While baseball is not a major sport in Germany like it is in North America, baseball cards have still found an audience among collectors in the country. The history of baseball cards in Germany can be traced back to the post-World War II American occupation when GIs introduced the sport and its trading cards to local German children.

In the late 1940s and 1950s, American soldiers stationed in Germany would often bring packs of baseball cards with them from back home. They shared their hobby with young Germans they befriended and sometimes traded or gave away duplicate cards. This helped spark early interest in collecting among Germans, even if they didn’t fully understand the rules of the game being depicted on the cards yet.

By the 1960s, as Germany’s economy strengthened in the postwar years, some German entrepreneurs spotted an opportunity. Small publishers began producing low-budget baseball card sets featuring German translations of American players’ names and stats on the back. These early German-language cards helped grow the collecting audience further by making the players and stats more accessible to local fans.

It wasn’t until the 1970s that baseball cards really took off in popularity in Germany as the country opened up more to American culture. Two major developments fueled this surge: First, American sports leagues like Major League Baseball saw an opportunity and began marketing their sports more aggressively in Germany. Second, German publishing houses realized there was money to be made by licensing baseball properties and producing higher-quality card sets locally.

One of the pioneering German publishers was Condor Verlag, which secured licenses from Topps and other American card makers to produce runs of localized cards using the same designs and photographs. Other major German publishers like Asso, PANINI and Select soon followed suit with their own baseball sets translated into German. These mass-produced local issues helped grow the fanbase exponentially by making cards much more widely available.

In the 1980s, collectors in Germany had their choice of various annual German-language releases replicating the Topps, Donruss and Fleer sets produced stateside that year. These local issues built upon the growing popularity of MLB among German sports fans, many of whom were now following their favorite teams and players avidly. Newer publishers like Bommer and Record also entered the market to compete for collectors’ dollars.

This was also when the first dedicated baseball card conventions and collector shows began popping up regularly in German cities like Frankfurt and Munich each year. This allowed aficionados to buy, sell and trade in person—an important social element that further galvanized the growing hobby community in Germany. Icons from the 1980s like the ’87 Topps set featuring Ken Griffey Jr.’s rookie card were hugely popular among German collectors as well.

In the 1990s, the German baseball card market entered a golden age of sorts as the sport saw its highest popularity levels yet locally. Publishers were pumping out massive annual sets replicating the flagship Topps, Fleer Ultra and Stadium Club English-language issues that collectors stateside enjoyed. Exclusive German parallels and insert sets became more common too from the major publishers to drive new interest.

This was also when elaborate hobby boxes containing factory sealed packs of the latest English-language sets began arriving in Germany. Enterprising hobby shop owners would break these boxes, sort the packs and sell them individually—a value-added service for collectors. High-end vintage sets from the 1960s-1980s also started gaining value as the hobby matured.

In more recent decades, the baseball card market in Germany has stabilized. While it remains smaller than other sports like soccer, dedicated collectors continue to enjoy annual releases from the major publishers as well as newer independent German companies. The internet has also been a boon, allowing for easier trading between collectors worldwide. Vintage cards from the 1970s-1990s golden era especially retain strong demand and appreciation among collectors today.

While baseball itself may never rival soccer in popularity locally, its vibrant trading card culture in Germany is a testament to how globalized the sports card industry has become. Fueled by American GIs, shrewd publishers and decades of dedicated fandom, baseball cards have carved out their own unique space among collectors in Germany. Their history shows how a hobby can be localized for new audiences worldwide.