History of German Football (cont...): Postwar football

Under Allied occupation all organizations, including sports clubs and associations, were initially banned. However, within a year, sports-only organizations without political affiliation were permitted, and in the American, British and French occupation zones, most pre-war clubs were reconstituted. Oberliga play resumed in 1945–46 on a regional basis in the South and South-West; Berlin and the other regions followed and, in 1948, 1. FC Nuremberg defeated 1. FC Kaiserslautern 2:1 to become the first post-war national champions. At the time, there was no "prize" to play for. The Viktoria trophy traditionally awarded to the nation's best side had gone missing in the chaos of post-war Germany. In 1949, Nuremberg and each winning side since VfB Leipzig in 1903, would have their names engraved on the newly created Meisterschale, nicknamed "the salad bowl" for its shape. The German Cup competition introduced prior to the war also returned, with Rot-Weiss Essen's 2:1 victory over Alemannia Aachen in 1953.

Through the 1950s, there were continued calls for the formation of a central professional league, especially as professional leagues in other countries began to draw Germany's best players away from the amateur domestic leagues. At the international level the German game began to falter as German teams often fared poorly against professional teams from other countries. A key supporter of the central league concept was national team head coach Sepp Herberger who said, "If we want to remain competitive internationally, we have to raise our expectations at the national level."

In spite of this, Germany (as West Germany) managed to win its first World Cup in 1954 defeating heavily favoured Hungary 3:2, the only "amateur" (i.e. semi-professional) side ever to do so. The unexpected victory was called "The Miracle of Bern" by a delighted nation. An oddity of the 1954 World Cup preliminary rounds was the fielding of a separate side by the German state of Saarland, which was occupied by the French and did not become a part of West Germany again until after a plebiscite and treaty negotiation. The Saarlanders acquitted themselves well, finishing second in their group ahead of Norway and behind group winner West Germany.

Meanwhile, in East Germany, a separate league was established with the formation of the DS-Oberliga (Deutscher Sportausschuss Oberliga or German Sports Association) in 1949. The league was re-named the Football Oberliga DFV in 1958 and was generally referred to simply as the DDR-Liga or DDR-Oberliga. The league fielded 14 teams with 2 relegation spots.

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German football under the Third Reich

The reach of Germany's totalitarian Nazi regime stretched into social institutions at all levels, including their football leagues. Most sports and football associations were disbanded or replaced by Nazi-sponsored organisations. To join a DFB club, a player required recommendations from two non-Marxists to be permitted to play. The DFB gradually lost its independence as it was assimilated into the Deutscher Reichsausschuss für Leibesübungen (DRA) (Reich Committee for Physical Education).

Under Hans von Tschammer und Osten as Reichssportsführer, appointed by the Nazis, formerly independent sports organisations became departments of a new organisation which replaced the DRA — Deutscher Reichsbund für Leibesübungen (DRL, later NSRL or Nationalsozialistischer Reichsbund für Leibesübungen). As in most of German society at the time, sports associations and football teams took part in the purge of Jews from their organisations as ordered by the regime. A few clubs, such as Alemannia Aachen and Bayern Munich, moved to support or protect their members in the face of these actions.

Football was re-organised into sixteen Gaue, or regions, in the Gauliga, which was in place from 1933 to 1945. The overall effect of this was positive for German football. Prior to 1933, nearly 600 clubs competed in the top flight. League re-organisation reduced this to about 170 sides and significantly raised the level of competition. This was the beginning of a process of consolidation of the myriad of small regional leagues that would culminate in a stronger, unified national league structure. The German Cup was introduced in 1935. Known initially as the Tschammerpokal, after Hans von Tschammer, the first cup winner was 1. FC Nuremberg. Play for the Tschammerpokal went on until 1943 and was not resumed again until 1953, under its new name.

The pre-war period saw the return of a number of German sides that played in a rump league set up in the Saarland, a German state occupied by the French since the end of World War I. Some of these teams played in the French Second Division, including FV Saarbruecken (later renamed 1. FC Saarbrücken), who won that division handily but were denied promotion to the First Division.

FC Schalke 04 dominated German football during the Nazi era and was often held up for propaganda purposes as an example of the new Germany. As the Reich expanded through conquest, teams from Austria, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Alsace-Lorraine and Luxembourg were incorporated into the Gauliga. After the Anschluss, the forced union of Austria with Germany, Vienna's Rapid Wien captured the Tschammerpokal in 1938 and the German national championship in 1941, the latter with a 4-3 win over Schalke, who had been three goals ahead with just fifteen minutes to play in the game.

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History of German football: Early history

Prior to the formation of the Bundesliga, German football was played at an amateur level in a large number of sub-regional leagues (until 1945) which, in post-war times, had a top layer of semi-professional regional Oberligen (Premier Leagues). Regional champions and, from 1925 onwards, runners-up played a series of playoff matches for the right to compete in a final game for the national championship. On January 28, 1900, a national association, the Deutscher Fussball Bund (DFB) was founded in Leipzig with 86 member clubs. From the start, the DFB was - and still is - a federation of regional associations. The first recognised national championship team was VfB Leipzig, who beat DFC Prague 7-2 in a game played in Altona on May 31, 1903.

The nascent German association permitted teams from outside the country in their new league, as long as they were ethnically German sides. This is how Prague, a team from Austria-Hungary, managed an appearance in the German national final. Once the DFB joined FIFA (Fédération Internationale de Football Association) in 1904, clubs from outside the country were no longer permitted to play in Germany.

The last team to win the Viktoria was Dresdner SC, who beat the air-force club Luftwaffen SV Hamburg in Berlin's Olympiastadion 4-0 to end the 1943–44 competition. In the confusion at the end of World War II, the trophy disappeared. It was re-discovered decades later in an East German bank safe-deposit box where it had been placed by a Dresden supporter for safekeeping. It has since been returned to the DFB. In the meantime, a new championship trophy, the Meisterschale ("Championship Plate"), sometimes nicknamed "die Salatschüssel" (the salad bowl), was created in 1949.

In 1919, there were 150,000 registered football players in Germany; by 1932, there were more than a million. In spite of the formation of a national association, German football held to an ideal of amateurism built around regional and local sports associations who felt that professionalism would diminish sportsmanship and local participation in the game. In the early 1930s, the DFB's president, Felix Linnemann, pushed for the creation of a professional league, or Reichsliga, in which the country's best teams would compete for the national championship. The idea was rebuffed by the regional federations dominating the sport.

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