FV Preussen Eberswalde

History

FV Preussen Eberswalde began on 1 July 1909 under the name FC Preussen Eberswalde. Before World War I, the team climbed steadily and reached the highest local league. The war nearly destroyed the club, but it resumed play in 1920 and quickly regained its strength, losing only one match in the 1922–23 season and moving up to the second-highest division in the country. When the Nazis took power in 1933, German football was reorganized, and Preussen held its place in the second-tier Oberliga. By 1936, however, the side had dropped back to city league competition. After World War II began, the team played fewer and fewer matches. In the 1943–44 season, Preussen briefly joined forces with its longtime local rival, Eberswalde SV 1912 (originally FC Britannia), as a combined wartime side known as a Kriegspielgemeinschaft. When the war ended, Allied authorities banned most German organizations, including sports clubs. The two former partners reemerged in 1946 as ZSG Eberswalde-Nord and ZSG Eberswalde-Süd, respectively.

Eberswalde lay in the Soviet occupation zone, which soon became East Germany, and separate football leagues developed there. As was common in the east, the club changed names several times: it became ZSG Eintracht Eberswalde in 1948, BSG Stahl Eberswalde in 1950, and finally BSG Motor Eberswalde in 1952. That same year, a league restructuring meant the club no longer regularly faced strong teams from Potsdam and Lausitz. Taking advantage, they won district titles in 1955 and 1956. However, they could not advance through the playoffs into the second-division DDR-Liga. This failure repeated itself in five more promotion attempts up to 1970, until the club finally earned promotion in 1972. Over the next decade, Eberswalde easily dominated the third-division Bezirksliga Frankfurt/Oder but could not stay up in the DDR-Liga for long. After dropping back to the third division in 1984, they won division titles in five of the next six seasons, yet again failed to win promotion to the second tier until after German reunification in 1990. The club then changed its name to SV Motor Eberswalde, and in 1995 the football section became independent as FV Motor Eberswalde.