The Race Against the Stasi

by Herbie Sykes

  6 The Dutchman Jorit Ivens produced a forty-five-minute documentary about the 1952 race, Wyścig Pokoju. Ivens, a committed communist, was based in Poland at the time. His work has been likened to that of Leni Riefenstahl, Hitler’s celebrated filmmaker, and bears all the totalitarian leitmotifs which characterised her work. Much of the imagery is beautiful, but the film is 100 per cent propaganda. It sets out to draw parallels between the workers and farmers and the toiling cyclists, and yet fails to mention Ian Steel, the (capitalist) winner.

  7 The GDR team had been leading the blue jersey competition prior to the English, and their jerseys had had Picasso’s white dove sewn on the breast as per Peace Race protocol. So, too, had the yellow ones worn by Stablinski and Veselý prior to Ian Steel. For some reason the jerseys they gave to the English team were bereft of the dove.

  At the beginning of the stage the ‘English’ were already in possession of the blue jersey, their lead over seventeen minutes. Meanwhile, Steel began the day sixth, six minutes behind Veselý. The race-winning break comprised six riders, among them Steel, Greenfield and Jowett. Given that the first three riders qualified for the team classification on each stage, their lead grew to an unassailable forty-six minutes. Steel’s advantage in the yellow jersey contest was only 1’42’’, but he came through the brutal Czech stages unscathed. By the finish he led runner-up Veselý by 2’35’’. The Scot never won a stage, but through his humility and outstanding sportsmanship became a Peace Race icon.

  Jan Veselý was one of the greatest champions in the history of the race. He’d triumphed in 1949, and would win sixteen stages throughout his career. Though apolitical, his status at home was akin to that of Schur, at least among the populace. In 1957 he was selected to ride the tenth-anniversary Peace Race, despite having been ill in the run-up. He abandoned and was subsequently banned for two years by his own federation. They viewed the abandon as a form of treason, and Veselý, notwithstanding his huge popularity, was never invited to work for the federation.

  Jan Stablinski, later World Professional Champion, was third. Like many French cyclists he was the son of émigré Polish parents, and was here competing for the ‘Polish France’ team. All told, ninety-four took part, among them teams from Trieste and Finland.

  8 Hugo Eberlain was a victim of Stalin’s purges. He was detained when the National Socialists came to power in 1933, and later exiled. He made his way to Russia in 1936, but was imprisoned the following year. Initially sentenced to fifteen years in the gulag at Vorkuta, he was sentenced to death and shot in Moscow in 1941.

  Huhn’s half-brother was Werner Eberlein. At the cessation their mother lobbied Wilhelm Pieck, then co-chairman of the party (and subsequently president of the GDR) in an attempt to find him. Pieck in turn appealed to Stalin, and he was discovered working in a sawmill in Siberia. Despite his father’s loss he had survived the war, and his communist conviction would survive Stalin. Returned to Berlin in 1948, he became Walter Ulbricht’s Russian interpreter, translating Russian politicians’ speeches on radio and TV. He became known as ‘Khrushchev’s Voice’, and was highly skilled in softening the Soviet leader’s doggerel. He later served in the Politburo, and became party chief secretary for Magdeburg.

  9 Katowice. Stalin had died on 5 March, and two days later they renamed the town Stalinogrod.

  10 It’s not clear how many were killed in Berlin during the uprising, though estimates vary from 50 to over 600. There remains speculation that Russian soldiers who refused to shoot protestors were executed. Some estimates have it that up to one million GDR citizens demonstrated, in one form or another, across the country.

  11 The collectivisation programme began in earnest in 1952. Landowners, perceived as bourgeois, were systematically driven out of business. Their holdings were passed to Landwirtschaftliche Produktionsgenossenschaft (‘Agricultural Production Co-operatives’), or LPG.

  12 More than 58,000 emigrated during the first three months of 1953.

  13 Peace Race legend has it that the Indian team had been told they were to participate in a ‘cycling exhibition’, as distinct from a gruelling 2,000-kilometre stage race. One of them, Supravat Chakravati, somehow made it all the way to Prague. The time gaps at the Peace Race were often abyssal, but he contrived to lose over nineteen hours in thirteen stages. The following year Dhana Singh would cement his position as the darling of the Peace Race. He came eightieth and last, his deficit over twenty-eight hours.

  In Italy, the staunchly anti-communist government of Mario Scelba refused to issue travel permits to their riders. On the eve of the race Neues Deutschland explicitly linked their absence to the ‘Montesi Affair’. The previous year Wilma Montesi, a twenty-one-year-old would-be actress, had been found dead on a beach near Rome. It sparked allegations that drugs and sex parties were rampant not only among Rome’s socialites, but also her politicians.

  14 Reprinted from Friedensfahrt und Tour de France – Emil Reinecke, by Peter Zetzsche

  15 Deutsche Hochschule für Körperkultur.

  16 Reprinted from Friedensfahrt und Tour de France – Emil Reinecke, by Peter Zetzsche

  17 Reprinted from Friedensfahrt und Tour de France – Emil Reinecke, by Peter Zetzsche

  18 Before his death in 2011, Trefflich claimed that his problems with the federation had had nothing to do with his failure to follow the training programme. He added that his career finished when he refused to allow his daughter to undertake Jugendweihe.

  Conceived to replace confirmation, Jugendweihe was the induction ceremony of the Freie Deutsche Jugend (FDJ). It was initiated after the Berlin uprising of 1953, and rolled out nationally two years later. FDJ members were aged fourteen to twenty-five, and most graduated from the Young Pioneers. Based on the Kinder Scout movement, this was where six-to fourteen-year-old GDR children began to learn socialist doctrine.

  19 Reprinted from Friedensfahrt und Tour de France – Emil Reinecke, by Peter Zetzsche

  20 There were two GDR riders named Lothar Meister. The one who rode the 1955 Peace Race was commonly known as Lothar Meister II.

  21 Reprinted from Friedensfahrt und Tour de France – Emil Reinecke, by Peter Zetzsche

  22 An abbreviation of Volkseigene Betrieb. At the cessation, Diamant was one of 850 or so Soviet Zone factories earmarked to be dismantled and shipped to Moscow as part of German reparations. Ultimately, however, around 200 of them were spared. The plant remained intact, albeit under Soviet ownership. In 1952 it was transferred back to GDR public ownership (VEB), and by now was producing over 250,000 bikes a year.

  23 In 1954, internal SED party analysis calculated that 25.8 per cent of the membership were former Nazis, though the number is somewhat illusory. Many among the pre-war political classes joined the party, so among the apparatchiks the ratio was much higher.

  24 Freier Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund.

  25 FDJ membership was already about 1.2 million in 1955, nearly 50 per cent of the total youth population. From 1956 it was to all intents and purposes mandatory. By the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 there were an estimated 2.3 million members.

  26 Reprinted from Friedensfahrt und Tour de France – Emil Reinecke, by Peter Zetzsche

  27 Emil Reinecke finished the Peace Race twentieth, and fourth of the GDR sextet. He signed a professional contract immediately upon his return. He would complete the 1960 Tour de France for the FRG, and became an accomplished six-day rider. He died in 2011.

  Wolfgang Grupe was twenty-fifth. He stayed in the GDR until 1957, but his return to the FRG is shrouded in mystery. His obituary states, somewhat obliquely, that he went back ‘under cover of darkness’, and he, too, had his Master of Sports award revoked. He died of leukaemia in 1971, aged forty.

  28 The BSG (Betriebssportgemeinschaft) were sports organisations funded by trade union contributions and organised, broadly speaking, according to employment sector and geography. Sixteen were operative, and their management and promotion was invariably delegated to large employers (Trägerbetrie
be).

  In the mid-fifties new, elite sport clubs were formed, and they appropriated most of the GDR’s international class athletes. Eighteen sport clubs were created between 1953 and 1956, sixteen of them ‘civilian’. Many had regional branches, and each was focused on producing world-class athletes in targeted sporting disciplines. In addition there were two non-civilian clubs, each with affiliates the length and breadth.

  The principal security agencies in the GDR were grouped together. The sports association under which employees of MfS (Stasi), the Police (Volkspolizei) and the customs and border control (Zollverwaltung) practised sport was Dynamo. At its heart was Dynamo Berlin, the MfS sport club. It was the biggest single sport club in the GDR, and it covered most Olympic disciplines. Elsewhere the police and customs clubs targeted excellence in specific areas. Dynamo Dresden, a police club, was football-orientated; Dynamo Weisswasser specialised in ice hockey, and so on.

  Vorwärts was the umbrella association of the sport clubs of the Volksarmee and other armed forces. In addition to Berlin it had branches in large towns such as Cottbus, Erfurt and Leipzig; wherever there was a military presence. Here again the branches specialised. Oberhof, for example, was a centre for winter sports, while Rostock excelled in rowing and wrestling.

  DHfK aside, Wismut, Dynamo Berlin and ASK Vorwärts Leipzig were among the more successful clubs in road cycling. Track cycling was also extremely popular in the GDR, and here SC Einheit Berlin (later TSC Berlin) was pre-eminent.

  29 SDAG Wismut was jointly owned by the USSR and the GDR. It was the biggest uranium producer in the Eastern Bloc.

  30 Prior to the 1959 Peace Race the first and last stages – and with them the huge opening and closing ceremonies – had always been in Warsaw and Prague. The GDR had hosted the middle four stages, usually in Görlitz, Berlin, Leipzig and Karl-Marx-Stadt. Now, however, it was agreed that the route would rotate annually. As such the race started in Berlin, and would conclude there the following year. In effect it was now on an equal footing with Prague and Warsaw.

  31 Täve had been voted into the Volkskammer in 1958. It was unprecedented that a sportsman might be elected, but by then his fame and influence was boundless.

  32 The GDR quartet for the 100-kilometre team time trial was Schur, Hagen and Lörke (all DHfK) and Adler (Rotation Leipzig). On a blistering hot Rome morning they finished second, two minutes behind the Italians. A Danish rider, twenty-two-year-old Knud Enemark Jensen, died shortly after the race. He was later discovered to have taken both a vasodilator and amphetamine. The following year an Italian professional, Bruno Busso, died under similar circumstances at the Tour of Piedmont.

  33 Reprinted from ‘Ex-leader Scharch interviewed’, L’Équipe, October 1960

  34 Neue Zeit was the daily paper of the CDU, one of the GDR bloc parties. It ceased publication in 1994.

  35 The incident mirrored Królak’s in 1956, and provoked outrage in the stadium. The jury, fearing a riot, demoted Melichow but not Weissleder. It made no difference, though, as the Russian went on to claim the USSR’s first Peace Race win, by eleven minutes. In general terms Soviet success met with polite indifference in ‘little brother’ GDR. In Poland and Czechoslovakia, however, the crowds were known to be openly hostile. When Melichow clinched both stage and GC on Prague, they set fire to seats and newspapers, and apparently hurled bottles.

  36 The construction of what would become the Berlin Wall began in the early hours of Sunday 13 August. Approximately thirty-thousand had defected in July alone, half of them under the age of twenty-five. The GDR had lost 2.7 million citizens in just thirteen years, and thus Moscow had reluctantly acquiesced.

  37 The opening stage began on Stalinallee (later renamed Karl-Marx-Allee).

  38 Willy Brandt was mayor of West Berlin in 1961. He would later become chancellor of the FDR. He resigned in 1974 when it was revealed that Günter Guillaume, one of his closest aides, was a Stasi agent.

  39 Erich Hagen built himself a bike and continued to ride for Motor Schkeuditz, a BSG in Leipzig. In December 1961 he stated that he agreed with the ‘education’ measures. He said that the western press had fabricated stories about him having been suspended for speaking his mind. He was readmitted to DHfK in 1963, and rode the Tour of the GDR. His career finished when, aged just twenty-seven, he failed to qualify for the Olympics the following year. He died in a traffic accident in 1971.

  40 In the GDR the list of candidates was pre-selected by the National Front, and you voted either ‘Yes’ or ‘No’. Those who chose the latter course did so in a separate booth, with no anonymity. At the 1958 elections the official list received 99.9 per cent of the vote. The turnout was recorded as 99.2 per cent.

  41 According to official SED data, 9,968 fifteen–eighteen-year-olds defected illegally in 1960. Among eighteen–twenty-five-year-olds the number was recorded at 24,248. One of the principal reasons given was pressure for eighteen–twenty-two-year-olds to enlist for military service in the Volksarmee. Though not technically mandatory (the Volksarmee was ostensibly a volunteer force), failure to do so implied opposition to the state, and could have damaging social and economic consequences. Young men weaned on the idea that the GDR was a peaceable country were thus placed in an invidious position: take up arms, risk being ostracised or leave their homeland. This gave rise to a virulent conscientious objector movement, but once the wall was built there was no way out. As such the party no longer felt the need to pretend, and conscription was enacted on 24 January 1962.

  In 1964 the GDR would introduce, uniquely in the Eastern Bloc, an alternative to armed military service. The so-called ‘spade soldier’ (Bausoldat) would be deployed in civilian works, usually construction. Here again, however, a raft of empirical evidence suggests that his training and employment opportunities were restricted as a consequence.

  42 Before the war BMW had a factory in Eisenach. When the country was partitioned after the war the plant, now under Soviet ownership, carried on regardless. A lawsuit in 1952 compelled it to desist from using the BMW brand name, so they rebranded the cars EMW. The company logotype was very similar to that of BMW, but red and white instead of blue and white. Later it became a VEB, and from 1955 the cars manufactured there carried the Wartburg brand name.

  43 The Allied Travel Office was responsible for issuing temporary travel permits to GDR citizens. Athletes, artists and diplomats were almost always refused in the period following the construction of the wall.

  44 Gedser is Denmark’s southernmost point. It’s a distance of about forty-five kilometres as the crow flies.

  45 ‘Klaus Ullrich’ was Klaus Huhn’s pen-name.

  46 By 1962 the Stasi had over 25,000 full-time employees and 100,000 unofficial informants. These would increase to over 91,000 and 170,000 respectively by 1989.

  47 From 1963 the start date was pushed back a week. From here on in the race would begin on or around 8 May, VE Day.

  48 Werner Fritzsche, not to be confused with the informant ‘Fritzsche’.

  49 Only fifteen teams were present, four fewer than the previous year. To make up some of the shortfall a ‘Three Continents’ team was included, and one from Cuba.

  50 Dieter Mickein crashed near the entrance to the stadium in Poznań, and rode in on a bike borrowed from a spectator.

  Though Jan Veselý and the brilliant Vlastimil Ružička had lit up the early Peace Races, by now the Czechs were much the weakest of the three host nations. Between 1956 and 1963 they had amassed just three stage wins, not a single day in yellow and no podium finishers. However, Smolik, twenty-two, was prodigiously talented. As a sixteen-year-old he’d apparently been given special dispensation to race against the men, and had outsprinted them. All the more impressive when one considers that the runner-up that day, Josef Krivka, had been a Peace Race stage winner in 1955.

  51 Peace Race stage finishes were civic events on a massive scale. As a rule they commenced around midday, five hours or so before the riders appeared. The Berlin stage had begu
n with a marching parade, followed by music from a 1,500-strong orchestra. Next came gymnastics and athletics displays from both DHfK and SV Dynamo. At two o’clock the GDR national team played Leeds United, just then promoted to the top tier of English football.

  52 After the war, the stadium in Erfurt had been renamed in honour of Georgi Dimitrov, first secretary of the Bulgarian Communist Party. The population of the town was 190,000, and 45,000 of them were present for the sprint.

  53 Smolik led Hoffmann by 7’31’’, with Wiedemann at 7’41’’.

  54 The positions remained unchanged. The GDR won the blue jersey by 6’14’’.

  55 The FRG intelligence service.

  56 The temporary ID document was known as a PM12.

  THE SECOND LIFE OF DIETER WIEDEMANN

  (and the Fourth)

  * In object administration ‘W’, department B monitored individuals with western contacts.

  * A ‘legend’ is described in the MfS handbook as a ‘plausible pretence used to mislead people about the MfS’ true aims or objectives’.

  IMMO

  When we got back to Erfurt there was a press conference. The main thrust of it was the idea that the West German guy had been encouraging me to stay over there. It wasn’t true, but that was the message they wanted to portray. As far as I can remember they didn’t mention Wiedemann. It was clear there was going to be a kind of media blackout about it, but I’ve no idea what was going on behind the scenes.

  NEUES DEUTSCHLAND

  ORGAN DES ZENTRALKOMITEES DER SOZIALISTISCHEN EINHEITSPARTEI DEUTSCHLANDS

  This was a defeat that even the most stubborn pessimists had never dared predict. On Sunday morning in Giessen, the complete destruction of the glorious Armada of our road team, for many years one of our blue-ribbon events, was prevented only by the brave Karl-Marx-Stadt rider Immo Rittmeyer. With his victory he accrued thirty Olympic qualification points. However, he was followed by no less than seven West German riders. Thus they have points enough to travel to the second elimination on Sunday in Erfurt in good spirits. […]