For many years they were teammates and led their team, Hamburgin victories at the German championships in 1923 and 1928.

Norwegian Asbjorn Halvorsen, a midfielder and a player who spent the entire game of the team at his feet. German, Otto Harder he was the one who ended the phases. A great scorer who, in addition to the Hamburg shirt, wore the shirt of the national team of his country 15 times.

The last time they met was at the end of 1934, when Halvorsen decided to leave Germany and return to his homeland to take a place in the Football Association as a member and coach of the national team. Prior to this, he refused to accept German citizenship several times, as he was one of the first major foreign football stars to enter the German field.

Harder went to the station to say goodbye and thank him for the great football years they had together. None of them at that time could have predicted what was to come, although the first dark clouds of Nazism were already gathering over Europe.

Halvorsen returned after two years in Germany and led Norway to a bronze medal at the 1936 Berlin Games. In fact, in the quarter-finals he met with Germany, which was the absolute favourite. The Norwegians won 2-0 and legend has it that Hitler, forced to attend a football match, left the venue before the game was over.

In the semi-final, Norway lost 2-1 to Italy, but Halvorsen actually won the unofficial title of the tournament’s best coach, thanks to both pre-match analysis and the careful diet he put in place for players and coaches. it was pretty advanced for the time.

Unlike the Norwegian who remained in football, Harder joined the Nazi Party. He even joined the SS and served for some time in Hitler’s bodyguard.

When the war broke out and the Nazis invaded Norway, Halvorsen was president of the country’s football association. From this position, he was able to organize an important resistance group that sabotaged many Nazi propaganda sporting events. But that was just the tip of the iceberg for Halvorsen. Two years later, in August 1942, the invaders discovered a basement in Oslo, where Halvorsen set up a small printing house. There he published various news papers, which he drew mainly from British radio broadcasts, and secretly distributed them to the townspeople. He was immediately arrested and imprisoned in Norway for approximately 12 months. “I am hungry. And I am afraid that I will be deported to Germany,” he once wrote in a letter to his brother Olaf, and his fears were finally confirmed. Halvorsen was sent to the Natzweiler-Schruthof concentration camp in the Alsace region. it also received prisoners from other countries as part of the “Night and Fog” (Nacht und Nebel) decree that Hitler issued on December 7, 1941 to eliminate political opponents of the regime in all countries occupied by the Nazis.

According to the Norwegian magazine Yosimar, out of 504 Norwegian prisoners in the camp, only 266 survived. As a former football player, Halvorsen was well known to some of the guards and is said to have enjoyed the favorable treatment he tried to take advantage of for his fellow prisoners.

He went through two more concentration camps until, in April 1945, the Nazis sent him to Neuingem on the outskirts of Hamburg, the city where he had once been a star. The commander of this particular camp was his former friend and teammate Otto Harder, but he was transferred months before Halvorsen passed through its gates. Conditions were deplorable, and evidence suggested that at least 42,900 people eventually died in it, as well as in its subcamps, both due to inhumane work and lethal medical experiments on prisoners, including children.

After the end of the war, Harder was sentenced to 15 years in prison for the crimes he had committed while leading the camp. He spent only four years behind bars before he died at the age of 63 in March 1956.

On the other hand, Halvorsen made it out of Hell alive, having been rescued by the Red Cross in April 1945. Later that year, in an interview with the newspaper Aftenposten, he said: “Hunger is the most cruel thing. We did the most incredible things to ease the pain.” A few months after his release, when he had recovered his strength and was able to travel, he returned to Oslo. After the war, Halvorsen returned to the sport as general secretary of the Norwegian Football Association. Fate sent him back to Germany and Hamburg for the 1954 World Cup qualifiers. In a photograph published at the time by the German sports magazine Kicker, Halvorsen shakes hands with West German coach Josef Herberger with the caption: “Everything that happened was forgotten. ”

Halvorsen, although he did not forget the suffering he experienced, in 1952 was the one who put pressure on his compatriots to accept German athletes for the Oslo Winter Games, saying that they were not responsible and should not be punished.

Three years later, in January 1955, Halvorsen took his last breath at the age of 56 while on a Federation assignment. His health was weakened by what he endured in the concentration camps, including the one commanded by Harder. There is no evidence that they met again after the end of the war…

Source: BBC Sports