“With our project, we want to ensure that the judicial confessions of guilt and victim stories find their way into the collective memory,” says doping researcher Jutta Braun. Why the more than 20-year-old court files from the GDR doping trials in the 1990s are only now being evaluated is a question of access.
Hundreds of yards of untapped files on doping practices
Blocking periods have only now expired, and there are hundreds of meters of untapped files: “Well, you can’t work through all the processes in a researcher’s life. You’re forced to do a bit of exemplary work, and it’s just not that easy to use these files. “
Because: Unlike Stasi files, they are only allowed to quote anonymously from court files, even from people from contemporary history. “Well, much to my regret. I’d like to write out a lot of things with full names because sometimes you can really appreciate what these people have admitted to by knowing who it is and what he or she said publicly about it before and after. Because there are some really interesting differences.”
Officials, doctors, trainers – a closed system of GDR state doping
The investigation by Jutta Braun and René Wiese sheds light on the structures of the GDR state doping: Away from the individual athletes towards officials, doctors, trainers who would have formed a closed system of doping.
The question of whether an athlete has doped “knowingly or unknowingly” under the doping victim assistance law, which has meanwhile expired anyway, is being pushed into the background, agrees Thuringia’s Prime Minister Bodo Ramelow, who commissioned the study: “The first question is: how was the system where normality was that you never knew: are you being doped, are you not being doped? And if you said: I knew that I would get injections and I knew that it was kind of funny – then it was considered complicity.”
Test subjects for the Olympic squad
Braun and Wiese want to work out how massively the SED state put pressure on underage athletes and their families to allow doping to happen. It was frightening for her that in 1984 the dam burst, massively doping athletes up to the third row.
The top GDR head of sports, Manfred Ewald, even instructed that the second and third rows should be doped with previously untried substances, according to Jutta Braun: “With the comment: ‘You can’t feed unripe chestnuts to Olympic squads.’ The ‘unripe chestnuts’, i.e. the still immature methods of increasing performance, should from now on only be tried out with subsequent squads.”