Dresdner Fussballmuseum

The Dresdner Fußballmuseum stands in the Rudolf-Harbig-Stadion, home of Dynamo Dresden, on Lennéstraße in the Pirnaische Vorstadt district. It moved there in late 2011 after earlier years in a prefabricated building on Hauptstraße. The collection began in the 1980s when Jens Genschmar started gathering football memorabilia from Dresden’s clubs and fans. Genschmar, now museum director and a city councillor, built a collection of more than ten thousand items covering the entire 20th century. Among them is the only surviving shirt of the German national team worn before 1933.

The museum’s holdings include programmes, tickets, photographs, pennants, shirts, posters, trophies, flags and badges. A notable piece is the shirt worn by Richard Hofmann, whose estate provided the only pre-1933 DFB shirt still in existence. Other highlights are Reinhard Häfner’s Olympic gold medal from 1976 and Dynamo Dresden’s first championship certificate from 1953. The exhibits trace the history of Dresden’s clubs before and after 1945, from the Dresden English Football Club of the 1870s to Dynamo’s European matches in the 1970s and 1980s.

Visitors reach the small exhibition area in the stadium’s VIP section during regular historical stadium tours. The display shows club shirts, medals and documents alongside photographs and magazines such as the complete run of the East German weekly fuwo. The tour also passes parts of the modern stadium, giving a view of the pitch and seating tiers. The museum’s compact size makes it easy to combine with a tour of the ground or a walk along the nearby Elbe river.