Kurt Weissenfels

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Kurt Weißenfels (born June 13, 1920 in Adorf ; † January 13, 1998 ) was a football player in the GDR in the 1950s .

Career history

Kurt Weißenfels began playing football when he was eight years old in Adorf, a small Saxon town near Chemnitz. At the age of 17 he played in the district league team of SG Adorf as a striker.

At the age of 19, Kurt Weißenfels had to go into World War II as a soldier. In 1942 he was taken prisoner in North Africa and was released in February 1947. In Adorf he found the opportunity to play soccer in the newly founded sports community. When national sports competitions were permitted again in 1948, Weißenfels joined the SG Chemnitz West, with which he won the championship of the Chemnitz District League (1947/48). After the soccer championship in the league system of the DS-Oberliga was played for the first time in East Germany in 1949, Weißenfels switched to the company sports association "Hans Wendler" Stendal in autumn 1949 .

On November 6, 1949, he was called up for the first time in the Stendal team and led in a 4-3 at Fortuna Erfurt with two goals. However, SG Chemnitz West had protested because of Weißenfels' change, and so the game result was annulled and scored 0: 0 goals and 2 points for Erfurt. Stendal was accused of having "pulled" the player Weißenfels. Kurt Weißenfels received a game ban for Stendal until April 16, 1950, Stendal's BSG manager Benes and the fruit section head were banned from official activities for three years. On March 25, 1950, Kurt Weißenfels was nevertheless appointed to the state selection of Saxony-Anhalt, which in Magdeburg in front of 10,000 spectators on the square on Königsweg lost 1: 5 to the GDR selection.

Weißenfels' regular position was the center forward. In a newspaper interview he said about himself: “The strongest sides in the game are my shooting power, my pass and my physical advantages.” These advantages helped him to 27 goals in the 1951/52 league season, with which he and Rudolf Krause from Leipzig Became top scorer. In the following season, Weißenfels proved to be an accurate shooter with 24 goals and ended up in second place on the top scorer list behind Harry Arlt from Dresden (26 goals). Although he only scored 12 goals in the 1953/54 season, he was still the Stendal's most successful striker, but his goals did not save the team from relegation to the second-rate GDR league . There Weißenfels was top scorer of the league season I with 37 goals in 26 point games. These goals contributed significantly to the immediate resurgence of the locomotive team, which then developed into an "elevator team", so that Weißenfels experienced relegation twice in 1957 and 1959. On August 5, 1959, he played his last league game against SC Lokomotive Leipzig (1: 2). For Stendal he had played a total of 163 league games, in which he scored 91 goals (11 from penalties). This makes him the most successful goalscorer at BSG Lokomotive Stendal. He celebrated his greatest success with the Stendal team in 1956 when they reached 4th place. Between 1952 and 1956 Weißenfels played 5 games for the GDR soccer cup and scored 7 goals.

After his active career, he was an assistant coach in Stendal between 1960 and 1977 (in 1970 he looked after the team in the 1st GDR League (North Staffel) for a short time, but missed the league promotion against 1. FC Union Berlin).

On the occasion of his 70th birthday, an article appeared in the Fuwo (No. 25/1990) ( The right foot was a dreaded hammer ) in which Kurt Weißenfels' teammates had their say. Goalkeeper Günter Reh said of him: “Buddy, open-minded, not unjust, in his time and in our era in the top league, the greatest. He was a daredevil and a storm handlebar at the same time. In seven years with him, I valued the way I was able to enforce safely and confidently deploy his neighbors. "Gerd Backhaus described Kurt Weißenfels as follows:" I was able to learn a lot from Kurt. Especially how he shielded the leather with his body. Actually, he could only be separated from the ball by fouls. And then his free kicks! Precise and with a force that made any goalkeeper pale. "

literature

Web links

Footnotes

  1. ↑ DS = German Sports Committee
  2. ↑ Berliner Zeitung of June 12, 1953
personal data
SURNAME Weissenfels, Kurt
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German soccer player
DATE OF BIRTH June 13, 1920
PLACE OF BIRTH Adorf
DATE OF DEATH January 13, 1998