"A ball acrobat of the first order"
At Christmas 1923, the Hungarian football champions M.T.K. Budapest played a friendly match in France against A.S. Strasbourg. The reporter from "Le Sport Alsacien", a local sports newspaper, was particularly impressed by one of the visitors' players: "A first-class ball-striker." "Small, brawny, inconspicuous, he was impossible to play around. He seemed to have grown together with the ball itself."
The 22-year-old middle filed player Henrik Nádler was the most impressive player here. Born in Budapest in 1901, Nádler laced up his football boots for M.T.K. for eleven years from 1919. It was an extremely successful time: he celebrated seven league titles and two cup victories with his club. The technically gifted Nádler made a total of seven appearances for the Hungarian national team. Pubi", as he was nicknamed, was also part of the Hungarian squad at the 1924 Olympic Games in Paris. However, he did not play. At the end of his career, he played briefly for Hakoah Vienna in 1930. Little is known about his life after that. He continued to live in Budapest with his wife, whom he had married in 1928.
German troops occupied Hungary in 1944. It is unclear when and how Nádler, who came from a Jewish family, fell into the clutches of the German occupiers. He was probably deported towards the end of the year and taken to the Buchenwald subcamp in
