List of German football champions
[5] Following World War II, Germany was occupied by the victorious Allies and two German football competitions emerged when the country was divided as a result.
[5] The new British game of football quickly caught on in late 19th-century Germany, which had previously been a nation of gymnasts and fencers.
The earliest attempt at organizing some form of national championship came in 1894, when city champions Viktoria 89 Berlin invited FC Hanau 93 to play a challenge match.
[6] After its formation in 1900, the DFB began to establish its authority over the myriad city and regional leagues springing up throughout the country and organized the first officially recognized national championship in 1903.
With the beginning of the 1933–34 season, top-flight German football was reorganized into 16 regional Gauligen with each of these leagues sending their champion to the national playoffs.
[5] It also introduced previously foreign clubs into German domestic competition where Viennese Austrian sides made a notable impression.
Competition during the war was also characterized by the formation of military-based clubs including the Luftwaffe side LSV Hamburg which appeared in the era's last national championship match at the end of the 1943–44 season.
[5] Unlike the United Kingdom, where play was suspended early on, national football competition continued on in Germany in some form through the course of the war.
An exception was in French-occupied Saarland where attempts by France to annex the state were manifested in the formation of a separate, but short-lived, football competition that staged its own championship.
Saarland briefly had its own representation under FIFA, forming Olympic and World Cup sides, before re-joining German competition in 1956.
A consequence of this was that by 1956, a distinct national amateur championship was established, open to teams playing below the Oberliga level in second- and third tier leagues.
The post-war occupation of Germany by the victorious Allies eventually led to the de facto partition of the country and the emergence of two separate German states, each with its own government and institutions.
Early plans to maintain a national championship to be contested by representatives from the eastern and western halves of the country quickly fell by the wayside in the context of the Cold War.
An Ostzone champion was declared in each of the 1946–48 seasons and in 1949 the first division DDR-Oberliga was established under the DFV (Deutscher Fußball-Verband der DDR) as a distinct national sport governing body.
[1] In the first recognized East German national championship staged in 1949, ZSG Union Halle defeated SG Fortuna Erfurt 4–1.
The following season the DDR-Oberliga (I) was redesignated the Nord-Ostdeutscher Fußball Verband Oberliga and became a third tier regional division within the existing German league structure under the DFB.
FC Hansa Rostock captured the title in the transitional 1990–91 season, and alongside runners-up SG Dynamo Dresden, advanced to play in the Bundesliga, thereby fully integrating former Eastern clubs into a unified German championship.
[3] The performance of various clubs is shown in the following table:[8] The formation of the Bundesliga in 1963 marked a significant change to the German football championship.
The re-match also went into extra time, and in an era that did not allow for substitutions, the game was called at 1–1 when Nürnberg was reduced to just seven players and the referee ruled they could not continue.
Play became increasingly difficult as the war drew to its conclusion due to manpower shortages, bombed-out stadiums, and the hardship and expense of travel.
In the era's final championship match Dresdner SC beat the military club LSV Hamburg 4–0 on 18 June 1944 in Berlin's Olympiastadion.
The 1944–45 season kicked off ahead of schedule in November; however, by March 1945 play had collapsed throughout Germany as Allied armies overran the country.
[1] Play was tentatively resumed in various parts of the now-occupied country in early 1946 and the postwar Oberliga structure began to take shape in the 1946–47 season; no national champion was declared from 1945 to 1947.
[1] In the aftermath of World War I, several lesser national football competitions emerged as outgrowths of the tumultuous German political situation.
These included the left-leaning workers' ATSB (Arbeiter-Turn- und Sport-Bund), the Catholic-sponsored DJK (Deutschen Jugendkraft), the Protestant-backed DT (Deutsche Turnerschaft), and the Communist KG (Kampfgemeinschaft für Rote Sporteinheit).
Because of the ideologies they represented, they were considered politically unpalatable by the regime and disappeared in the 1933 reorganization of German football under Nazi Germany that consolidated competition in state-sanctioned leagues.
