Waldemar Gerhardt

Waldemar Gerhardt was born in Gelsenkirchen, in the Ruhr, on 6 January 1939. He joined the youth set-up of FC Schalke 04 at the age of eight and developed into a gifted attacker, winning the West German championship with the club's A-youth (under-19) team.

Alongside football he trained as a Schlosser, a fitter or locksmith, and later also qualified as a computer programmer.

Gerhardt was already part of the Schalke first-team squad in 1958, the year the club won the German championship, although he did not appear in the championship rounds. In the 1960-61 Oberliga West season he became a regular on the wing, and in the three seasons before the Bundesliga was founded he scored 29 goals in 74 Oberliga matches.

In the first Bundesliga season, 1963-64, he played in every one of Schalke's matches. He scored his first Bundesliga goal on the opening day, the second in a 2-0 win over VfB Stuttgart, and finished the season with nine goals and eight assists, Schalke's second-highest scorer. In 1964-65 he scored eleven goals in only 22 league games and four in the DFB-Pokal, among them the opening goal of the semi-final at Alemannia Aachen, which Schalke lost 4-3 after extra time.

In 1965 he moved to Fortuna Düsseldorf in the Regionalliga West. According to the club, he was actually on his way to Munich to join FC Bayern when Fortuna's treasurer Heinz Hahn caught up with him at Frankfurt airport and talked him into joining Düsseldorf instead. He scored 16 goals in 34 matches as Fortuna won promotion to the Bundesliga for the first time in 1966. In the 1966-67 Bundesliga season he scored twelve goals in 30 matches, including two against 1. FC Kaiserslautern on the penultimate matchday, but could not prevent relegation. When Schalke tried to bring him back he stayed with Fortuna, and he retired in the spring of 1969 after 115 competitive appearances for the club. Across his Bundesliga career he scored 32 goals in 82 matches.

In the mid-1960s he studied sport in Cologne and, together with Hannes Löhr and Wolfgang Weber, took his coaching licence under Hennes Weisweiler. He went on to coach Tura Büderich, Schwarz-Weiß Essen in 1972-73 and VfB Remscheid, which he led to the Lower Rhine championship in 1974 and to the final of the German amateur championship, lost to SSV Reutlingen only after a replay. In 1978 he took Remscheid into the newly created Oberliga Nordrhein. For two decades he was part of the coaching staff of the Lower Rhine Football Association (Fußballverband Niederrhein), where he led the training of youth coaches.

Gerhardt made Düsseldorf his adopted home and worked for many years as a sports teacher at a Hauptschule, a secondary school, in the city. Fortuna described him as straightforward and warm-hearted, and said he followed the club closely long after his playing days, regularly attending matches and keeping in touch with former team-mates. He was known to friends and supporters as "Waldi".

Waldemar Gerhardt died on 30 October 2026, aged 87. His death was announced the same day by Fortuna Düsseldorf, which said the club had lost a promotion hero, a passionate footballer and a man who had remained closely connected to Fortuna for many decades, and offered its sympathy to his family. The cause of death has not been made public, and no funeral details have been published.

Gerhardt belongs to the generation that played in the very first Bundesliga season, and to the Fortuna Düsseldorf team that first brought top-flight football to the city in 1966. After his playing career he passed his experience on to generations of young players and coaches on the Lower Rhine, both as a club coach and as an educator of youth coaches for the regional football association.