Lothar Meyer (soccer player)

Lothar Meyer (born August 1, 1933 ; † September 2002 in Berlin ) was a German football player in the GDR.

Athletic career

Immediately after the end of the Second World War, Meyer began to play football for the Berlin sports club Baumschulenweg in 1946. In 1953, at the age of 20, he joined the company sports association (BSG) Motor Oberschöneweide , which had just been relegated from the Oberliga , the highest GDR soccer class. There he played himself so in the foreground as a striker that he made his first international appearance on May 9, 1954 in the encounter between the GDR and Romania (0-1 in Berlin). At that time he was also the only national player who had to be seconded to the newly formed soccer section of the SC DHfK Leipzig in the summer of 1954 . After the football teams of the SC DHfK were dissolved again after six months due to unsuccessfulness, Meyer was assigned to the Army Sports Club (ASK) Vorwärts Berlin , which played in the upper league, in January 1955 . Here he completed 138 league games by November 1961, in which he scored 51 goals. There were also five games in European Cup competitions. With the ASK Meyer was three times GDR soccer champion (1958, 1960 and 1962). During this time he made 15 more international appearances, as a national player he scored a total of two goals. He also played two international junior matches in 1954 and 1956 and completed four international B matches between 1954 and 1958.

During his ASK years, Meyer made it to the position of captain in the National People's Army , was a member of the SED and appeared in public with systematic propaganda. He was arrested in early November 1961 and then sentenced to one and a half years of forced labor for a sexual offense, which he performed in a copper mine near Eisleben . He was demoted in the army and expelled from the ASK.

Unusually for a convicted criminal, Meyer was able to play competitive sports again after his release from prison. In 1963 he first joined the third-class BSG Motor Köpenick , with whom he was promoted to the GDR league in the same year . However, the team rose after a year off, and Meyer came on August 30, 1964 the third league match of the season, for the SC Dynamo Berlin ( carrier operating at the Ministry of State Security). Here he brought it again to 27 league appearances, so that he came to a total of 165 games with 57 goals (6 for Dynamo) in the highest GDR class. After playing in the Dynamo Berlin reserve team for two years from 1966, he ended his football career in 1968. He died at the age of 69 in a Weißensee hospital.

literature

• Hanns Leske : Encyclopedia of GDR football . Verlag Die Werkstatt, Göttingen 2007, ISBN 978-3-89533-556-3 , p. 317.
• Andreas Baingo, Michael Horn: The History of the GDR Oberliga. 2nd Edition. Verlag Die Werkstatt, Göttingen 2004, ISBN 3-89533-428-6 , p. 314.

Web links

• Lothar Meyer in the database of the German Football Association