On 30 April 1898, former members of the Dresden English Football Club and of the Neue Dresdner FC founded the Dresdner Sport-Club. Until sports historian Andreas Wittner uncovered the earlier history of the DFC, it was thought to have been founded only in 1890. Early on, DSC made regular appearances in regional finals and captured several titles. They were a dominant side in the Mitteldeutschen Verbandsliga: from 1925 to 1930 they lost only two of the ninety games they played.
The 30s and 40s
Dresdner's performance slipped for a time, but the club re-emerged as a strong side in the Gauliga Sachsen, one of sixteen top flight divisions established in the re-organization of German football under the Third Reich. They captured the Tschammerpokal – the predecessor of today's German Cup in 1940 and 1941, and followed up with national titles in 1943 and 1944. The club won all 23 games they played during the 1942/43 season, scoring 152 goals and conceding only 16. Their 4:0 win over Luftwaffen SV Hamburg in Berlin's Olympiastadion made them the last holders of the Viktoria trophy, symbolic of German football supremacy since it was first awarded to VfB Leipzig in 1903. That trophy was secreted by a Dresden supporter to a bank safe deposit box in what would become East Germany and remained hidden away for decades before finally being returned to the German Football Association.
After World War II, all existing sports clubs and other organizations were banned by the Allied occupation authorities in an attempt to create a disconnect from the recent Nazi past. In early 1946, the club was re-constituted as SG Friedrichstadt and then slipped into oblivion after a fateful appearance in the 1950 East German final. That match, against Soviet-sponsored Horch Zwickau, would be the end of the side which was regarded as being too bourgeois by the communist authorities. Zwickau played a viciously physical game and, abetted by the referee who refused the homeside substitutions and eventually reduced Friedrichstadt to an 8-man squad, "won" the match 5:1. Unhappy Dresdner/Friedrichstadt fans invaded the field several times, and at game's end, badly beat a Zwickau player. Mounted police were called in to restore order. Within weeks, orders came to dismantle the club and send the players to BSG Tabak Dresden. Most of the players instead fled to the west to play for Hertha BSC. What happened to Dresdner/Friedrichstadt would become commonplace in East Germany as highly placed politicians or bureaucrats manipulated clubs for their own purposes.
Dissolution
At this point the history of the club becomes quite convoluted, with a number of sides laying claim to some part of the heritage of Dresdner SC:
Local side Volkspolizei Dresden, founded in 1948, was groomed as an ideologically safe "replacement" for the city's loss of their favoured team. The team was assembled using seventeen players plucked from eleven other clubs, the bulk of that number coming from SG Mickten. By the 1952–53 season the club was known as SG Dynamo Dresden and would go on to become one of East Germany's best teams. Unfortunately, they ran-afoul of Stasi-sponsored BFC Dynamo. While not as privileged as BFC Dynamo, Dynamo Dresden was a focus club and received considerable backing from local politians such as Hans Modrow, and would become the country's most successful side internationally. The club struggled after German re-unification in 1990, but recovered themselves sufficiently to earn a place in 2. Bundesliga.
What was left of SG Mickten, formed in 1947, was merged with BSG Sachsenverlag Dresden in 1950 and then went through a number of other mergers and name changes: BSG Rotation Dresden ; SC Einheit Dresden ; FSV Lokomotive Dresden ; and finally, in 1990, became today's Dresdner SC 1898.
BSG Tabak Dresden was a descendant of Dresdner SV 1910 which had taken in the players of the local sides of Striesen, Blasewitz, Tolkewitz und Laubegast at the behest of the Nazi sport authorities in 1933. The side was re-formed as SG Striesenafter the war in 1945 and played as ZSG Nagema Dresden in 1948 and 1949. The side then became Tabak, where the players of Dresdner/Friedrichstadt were officially directed after the farce of the 1950 final against Zwickau. The club SG Dresden Striesen emerged from it all in June 1991.
Another thread of the current incarnation of Dresdner SC can be traced back to the Gauliga side Dresdner Sportfreunde, itpself built out of the forced pre-war merger of a number of local sides. After World War II, that club was re-formed as SG Pieschen and then went through its own confusing series of unions with other clubs during the 50s. In 1966, the football side of the club emerged as FSV Lokomotiv Dresden.
The "new" Dresdner SC was formed at the time of German re-unification, beginning play in the 1991–92 season. They reached the third-tier Regionalliga in 1998, and finished second in the 1999–2000, and supplanting Dynamo Dresden as the top team in the city. They were relegated in 2003, though, which prompted an insolvency and a gradual drop to the local amateur leagues. Since 2012 the club has been playing in the tier seven Landesklasse.
played for Dresdner/Friedrichstadt and would go on to become one of West Germany's most exceptional managers and, in an historical aside, also coached Saarland's World Cup side in 1954. Richard Hofmann, nicknamed "King Richard", scored 24 goals in 25 games for the German national team from 1927 to 1933 He also was one of the integral players in the DSC's cup and championship wins, but was never considered for the national team after 1933 for political reasons.
DSC-Players who played for the German national teamKicker-Almanach 2003. Copress Verlag München 2002.
