The Race Against the Stasi Read online

  Also by Herbie Sykes

  The Eagle of the Canavese

  Franco Balmamion and the Giro d’Italia

  Maglia Rosa

  Triumph and tragedy at the Giro d’Italia

  Coppi

  Inside the legend of the Campionissimo

  THE RACE

  AGAINST THE STASI

  HERBIE SYKES

  THE INCREDIBLE STORY OF DIETER WIEDEMANN, THE IRON CURTAIN AND THE GREATEST CYCLING RACE ON EARTH

  CONTENTS

  Epigraph

  Notes on the Text

  The Race For Peace

  The First Life of Dieter Wiedemann (and the Fourth)

  The Second Life of Dieter Wiedemann (and the Fourth)

  The Third Life of Dieter Wiedemann (and the Fourth)

  Turin, May 2014

  Selected Bibliography

  Acknowledgements

  Photographs

  Copyright

  ‘The Peace Race was an oasis, and through it we were able to dream. It was about different peoples, from different countries, crossing borders and coming together. It was about genuine fellowship, and that was its beauty and virtue. For two weeks a year it offered us a window on worlds we were denied access to. It was a huge paradox, obviously, but for me it remains something beautiful. It was the race of peace.’

  Horst Schäfer, Curator, Peace Race Museum

  NOTES ON THE TEXT

  Documents prefixed MfS (Ministry for State Security) are reproduced from Stasi files. Those prefixed MfS383/65 are reproduced from Wiedemann’s file. Where the prefix includes a number other than 383/65, they are reproduced from the files of the informants who reported on him.

  Many persons are redacted in the Stasi files. People referred to as (?) are either protected under current legislation, unknown to the author, or have chosen to remain anonymous. In some instances addresses and other indicators are also redacted, in order to help conceal their identity. Some blocks of text have been redacted from the Stasi files. In these instances the text is either indecipherable or is not germane to Dieter Wiedemann. In translating the Stasi files I have attempted to be as faithful as possible to the original documents. On occasion, therefore, the grammar may be less than perfect.

  This work is not intended as an examination of Stasi structure or methodology, but twenty-five secret informants are believed to have compiled reports on or including Dieter Wiedemann. Most were submitted to one of the following four Stasi offices:

  Berlin: Seat of the vast Stasi headquarters and of the GDR Cycling Federation. From here, main department V sought to recruit Wiedemann as an informant in 1962.

  Chemnitz (previously known as Karl-Marx-Stadt): One of the fifteen regional ‘area command units’.

  Flöha: A ‘district service unit’ in Wiedemann’s home town, subordinate to Chemnitz Area Command Unit.

  ‘W’: A division responsible for the Wismut uranium mining company and its assets, including the sport club it ran.

  Staff or informants from the following Stasi departments compiled reports on Wiedemann at one time or another:

  Main Department II: Counterintelligence

  Department M: Postal surveillance

  Main Department VI: Passport control, Tourism

  Main Department VII: Ministry for the Interior, People’s Police

  Main Department VIII: Economy

  Main Department XX: Apparatus of the State, Culture (including sport), Church, ‘Underground’

  Main Department V: As Main Department XX, prior to 1964

  The Stasi files use various terms to describe the unofficial informants. Most commonly these are ‘GI’ (Geheimer Informator), the term used throughout the 1950s, and ‘IM’ (Inoffizieller Mitarbeiter), adopted in 1969 but already prevalent beforehand. For the purposes of simplicity, however, I have used the term ‘informant’ throughout the text. Equally, where other Stasi abbreviations appear (for example ‘KW’; conspiratorial dwelling), I have taken the liberty of translating them.

  All of the interviews in this book were carried out before the Stasi files were accessed.

  Witnesses

  Dieter: Dieter Wiedemann

  Sylvia: Sylvia Wiedemann, wife of Dieter

  Nicole, Alex and Nina: Daughters of Dieter and Sylvia

  Eberhard: Eberhard Wiedemann, brother of Dieter

  Rainer: Rainer Müller, best friend of Dieter

  Klaus: Klaus Huhn, sports editor, Neues Deutschland

  Täve: Täve Schur, racing cyclist with DHfK

  Immo: Immo Rittmeyer, racing cyclist with SC Karl-Marx-Stadt

  Manfred: Manfred Weissleder, racing cyclist with SC Karl-Marx-Stadt

  Ian: Ian Steel, British racing cyclist

  Frank: Frank Seal, British racing cyclist

  Axel: Axel Peschel, racing cyclist with Dynamo Berlin

  Gerhard: Gerhard Richter, Wiedemann family friend

  Udo: Udo Richter, son of Dieter’s trainer, fellow cyclist and defector

  In absentia

  Emil: Emil Reinecke, racing cyclist with DHfK

  Werner: Werner Scharch, former president of GDR cycling and defector

  Informants

  ‘Fritzsche’: Cycling trainer, SC Karl-Marx-Stadt, born 1915

  ‘Hildebrand’: Cycling trainer, SC Dynamo Berlin, born 1929

  ‘Jonni’: Worker, SDAG Wismut, born 1926

  ‘Kaufmann’: Neighbour of Dieter Wiedemann, born 1897

  ‘Orion’: Classmate of Dieter Wiedemann, born 1941

  ‘Radler’: Cycling trainer, SC Dynamo Berlin, born 1913

  ‘Seppel’: Retired cyclist, trainer at BSG Wismut, born 1927

  ‘Ursel’: Worker, SDAG Wismut, born 1928

  THE RACE FOR PEACE

  Arguably the most efficient of the Warsaw Pact dictatorships, East Germany (the GDR) is invariably portrayed as the cruellest and most oppressive. In the broad-brush historical way of things, it’s come to be characterised by little more than the Berlin Wall, and by the secret police force known as the Stasi. In a sporting context it’s synonymous with a grotesque, state-orchestrated doping programme, with Olympic fraud on a mammoth scale.

  Immediately Stalin bludgeoned it into being in 1949, the GDR was declared a rogue state by the western allies. Two years later, when the GDR formed its own National Olympic Committee, the IOC refused to recognise its legitimacy. Instead it was invited to participate in the 1952 Olympics as part of a combined German team, with predictable consequences; no East German athletes made the trip to Helsinki. Between 1956 and 1964 a deeply politicised all-German ‘alliance’ competed at both summer and winter games. Not until 1965 did the IOC recognise the GDR and the Mexico games hosted, for the first time, its national team.

  For twenty years thereafter the country, a socialist totalitarian state of around seventeen million people, achieved astounding, unprecedented results at the Olympics. GDR athletes out-ran, -jumped, -lifted and -swam all but those of the USSR. The ‘GDR sports miracle’, driven by systematic, state-run anabolic steroid abuse, saw the country’s weightlifters, skiers, athletes and gymnasts routinely finish second in the Olympic medal table. It was entirely as ordered by the ruling SED party,1 for whom sports were a crucial propaganda instrument. In performing so spectacularly, they apparently underscored the moral and political supremacy of communism to their countrymen, but also to the capitalist west.

  At the Montreal games of 1976, East German teenagers won eleven of the thirteen female swimming competitions. All told, the GDR accumulated no fewer than forty golds at those games, six more than the USA, a country of 220 million people. Meanwhile, West Germany (the FRG), with its sixty-one million citizens, took home ten. Eight years on, at the winter games in Sarajev
o, the GDR actually topped the medal table, winning a quarter of all the available prizes.

  Huge doses of Oral-Turinabol, the testosterone-filled ‘blue bean’ developed by the state-owned pharmaceutical company VEB Jenapharm, were administered under Stasi supervision. Stories of the hideous physical and psychological damage it visited upon the country’s teenage swimmers and gymnasts are legion, but no less horrific for it. They tell of liver damage, hirsuteness and infertility among the girls, of testicular cancer and of appalling emotional and corporal deformation. Particularly shocking was the testimony of Hans-Georg Aschenbach, a former ski-jumping champion. Doped from the age of sixteen, he claimed that the drugs, combined with the massive physical workload, saw to it that for every East German Olympic gold medallist there were 350 invalids.

  The man who oversaw the programme, code-named ‘Stateplan 14.25’, was a former Nazi named Manfred Ewald. As head of the hugely successful German Gymnastics and Sport Federation (DTSB) he was one of the first recipients of the Olympic Order, an honour he shared with Jesse Owens and Pope John Paul II. Two years later, GDR First Minister Erich Honecker was given one, as was the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu. The latter was summarily executed for genocide in December 1989, while Honecker escaped to Chile. Ewald was convicted for the intentional bodily harm of twenty elite athletes, all of whom had been administered anabolic steroids without their knowledge. He was sentenced to twenty-two months. Suspended.

  All of the above is a matter of public record, but what of East German cycling, a sport with a notoriously troubled relationship with doping? I’d always been intrigued by the subject, and I’d learned that bike racing had been extremely popular there, particularly in the 1950s and 1960s. At its vanguard was the mythical Friedensfahrt, the Peace Race. The so-called ‘Tour de France of the East’, it ran each May between Berlin, Warsaw and Prague, and by common consent had once been a much bigger event than the Tour. I wanted to understand just how big, and to gain an appreciation of its significance culturally, politically and socially. I’d heard from British participants about the vast crowds, but had no understanding of the quotidian reality for those for whom it was the highlight of the sporting calendar. Where did it sit within the GDR sporting milieu, and within that of the Eastern Bloc as a whole? Who were East Germany’s cycling heroes, and how politicised were their lives? How much was controlled and orchestrated by the state, and to what degree did political conviction (or otherwise) materially condition cycling achievement? What was it like to be a bike racer in a supposedly tyrannous state, and how did the sport’s practitioners fare at the hands of the Stasi?

  Like many cycling people I was familiar with the story of Wolfgang Lötzsch. The most talented rider of his generation, he had earned selection for a 1972 Olympic training camp aged just nineteen. His father, however, had criticised the absence of a free press in the GDR, and Wolfgang failed to denounce him. In so doing, and in his refusal to join the party, he made himself an enemy of the state. For all his extravagant talent he would never represent his country, never travel to the west, never ride the Peace Race or the World Championships.

  The problem for the dictatorship was that Lötzsch routinely trounced those who did, ridiculing the hypocrisy at its root. Wolfgang Lötzsch was easily the best rider in the GDR, but his career became an ideological cause célèbre. Support for him inferred opposition to the party, and as he won and won again so his ‘fan base’ grew. Simple bike rider or otherwise, he became synonymous with the ‘passive resistance’ movement, and so the Stasi declared all-out war on him.

  Twelve full-time agents and fifty secret informants hounded him relentlessly, and eventually he cracked. In articulating his support for the dissident musician Wolf Biermann, he presented them with the pretext they needed. He served ten months in solitary confinement and, upon his release, had his racing licence revoked. He later agreed to conform but, licence back in hand, simply resumed hostilities. His life and career started to resemble a political chess match, albeit one played out in public. A part-time cyclist denied access to decent equipment and training facilities, he continued to humiliate the full-time, state-sponsored riders and their paymasters.

  In 1979 he lined up with the elite of the national team at the Tour of Berlin. It was biggest single-day race in the GDR, and one of the few to be televised. Before a huge audience he rode away 150 kilometres from home, and soloed to victory. It was the apogee of his ‘career’, and the symbolism of it was lost on nobody. Lötzsch claimed to be apolitical, but being apolitical, or even ambivalent, wasn’t remotely good enough in the GDR: either you were with socialism or you were against it. Therefore in winning a simple bicycle race, Lötzsch had rubbed their noses in it. From there on in his training would be curtailed further still, the chances of a repeat performance all but eradicated.

  Wolfgang Lötzsch, though, was one of thousands of racers in the GDR. I therefore assumed that his case couldn’t be representative of all GDR cyclists, and nor of sport there as a whole. Could it?

  In 2012 I was working with Timm Kölln, a Berlin-based photographer. Travelling extensively through eastern Germany, we met former cyclists, journalists and officials. In addition, we mined the vaults at the Peace Race Museum, tucked away amidst the agricultural communities of Saxony-Anhalt. We did so in the hope of exhuming something of the GDR cycling landscape and, gradually but unequivocally, an extraordinary story revealed itself. It was ostensibly that of a two-week stage race, but it would inform all of GDR sport for the thick end of four decades.

  As a child of the capitalist west I’d had no real understanding of the degree to which politics – all twentieth-century politics – directly influenced the careers of those who rode the Peace Race, and those who didn’t. Equally, I had totally underestimated the sheer political resonance of GDR bike racing, particularly in the 1950s and 1960s. Nowhere, not even in Nazi Germany, has sport been so influential in shaping the way a society acted and thought.

  From the outset, western politicians and diplomats viewed the GDR as an illegitimate pariah state, unlawfully created and propped up both militarily and politically by the USSR. Stalin, however, didn’t much trouble himself with the platitudes of diplomacy. Rather, he charged his East Berlin serfs with the creation of a dynamic new country, and with persuading a population of 18.9 million to buy into it. Somehow they had to be convinced that they were stakeholders in a progressive new society, that they were fashioning an alternative to the imperialism which had decimated their continent.

  The political rhetoric of the nascent GDR project was therefore characterised not only by stereotypical communist sloganeering, but also by a unique optimism. Through a huge propaganda machine the party set about convincing East Germans that they were building the model socialist state. As ever in these circumstances they fostered the idea of a common enemy – capitalism – and gave it a flesh and blood embodiment: Chancellor Konrad Adenauer and the Bonn government of the FRG. The rationale for so doing was manifest. In Leipzig, Dresden and East Berlin, ordinary Germans had suffered appalling, incalculable hardship as a direct consequence of Nazism. The party therefore sought to prove to them that the FRG remained a fascist rampart and a class enemy. If they could be convinced, it reasoned, they would be unburdened of moral, emotional and political responsibility for the war. That in turn would lead to national unity, and ultimately to the utopia of communism. Meanwhile, the opposition parties were systematically disembodied, the police and the judiciary neutered, religious institutions marginalised.

  West German politicians lobbied for reunification. They also claimed that in the meantime theirs was the only legitimate Germany, that the GDR was simply a Soviet foil. The east ostensibly sought repatriation, too, but as a socialist state. Many believed it was entirely disingenuous, a pretext upon which to pin the supposed intransigence of the west. For all their diplomatic bluster it was never going to happen, but that really wasn’t the point. The point was the successful creation and manipulation of East German (as
distinct to German) sentiment. The party apparatchiks knew full well that the business at hand wasn’t reconciliation at all, but, rather, quite the opposite. Their objective was the unification of East Germans, and they’d achieve it first and foremost through the systematic portrayal of western politicians as implicitly corrupt, morally bankrupt. Through total media control – and many would say outright lies and obfuscation – they set about creating an entirely new German identity, to building the GDR.

  Against this political backdrop, the leaders of the Czech and Polish cycling federations sat down to discuss a complex problem in 1950. Two years earlier a coalition of sports journalists had conceived a cross-border bike race for national amateur teams. It would be run off between Warsaw and Prague, and would be organised and promoted by the respective party newspapers, Trybuna Ludu2 and Rudé Právo. Its genesis had lain in the idea of using sport to promote solidarity between two populations which had suffered immeasurable damage during the war, and which were now being rebuilt under communist dictatorships.

  The event, circumventing Germany (the common enemy), had been inaugurated on 1 May 1948, International Workers’ Day. It had finished, by design, eight days later on VE Day, and had immediately captured the public imagination. At the second edition, finishing in Warsaw, the great Czech rider Jan Veselý had triumphed, while Polish riders won two of the stages. Later that year Germany’s division became permanent and the Soviet Occupation Zone became the GDR, ostensibly a communist ally.

  Notwithstanding – or perhaps because of – its inherent nationalism, the event was rebranded ‘The Peace Race’3 in 1950, and assumed Picasso’s white dove as its symbol. According to its precepts any nation, regardless of political orientation, creed, sporting prowess or wealth, would be at liberty to send a team. The previous year a team of French communists had competed alongside their brethren from behind Churchill’s ‘Iron Curtain’. So, too, had a group from neutral Finland, and all had been generously received. Their presence hardly represented a groundswell of geopolitical goodwill, but it was a start. The Peace Race, unencumbered by the monetary inducements which compromised the integrity of professional sport, was simply an open invitation to come and ride. While the Tour de France and the Giro d’Italia were professional events constructed around commercial interest, this was something else entirely. It was cycling as a metaphor for community among all the world’s peoples.