You can see a light-coloured band across the instrument where the bars used to be (probably only three of them, like the first instruments called "autoharps" back in the 1880s). The strings are equally spaced, whereas on the chord zithers I've seen the chord sets are more tightly spaced than the melody strings. "Left-handed" autoharps like that one have been made to the present day.

But the result of removing the chord bars on an autoharp or ignoring the chords on a chord zither would be identical.