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Happy Birthday to Union

The Story of the Founding, 59 Years Ago

Mon, 20. January 2025
Happy Birthday to Union

Today, Monday, 1. FC Union Berlin celebrate their 59th birthday and wish all fans, members, sponsors, partners, friends, employees, coaches, players and committee members a successful special day – und niemals vergessen: Eisern Union!

History

Sport – and therefore also football - was highly valued in the DDR (German Democratic Republic) and seen as an instrument for the GDR to gain international recognition. The aim was to demonstrate the superiority of the socialist system over that of the capitalist states. However, East German football was by no means on a par with that of the FDR (West Germany), for example, which had been the second German state since 1949. On a European scale, both national and club teams were considered below average, so that their reputation was not very high even in their own country.

The restructuring of the sports system that took place up until 1965 did not have the desired effect. In a 1964 ‘Concept of Proposals for the Further Development of the Work’, the DFV, the German Football Association of the GDR, stated that it was necessary ‘to introduce further measures to advance in the field of football from the European level to among the best in the world’. The extensive document addressed many points, including the need to ‘form various focus teams… to raise the level of performance’. These focus teams were to be football clubs, based on the football sections of the sports clubs that had existed since 1954 and 1955.

In 1964, there were three of these in Berlin, the sports associations Dynamo and Vorwärts, affiliated with the police, ministry of state security and customs, and the army, respectively, and the Berlin Gymnastics and Sports Club, which was organised as a civil club and was largely supported by the capital city’s larger companies.

The analysis was then also revised and expanded upon in 1965, so that the highest active body of the ruling SED (Socialist Unity Party of Germany) devoted itself to the topic. They took note of the proposals and confirmed the club-building measures.

The corresponding protocol of the meeting of the SED Central Committee Secretariat was signed by the most senior East German politician, the Chairman of the State Council and First Secretary of the Central Committee of the SED, Walter Ulbricht. The party had confirmed that the DTSB (German Gymnastics and Sports Federation - and thus the football association as a professional association - would implement the measures. The trade unions, whose sponsorship of competitive sports had already been largely reduced by 1957, thus lost their influence completely.

 

At that time, TSC Berlin were still under the sponsorship of the Free German Trade Union Federation, the FDGB, while TSC's predecessor until 1963, the Turn und Sportclub Oberschöneweide, was in 1957 still enjoyed the trade union’s extensive structural and economic support.

The federal chairman Herbert Warnke, as a great supporter of sport, was often a direct point of contact for the club management, as Werner Koch, a member of Warnke's staff who was temporarily seconded to the club's board of directors, confirmed. The union had ultimately been disempowered from that point on.

‘Comrade Paul Verner has personally committed himself to this,’ the head of the sports working group at the FDGB federal executive committee, Hans Degebrodt, reported to his boss Herbert Warnke in December 1965. The TSC footballers should receive the same opportunities “as the other football clubs that are being formed.” Verner was a member of the Politburo of the SED Central Committee and the Berlin party leader – one of the most important decision makers, and it was ‘at Paul Verner's insistence’ that the TSC football section was given club status and not affiliated to a company sports club.

This is what happened, for example, to the footballers of SC Cottbus, who now belonged to BSG Energie. Herbert Warnke was only informed of the effects of the whole thing in the letter, as if in passing.

January 1966 was set as the date for the formation of these clubs in the GDR, including those from the Sport clubs in Rostock, Magdeburg, Leipzig, Erfurt, Jena, Halle, Karl-Marx-Stadt (now Chemnitz), and in Berlin from the Dynamo and Vorwärts sports clubs. Until then, formalities had to be settled in addition to the economic and sports-related structural requirements.

The selection of the respective club management members occupied the DTSB board just as much as the proposed names. For example, there were initially objections to ‘1. FC Chemie Halle’. For the club to be founded from the TSC football department in Berlin, no specific name was mentioned for a long time, until on 11 January 1966, alongside the confirmation of the board, ‘1. FC Berlin’ was mentioned.

Since December 1965, the members of the association and TSC management who were preparing the founding of the Köpenick-Oberschöneweide club had already written about a club emerging from TSC and called on Berlin football fans via newspapers and radio to suggest names and emblems. The founding committee, led by Heinz Busch, head of the Berlin DTSB, did not want to ‘make the decision without the support of the fans of the team from the Alte Försterei,’ as it was reported in the newspaper B. Z. am Abend.

In the end, the organisers received 286 submissions with 475 suggestions and drafts. ‘1.’ and ‘Union’ prevailed thanks to the letters received, while ‘Berlin’ was the obvious choice given the club's home city, as was ‘FC’. But it was not until 18 January 1966 that the association confirmed this specific name.

It is still unclear why this name was only confirmed two days before the founding conference; there had been numerous meetings at the DTSB in the run-up to the conference, during which ‘Hallesche Fußballclub Chemie’ instead of ‘1. FC Chemie Halle’, and all the other names were also recognised. ‘The wish of the footballers’ was to “continue playing under the name TSC”, Hans Degebrodt had told Herbert Warnke. However, apparently none of those who had proposed the new name had submitted a usable emblem design. If the name was not to be announced until the inaugural conference on 20 January 1966, there was a surprise for the 300 or so guests at the club house of the Oberschöneweide Transformatorenwerk. A prepared plaque only showed the lettering.

The meeting begun at 17:00 and reached its climax with Heinz Busch's words, ‘Long live 1. FC Union Berlin!’ – with that, the club was now founded, wrote the reporter of the sports magazine Berliner Fußball. He also listed the evening's guests of honour, naming Paul Verner first and Konrad Naumann second, the candidate of the SED Central Committee and secretary of the Berlin district leadership, respectively. The author did not mention a representative of the trade union – and no-one responsible, neither from the federal nor from the Berlin level, was present. No trade union representative gave a welcoming address.

However, the delegates of the two clubs that had recently been founded in Berlin had sent their regards – as Paul Fettback, who had been appointed club secretary, recalled. Verner and TSC chairman Gerhard Michael also gave speeches. The late afternoon was relaxed and business-like, said Fettback, ‘we didn't plan to have a real party, we didn't do a dance event.’ The board that had been formed to run the club toasted to its future work with sparkling wine. The next day, the readers of the B.Z. am Abend also learned that the founding committee had ‘consciously chosen a modest setting’.

The DTSB had appointed and confirmed Werner Otto, General Director of the Association of State-Owned High-Voltage Equipment and Cable Companies, as chairman. The Oberspreer Kabelwerk, which had been selected as the most important of the supporting companies, also belonged to this industry. Its director, the party-independent technician Georg Pohler, also took a seat on the board, as did the minister of the industrial sector, Otfried Steger. They and the party representative Hans Wagner were the representatives of the club's economic and political supporters. The operational day-to-day business was now in the hands of club secretary Paul Fettback, a passionate football fan with a SED career to date. His deputy was the SED’s Günther Mielis, who had already earned the trust of the players as a youth coach at the predecessor clubs. The meeting set the players, who were present, an initial goal: promotion of the first team to the top division, the Oberliga. Union was the only second division club among the new clubs.

 

The club colours, red and white, have defined football in Köpenick since 1951. They were those of the sports club Motor, when the key players of Union Oberschöneweide joined the company sports club Motor Oberschöneweide in August of that year. ‘There was a fairly unanimous decision’ in 1966 that the colours “should remain red and white in the future as well,” as reported in Berliner Fußball – “the colours of our city”. TSC Berlin were also red and white.

The Unioners only saw a club emblem for the first time in February. The board of directors had commissioned the commercial artist Peter Gribat to create one and he presented them with a series of designs. The one that is still in use today (with only minimal changes over the years) was originally symbolically wreathed in foliage, while the ball in the centre also appears in the original version.

The emblem is not the only thing that clearly shows what the club's founders did right back then. The 1964 DTSB concept also identified ‘the isolation of the football sections and the thousands of football supporters’ as ‘the decisive mistake’ made since 1954. The possibility of becoming a supporting member was intended to resolve the lack of connection between sports fans and their clubs.

That Union can now count on more than 69,000 members of Union today is the result of the decisions taken at that time.