Stasi files reveal Katarina Witt was willing accomplice

The Sunday Telegraph (U.K.) ^ | 05/05/2002 | Tony Paterson

[Pokey78]

SECRET police files on Katarina Witt have revealed that the most glamorous and popular sporting figure in the former East Germany was so close to the Stasi that she considered them a "partner".

Excerpts from the Olympic Gold winner's files published last week in Der Spiegel magazine raise embarrassing questions about the career of the former figure skating champion.

	Katrina Witt: Stasi files reveal her loyalty to the Communist regime

The disclosures suggest that Ms Witt, 36, who posed naked for Playboy in 1998, was one of the East German regime's most willing accomplices.

The state gave her cars, accommodation and a passport enabling her to travel to the West. In return she co-operated fully and promised not to defect.

While it has always been assumed that members of national sports teams in the former Soviet bloc were placed under intensive surveillance, if only to limit their chances of defection, the extent of Ms Witt's apparent compliance with the authorities has astonished Germans.

The first excerpts to be published from her files show that in October 1989, a month before the Berlin Wall fell, Ms Witt told her Stasi minders: "Had I not had you and your generous support, my success would not have been as great as it has become."

In another meeting, she said: "Thank you - you are the only people one can rely on."

The revelations have appeared despite attempts by Ms Witt's lawyers to obtain a court injunction preventing publication of an 181-page section of her 1,354-page Stasi file.

The German government body responsible for issuing Stasi material says that the section in question shows her to have been a "beneficiary of the regime" and that it is therefore entitled by law to release the material for publication.

Ms Witt, who won gold medals for figure skating in the 1984 and 1988 Winter Olympics, has since built an international career as a producer of ice extravaganzas. She was also a television commentator during the last winter games.

In 1988, the Stasi commander in Karl-Marx-Stadt, Ms Witt's home city, wrote to Gen Erich Mielke, the Stasi chief: "The regular meetings have enabled a real basis of trust to be established between Katarina Witt and the Ministry of State Security.

"She sees the ministry as a partner in whom she can confide all problems including her relationships with men."

Ms Witt has refrained from commenting on the latest excerpts but has always professed a certain loyalty towards East Germany. She told Der Spiegel: "They want to publish part of my file, but I want a stop put to this. Sometimes I think they are taking away my life."

Late last year she said: "I will never turn round and say I lived in a horrible country and had a horrible time because the success I have today would never have been possible if I had grown up in the West. All the groundwork was laid in East Germany."

The excerpts provide an insight into the relationship between the skater and the Stasi during the first 23 Communist-controlled years of her life. The Stasi took an interest in her when she was nine years old and a promising pupil at the Karl-Marx-Stadt Youth Sport School.

"Considering her age, her political and ideological maturity is well developed," notes one of the first entries in her file.

In 1984, just before the Sarajevo Winter Olympics when she was already an established international star - and receiving lucrative offers to defect - the Stasi launched an operation to ensure that she stayed loyal.

From then on, Ms Witt was placed under 24-hour surveillance: her friends' flats and even the ice rink on which she trained were bugged. Two years later, she joined the party but her increasingly acrimonious relationship with Jutta Mueller, her trainer, prompted the state to take more drastic steps.

The Stasi in Karl-Marx-Stadt persuaded her to attend regular debriefing sessions with its officers at a secret flat, codenamed Apartment Beetle. Their job was to ensure that the champion was given all that she wanted.

The rewards heaped on Ms Witt included a Soviet-built Lada in blue from the Stasi pool, thus jumping the 10-year waiting list for the cars (she later exchanged it for a red West German Volkswagen Golf); a flat; extensions to her parents' home; a holiday in Bulgaria and a passport enabling to her to travel to West Berlin followed. She was also allowed to set up a sporting goods marketing firm.

In 1988, Ms Witt was received in person by Erich Honecker, the East German leader. Egon Krenz, his deputy, who is serving a prison term over the shooting of more than 200 East Germans who tried to escape to the West, offered her the "du" form of address, reserved for close family and friends.

In late October 1989, only a few days before the end of the East German regime, the Stasi compiled a report on what was to be its last meeting with the star: "Katarina Witt declared that she has to thank our state and our party for everything that she is. She will never disappoint our state or turn her back on it."

[Jeremiah Jr]

Hmmm, Did she have a phone in her skate?

[cibco]

One ringy dingy...

[Tolik]

The biggest point in all this to me is that people under the communist rule, being that in the Soviet Union, East Germany, or elsewhere, had to sell at least part of their soul to get freedoms taken for granted here. You don't see them like you don't see air. But there, you had to compromise, sometimes a lot, just to get so little. And when you are selling your soul, you are being the one who is paying the ultimate price for it. People who got high enough to enjoy some freedom were turning from normal and kind human beings into the last SOBs in the process. This is one of the lesser known effects of the ultimate corruption of the Soviet System.

Not surprising also her statement about Stasi as a good reliable partner. When the whole system is so rampantly inefficient, one can find a relief in dealing with organization that at least works.

 

[nightdriver]

If she did not "rat out" anybody or otherwise cause grief, it looks like she mearly parlayed an otherwise completely oppressive situation into one that, to some extent, worked.

I'd be a little slow to condemn.