When the Berliners last won the championship in 1931, Germany was in the middle of the global economic crisis and the trophy was still the Viktoria, not the modern shield. During the Bundesliga era Hertha became the first great scandal club of German football. For decades.\n\nThe triumphant promotion of 1997 seemed to shake that image.
Hertha drew more than 75,000 for major games against Dortmund, Bayern and Kaiserslautern and in 1998/99 reached the Champions League for the first time by finishing third. The team under Jürgen Röber showed Europe that Germany’s capital did, after all, exist on the football map.