Stasi Controlled E. German Sports -- Documents Show Doping Was Used To Show `Superiority'

BERLIN - New documents discovered in the vast files left by the former East Germany's secret police, the Stasi, disclosed just how systematic doping was in making the communist state's athletes the remarkable world-beaters they were for decades.

One memo reads: "The aim is to secure a top position for East German sport and demonstrate the superiority of socialist society over capitalist by the use of u.M. . . . and to prevent their use being proved."

The term "u.M." is an abbreviation of the German for "supportive means" - in other words, doping.

Documents going back to 1971 show that East German sport was totally Stasi-controlled.

A "control and research institute" in Kreischa, a village near Dresden, played a central doping role. Like all aspects of East German sport, it had a Stasi man in a key position as deputy head.

Another document implicates Manfred Ewald, who long headed East Germany's main sports organization and who after reunification in 1989 consistently claimed to know nothing of doping practices.

This document, a memo from an informant to a senior Stasi officer, refers to former world-champion sprinter Marlies Goehr, then known by her unmarried name, Marlies Oelsner - getting caught for doping at the European junior championships in 1975.

During training, it says, she had undergone "three instead of the planned two doping cycles, and the last was not terminated in time." It adds: "The first reaction of Comrade Ewald was that such a situation had to come about sooner or later."

"Fantastic effort" went into sending East German athletes to the Olympics and other top international competition, according to Hans-Joerg Geiger.

Geiger is deputy head of the so-called Gauk authority in Berlin, where former Stasi files are stored in banks of documents 108 miles long. He's one of the few people to have had anything approaching a detailed look at the relevant files.

The authority organizes the long and often painful business of letting former East Germans and others see the extent to which the Stasi spied on its own people and carried out covert operations.

Another set of documents records how, just for the 1980 Winter Olympics in Lake Placid, N.Y., the East German party included 10 Stasi agents among the 61 competitors and coaches, 9 among the 45 journalists and 16 among the 70 officials.

The "operative group" carrying out an "operative plan" to grab as many medals as possible was headed by a Stasi departmental chief, and sports material to be kept secret from the U.S. "class enemy" was sent "secured by transport means used for diplomatic baggage."

Gauk officials say that because of the post-reunification interest in political persecution during the four decades of communist rule, relatively few files have been looked at concerning sport so far.

This is about to change. Hans Hansen, German Sport Federation president, and his deputy, Manfred von Richthofen, were scheduled to visit the Gauk authority last week.

While Hansen is known to want a cautious approach in stirring up the doping past of people still active in German athletics, Richthofen has a more uncompromising approach.

Clearly, a lot of documentation has to be sifted through - unique material which could give the sort of record of systematic doping over the years which no one would have dreamed of keeping in the West, where doping was as prevalent if not state-run.