The union was good for the club, which advanced to upper league play in 1930, and made it as far as the semi-finals in the national championship the next season.

Despite delivering consistently solid results in the post-war period, the club missed qualifying for the Bundesliga – Germany's new professional football league – in 1963 with an unexpectedly poor finish in the 1962–63 season that saw the team relegated.

They picked up play next season in the Amateur Oberliga Westfalen (III) before slipping again, this time to the IV and V level divisions.

Sönke Wortmann, now a famous director in Germany with films like Little Sharks, Der bewegte Mann and especially The Miracle of Bern - a story about a returning soldier in the atmosphere of winning the worldcup by the German Squad in 1954 - played for Westfalia in the season 1980–81.

In the 1980 German movie Theo Against the Rest of the World [de], starring Marius Müller-Westernhagen, Theo, the main character, has tickets for his "game of the century", a DFB-Pokal match of SC Westfalia Herne versus FC Schalke 04 but misses the game due to his truck being stolen.