ↑ Die Jahr100elf  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. on mopo.de.  
11. ↑ Homepage St. Pauli