The SED dictatorship feared protests in the stadiums and closely monitored fans in the GDR. 36 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the clubs have not yet started to come to terms with it.
Rolf Walter could hardly imagine life without football. He grew up in the Pankow district of East Berlin in the 1970s. His favorite club: BFC Dynamo. Fans like him sewed their own flags for the stands, and their grandmothers knitted scarves in the club colors. Walter attended dozens of games, home and away. As a BFC fan, he encountered rejection in Dresden and Magdeburg. He says he wasn’t looking for the violence. But when fights broke out, he had to defend himself.
Like in 1984. After a game in Halle, Walter got into a mass brawl. He says he defended himself against drunken Cuban passengers on a train. A week after this incident, he was arrested at his workplace. Walter was 24 and had no criminal record. Nevertheless, he received a six-month prison sentence for “hooliganism” and “disrupting socialist coexistence.”
The course was rejected
Walter had to share his prison cell with men who were convicted of murder and rape. The cell was designed for eight inmates, but had to accommodate 16 at one point. “The conditions were terrible,” he says. “The toilet was visible to everyone.” A certificate confirmed that he was not allowed to do heavy lifting. Nevertheless, it was used with heavy equipment in road construction.
After his prison sentence, Walter no longer wanted to play football. His studies were rejected due to “lack of political maturity”. He took on various jobs and was involved in the Peace Church. Today he works primarily as a photographer. Walter was recently a guest for a contemporary witness interview at the Berlin fan project, in which social educators work with young BFC Dynamo supporters. He wants to help ensure that the SED dictatorship is not glorified.
Rolf Walter spent six months in prison in the GDR for “hooliganism” and “disrupting socialist coexistence.”
Hidden cameras in jacket pockets
It is one biography of many that makes the influence of state security on football clear. In the 1980s in particular, the SED dictatorship tightened surveillance of stadiums. She looked with concern at the fan clubs of the GDR clubs, at groups of young men who were considered violent and rebellious. “Many fans in the GDR also had a favorite club in the West,” says historian Jutta Braun. “But the state security wanted to prevent symbols of German-German fraternization at all costs.”
Jutta Braun took part in an exhibition that is currently in the Stasi Records Archive in Frankfurt (Oder). The title: “In the lens of state power”. The photos shown by fans in the GDR were partly taken by the Stasi with miniature cameras hidden in jacket pockets.
Some motifs in the exhibition show the Jahnsportpark in East Berlin, where the series champions BFC Dynamo played their home games, the favorite club of Erich Mielke, the Minister for State Security. “The Jahnsportpark was on the wall and could be seen from cameras from the west,” says Jutta Braun, recalling a European Cup game between Hamburger SV and BFC Dynamo in 1982. “Almost only members of the party, Stasi and FDJ sat in the stadium. The state power mimed fan culture.”
The Stasi wanted to “dismantle” the fan group
In those years, Harald Wittstock also regularly visited the Jahnsportpark. As an official state security employee, he was supposed to observe the “ringleaders”, the influential fans of BFC Dynamo. At the stadium, Wittstock wore jeans, a parka and sneakers. He also observed the surrounding pubs, the routes and compartments in special trains. Sometimes, he says, he also went to prisons where fans were serving a sentence: “I wanted to find out more from them about the motivations of the scene.”
Harald Wittstock says he rarely heard political statements in the stadium. He was concerned with preventing crimes, violence, theft and right-wing extremist statements. He was known in the scene as a full-time Stasi employee. But for further information he wanted to recruit unofficial employees among the fans, “snitches”, as they were called in the scene. Wittstock emphasizes that he never blackmailed his “sources” by, for example, losing his job. But he also says: “If unofficial employees in the football organization had been exposed, it could have been dangerous for them.”
From the mid-1980s onwards, more and more right-wing extremist hooligans gathered around the BFC Dynamo. The violence increased, but the GDR media did not report it. And so Harald Wittstock wanted to “dismantle” the fan scene, as the Stasi used to say. He turned his attention to one of the leaders that young fans looked up to. “We spread the rumor that he was giving us information. And just like that, his reputation among the fans was gone.”
Critical impulses from outside
Harald Wittstock’s statements cannot be independently verified. He says that he only reported those fans to the police who had also committed crimes. What he doesn’t say: In the GDR, even “rubbing” – stealing an opponent’s fans’ scarf – could result in a prison sentence of several months. Some BFC Dynamo fans even received a “Berlin ban” lasting several years, writes author Frank Willmann in his book “Stadionpartisanen”. These fans had to leave their hometown and were assigned housing and work in remote regions.
1987: Erich Mielke, Minister for State Security, congratulates the BFC Dynamo championship team.
There is currently no compensation for football fans who were punished excessively in the GDR. The traditional East German clubs that now play in higher leagues have not yet commissioned any independent and critical research. Perhaps also because some former and still popular players, coaches and officials themselves worked with the state security. And so it is once again outside experts who are initiating a historical reckoning in football.
Trained in hand-to-hand combat
A visit to Rostock, to the former Stasi detention center, which is now a memorial. An exhibition, including interrogation methods, winds through the old prison cells. In an office on the edge of the building, historian Volker Höffer is laying out documents. It shows a site plan for the “security object” Ostseestadion, the home of FC Hansa Rostock.
This map shows where the Stasi employees were deployed during the games. “And outside the stadium there was a reaction force ready for possible escalations,” says Völker Höffer. “There were 50 people who were also trained in hand-to-hand combat.”
Volker Höffer heads the branch of the Stasi records archive in Rostock. In the 1970s he played for FC Hansa’s youth teams. At the beginning of the millennium he initiated a cooperation with his old club. He looked at files, interviewed contemporary witnesses and developed an exhibition. “Own goal – FC Hansa Rostock and the Stasi”.
The past is romanticized
The exhibition also addresses how a former club chairman, a Stasi IM, wanted to collect the names and addresses of fans. And how a player in the locker room collected information about teammates. “Eigentor” has now been a guest at more than thirty locations in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, and Volker Höffer is still receiving inquiries: “With the help of football, we can reach significantly more people who have previously been less concerned with coming to terms with the dictatorship.”
And what happens next? Many fans from Rostock, Magdeburg or Dresden or Rostock today look with pride at the old successes of their clubs in the GDR. They celebrate anniversaries of championships and European Cup games. In this way they strengthen their identification and tradition.
A chant that can often be heard in the fan curves: “East, East, East Germany”. But the political context of the previous successes, the repression, the control of the Stasi: all of this is hardly discussed today by clubs, fans and the DFB – despite football’s great potential to enrich the discussion.