Tale of forgotten resistance hero Gerhard Nijland and Nazi star reignite anger

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Gerhard Nijland was a Dutch resistance hero who died a slave labourer working 20-hour days in a Nazi concentration camp and was buried in a wrongly marked grave.

Otto “Tull” Harder, a celebrated footballer in Germany’s prewar national team, was the SS commandant at the Ahlen camp. He died in the 1950s a sporting hero.

Inmates at the camp, which was liberated by American GIs including a traumatised 21-year-old Sergeant Henry Kissinger, said Harder created a “living hell”.

A new book, The Resistance Man and the Football Hero, by Frank Krake, has opened old wounds in the Netherlands, where anger lingers over the failure to hold German war criminals to account or to celebrate resistance heroes.

Gerie Voerknecht-Nijkamp, Nijland’s niece, says she

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