Kalpana Kalpana (Editor)

Doping in East Germany

Updated on
Edit
Like
Comment
Share on FacebookTweet on TwitterShare on LinkedInShare on Reddit

The German Democratic Republic (GDR), commonly known as East Germany (German: Deutsche Demokratische Republik or DDR) conducted a decades-long program of coercive administration and distribution of performance-enhancing drugs, such as testosterone and other anabolic steroids to its elite athletes for the purpose of bolstering the communist state's image and prestige by winning medals in international championships (such as the Olympics), known officially as State Plan 14.25. The drug regimens, given either with or without the knowledge of the athletes, resulted in victories in international competitions, including the Olympic Games. East Germany had been a pioneering state in doping, so much that it was considered to be the inventor of doping.

Contents

Systematic doping of athletes ended with the fall of communism in East Germany in 1989, before German reunification a year later. Many former athletes suffer from health problems related to steroid consumption.

Use of sport in ideology

Socialist East Germany’s use of sport is similar to use of the Italian National Football team in Fascist Italy during the reign of Benito Mussolini, or Nazi Germany’s use of the 1936 Olympics during the reign of Hitler.

Dictators and authoritarians understood sports as events that were more than just athletics to the public; sport was a “cultural institution in society and it plays an important role in many citizen’s lives”.

Not only was sport used as propaganda to achieve international prominence, it was also used on the home front, as “the political use of sport has ranged from attempting to reduce crime levels, stimulate ‘social capital’ and promote cohesion among disadvantaged groups. Benefits claimed for sport range from fighting obesity – and hence reducing the burden on the National Health Service”.

Following the end of the World War II, sport became incrasingly politicized on the world stage. International competitions, like the Olympics, various World Cups, and similar large-scale events began to be recognised as more than purely athletic enterprises, whence actual competition between the West and the East increased in other areas. Inventions in broadcasting, such as television, amplified media attention to the point of putting financial support and perceived national reputations all at stake.

Aspects around sports funding, coupled with the egos of nations that were in ideological conflict with one another, meant, that sporting competitions with their participation would offer a chance to demonstrate which country was superior.

For Eastern-Bloc states, the Cold War was a time, when right- and left-wing political powers of the world constantly vied for supremacy politically, economically and militarily; one example of it being the Space Race. Western countries, on the other hand, sought to preserve their freedom.

Situation in East Germany

The German Democratic Republic (GDR), colloquially known as East Germany, was ideologically a Marxist–Leninist state with socialist trappings. The GDR closed itself to the sporting world in May 1965.

In GDR, the origin for sports culture was found following World War II, when people were poor, malnourished, and unhealthy; state ideology also regarded its people as having been 'in need of guidance.' With most fitness centers destroyed in the air bombing campaigns, and most equipment taken by the Soviets during their invasion of Germany, the GDR government decided to create the DSA (Deutscher Sportausschuss), a 'German Committee for Sports'.

The left-wing ideology of East Germany then progressed: that every citizen was equal and was expected to give back to the state. Accordingly, sportspeople's achievements were attributed to the state. But career opportunities depended on political loyalty.

The GDR differed from the states of Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany only due to advances in science, and in the incredible and deeply unethical uses of science and medicine to aid the state's push for dominance. East Germany's desire to ostensibly promote left-wing ideologies, mixed with advancements in medicine, inevitably led GDR to use their athletes as a propaganda tool.

State policy

State-endorsed doping began with the Cold War, when every eastern bloc gold was an ideological victory. From 1974 on, Manfred Ewald, the head of the GDR's sports federation, imposed blanket doping. Ewald was quoted as having told coaches: "They're still so young and don't have to know everything."

Procedures and mechanisms

Most children would compete in youth sport centers and be scouted by the government, which resulted in the best prospects being taken for the purpose of intense Olympic training. These children were expected to deliver great victories, and the state was willing to use anything at its disposal to ensure that. The advances in medicine and science meant that use of steroids, amphetamines, human growth hormones and blood boosting were common practice behind the scenes in training centers for professional athletes.

The Sportvereinigung Dynamo (English: Sport Club Dynamo) was especially singled out as a center for doping in the former East Germany.

Initial outcomes

The results of East German sportspeople appeared at the time to be an immense success: “Not until 1964, In Tokyo, did East German participants win more medals than their Western team colleagues."

Four years later, in Mexico City, the GDR, entering for the first time as a separate team, surpassed the West German (FRG) medal count.

At the 1968 Mexico City Olympics, the GDR, a country of 17 million, collected nine gold medals. Four years later, the total was 20, and in 1976, it doubled again to 40.

This was repeated on ‘enemy territory' at the 1972 Munich Games; subsequently, the GDR never fell below third in the unofficial rankings. The total medal count of GDR participants at the Winter and Summer Olympics from 1956 to 1988 amounted to 203 gold, 192 silver and 177 bronze”.

Effects on athletes

The results were great for East Germany, but absolutely devastating for the athletes involved: “While figures cannot be precise, the state-inspired doping program affected perhaps as many as 10,000 athletes. Not only was cheating at the center of the program, but so was the abuse of the athletes’ health. Female athletes, including adolescents, experienced virilisation symptoms, and possibly as many as 1,000 sportsmen and -women suffered serious and lasting physical and psychological damage”.

Often, doping was carried out without the knowledge of the athletes, some of them as young as ten years of age. It is estimated, that around 10,000 former athletes bear the physical and mental scars of years of drug abuse, one of them is Rica Reinisch, a triple Olympic champion and world record-setter at the Moscow Games in 1980, has since suffered numerous miscarriages and recurring ovarian cysts.

While the doping worked in achieving victories for the state and advancing a relatively small nation to prominence on the world stage, many concerns remain. All victories by East German athletes are tainted due to the widespread use of drugs. Many former doctors and former athletes struggling with the side effects are bringing sports directors to court. The legacy of East German sport outlasted the country.

Discovery

In 1977, shot-putter Ilona Slupianek, who weighed 93 kg (205 lb), tested positive for anabolic steroids at the European Cup meeting in Helsinki. At the same time, the Kreischa testing laboratory near Dresden passed into government control, which was reputed to make around 12,000 tests a year on East German athletes, but without any being penalised.

The International Amateur Athletics Federation suspended Slupianek for 12 months, a penalty that ended two days before the European championships in Prague. In reverse of what the IAAF hoped, sending her home to East Germany meant, that she was free to train unchecked with anabolic steroids, if she wanted to, and then compete for another gold medal, which indeed she won.

After the Slupianek affair, East German athletes were secretly tested before they left the country. Those who tested positive, were removed from international competition. Usually, such withdrawals were temporary, as they were intended to serve less as a punishment, but as a means to protect both the athlete and the East German team from international sanctions.

As it was, the media first in East Germany, and later outside, would usually be informed, that the withdrawal was due to an injury sustained during training. If the athlete was being doped in secret, as was often the case, their doctor would usually be ordered to fabricate a medical condition so as to justify the withdrawal of the athlete. The justficiation was also served as such to the athlete. The results of East Germany's internal drug tests were never made public - almost nothing emerged from the East German sports schools and laboratories. A rare exception was the visit by the sports writer and former athlete Doug Gilbert of the Edmonton Sun, who said:

Dr (Heinz) Wuschech knows more about anabolic steroids than any doctor I have ever met, and yet he cannot discuss them openly any more than Geoff Capes or Mac Wilkins can openly discuss them in the current climate of amateur sports regulation. What I did learn in East Germany was that they feel there is little danger from anabolica, as they call it, when the athletes are kept on strictly monitored programmes. Although the extremely dangerous side-effects are admitted, they are statistically no more likely to occur than side-effects from the birth control pill. If, that is, programmes are constantly medically monitored as to dosage.

Other reports came from the occasional athlete who fled to the West. There were 15 escapees between 1976 and 1979. One, the ski-jumper Hans Georg Aschenbach, said: "Long-distance skiers start having injections to their knees from the age 14 because of their intensive training." Aschenbach continued: "For every Olympic champion, there are at least 350 invalids. There are gymnasts among the girls who have to wear corsets from the age of 18 because their spine and their ligaments have become so worn... There are young people so worn out by the intensive training that they come out of it mentally blank [lessivés - washed out], which is even more painful than a deformed spine."

Then on 26 August 1993, well after the former GDR had disbanded itself to accede to the Federal Republic of Germany in 1990, the records were opened, and the evidence was there, that the Stasi, the GDR state secret police, supervised systematic doping of East German athletes from 1971 until reunification in 1990.

Virtually no East German athlete ever failed an official drugs test, though Stasi files show, that many did, indeed, produce positive tests at Kreischa, the Saxon laboratory (German:Zentrales Dopingkontroll-Labor des Sportmedizinischen Dienstes) that was at the time approved by the International Olympic Committee, now called the Institute of Doping Analysis and Sports Biochemistry (IDAS).

Jean-Pierre de Mondenard, an expert in performance-enhancing drugs, contended, that doping existed in other countries, both communist and capitalist, but the difference with East Germany was, that it was a state policy.

The search for justice

Many former club officials of Sportsvereinigung Dynamo and some athletes found themselves charged after the dissolution of GDR. A special page on the internet was created by doping victims trying to gain justice and compensation, listing people involved in doping in the GDR.

Two former Dynamo Berlin club doctors, Dieter Binus, chief of the national women's team from 1976 to 80, and Bernd Pansold, in charge of the sports medicine centre in East-Berlin, were committed for trial for allegedly supplying 19 teenagers with illegal substances. Binus was sentenced in August, Pansold in December 1998 after both being found guilty of administering hormones to underage female athletes from 1975 to 1984.

Daniela Hunger and Andrea Pollack are the former Sport Club Dynamo athletes who publicly came forward and admitted to doping, accused their coaches.

Former Sport Club Dynamo athletes disqualified for doping:

  • Ilona Slupianek (Ilona Slupianek was tested positive along with three Finnish athletes at the 1977 European Cup, becoming the only East German athlete ever to be convicted of doping)
  • Manfred Ewald, who had imposed blanket doping in East Germany, was given a 22-month suspended sentence to the outrage of his victims.

    In 2005, fifteen years after the end of the GDR, the manufacturer of the drugs in former East Germany, Jenapharm, still finds itself involved in numerous lawsuits from doping victims, being sued by almost 200 former athletes.

    Based on an admission given by Andrea Pollack, the United States Olympic Committee asked for the redistribution of gold medals won in the 1976 Summer Olympics. Despite court rulings in Germany about substantial claims of systematic doping by some East German swimmers, the IOC executive board announced that it has no intention of revising the Olympic record books. In rejecting the American petition on behalf of its women's medley relay team in Montreal and a similar petition from the British Olympic Association on behalf of Sharron Davies, the IOC made it clear that it wanted to discourage any such appeals in the future.

    Documentation

    In 1991 Brigitte Berendonk and Werner Franke, two opponents of the doping, published several theses which had been drafted former researchers in the GDR doping products which were at the Military Medical Academy Bad Saarow. Based on this work, in their book (translated from German as 'Doping Documents") they were able to reconstruct the practice of doping as it was organized by the State on many great athletes from the GDR, including Marita Koch and Heike Drechsler, who have denied the allegations. Brigitte Berendonk survived a 1993 lawsuit where Drechsler accused her of lying. The lawsuit essentially validates the book.

    Renate Neufeld

    In 1977, one of East Germany's best sprinters, Renate Neufeld, fled to the West with the Bulgarian she later married. A year later she said that she had been told to take drugs supplied by coaches while training to represent East Germany in the 1980 Olympic Games.

    At 17, I joined the East Berlin Sports Institute. My speciality was the 80m hurdles. We swore that we would never speak to anyone about our training methods, including our parents. The training was very hard. We were all watched. We signed a register each time we left for dormitory and we had to say where we were going and what time we would return. One day, my trainer, Günter Clam, advised me to take pills to improve my performance: I was running 200m in 24 seconds. My trainer told me the pills were vitamins, but I soon had cramps in my legs, my voice became gruff and sometimes I couldn't talk any more. Then I started to grow a moustache and my periods stopped. I then refused to take these pills. One morning in October 1977, the secret police took me at 7am and questioned me about my refusal to take pills prescribed by the trainer. I then decided to flee, with my fiancé.

    She brought with her to the West grey tablets and green powder she said had been given to her, to members of her club, and to other athletes. The West German doping analyst Manfred Donike reportedly identified them as anabolic steroids. She said she stayed quiet for a year for the sake of her family. But when her father then lost his job and her sister was expelled from her handball club, she decided to tell her story.

    Andreas Krieger

    Andreas Krieger, then known as Heidi Krieger, competed as a woman in the East German athletics team, winning the gold medal for shot put in the 1986 European Championships in Athletics.

    From the age of 16 onward, Krieger was systematically doped with anabolic steroids, which have significant androgenic effects on the body. She had already had doubts about her gender identity, and the chemical changes resulting from the steroids only exacerbated them. In 1997, some years after retirement, Krieger underwent sex reassignment surgery and changed his name to Andreas.

    At the trial of Manfred Ewald, leader of the East German sports program and president of his East Germany's Olympic committee and Manfred Hoeppner, East German medical director in Berlin in 2000, Krieger testified that the drugs he had been given had contributed to his trans-sexuality.

    References

    Doping in East Germany Wikipedia


    Similar Topics