The Race Against the Stasi
Page 16
‘How could this happen?’ will be the question asked, in horror, across the country. In our preview we’d already referenced the fact that this group can’t be compared with those of four years ago, and that a carefully prepared opponent lay in wait in Giessen. This was the bitter truth. […]
The hotels around Giessen were crowded this weekend, every pool filled. Most were honest friends of cycling, but not all. Unfortunately there were also some unscrupulous individuals intent on making money from the conflict. Some met with success when they persuaded Dieter Wiedemann not to return to the GDR. It’s not difficult to imagine how the inexplicable actions of Karl-Marx-Stadt rider rocked our team.
Reprinted from ‘Rittmeyer wins a consolation prize’, 6 July 1964
DIETER
I understand there was very little in the papers about it, but that was pretty much par for the course. Defections to the west sent out a very negative signal, and that’s why they reported them in the most cursory way they could. The inference was that I’d been offered money, seduced by unscrupulous capitalists. They did it that way because it suggested I was either weak-minded or opportunistic, and that implied that the GDR would be better off without me.
I heard that some of the people who had been on the bus with us stayed around until the Tuesday, but I don’t know whether or not that’s true.
To be honest I’ll be interested to find out what it says in the file. I’m pretty sure the Stasi was watching me, but it seems that no one individual was responsible for watching me. It seems they weren’t so bright after all.
EBERHARD
I was racing in Reichenbach the day that Dieter was in Giessen. I won, but the following morning the president of the sport club called me in. He asked me what I’d known about his plans to defect, and I told him I’d known nothing at all. I explained that because we were always training and racing separately I’d hardly seen him, but he suspended me from racing there and then. He said there would be an inquiry, and that I could continue to train until such time as they reached a decision.
UDO
We had no issues whatsoever about talking with the GDR riders. Unfortunately we couldn’t find Dieter Wiedemann, but we had interesting chats with Löhse, the coach, and with Weissleder and Rittmeyer.
DIETER
Sylvia’s mum took me to the town hall, but there were problems straight away. I was claiming asylum to be with Sylvia, but my papers said that I was married. The woman there knew Sylvia’s family and understood that I wasn’t lying, but she still couldn’t do anything. She said, ‘You’re telling me that the document is falsified and I believe you, but it makes no difference because I have to record what’s written here. You can tell me whatever you want, but you’re going to need proof. I’m sorry, but I’m obliged to record what it says on your document.’
I wrote to my mum and asked her to go to the town hall and get a copy of my birth certificate.
DIETER
They refused to give my mum the birth certificate at first. Defection was a treasonable offence, so they were hardly going to hand it over just because she asked for it. They were determined to make life difficult, but eventually someone she knew there made a copy. I don’t know how, but somehow she managed.
DIETER
The threats started straight away. They said, ‘You won’t be needing all this space now that he’s gone. We’ll probably move some new people in to share with you, because there are a lot of people needing housing.’
* VEAB (Volkseigener Erfassungs und Aufkaufbetrieb) was a state-owned purchasing company. Smallholders sold eggs, poultry, fruit and vegetables through it.
DIETER
A delegation from the sport club went to see my mum and dad and proposed a meeting. They said, ‘He’s bound to be missing home, and he probably realises he’s made a big mistake. Let’s arrange a meeting with him and see if he wants to reconsider.’
They assumed that when I saw them I’d be homesick, and that seeing my parents would persuade me to go back. My mum wrote to me and told me, but I wanted nothing to do with it.
The other thing to bear in mind is that it was probably a trap. I’d committed a criminal act, so I’m pretty sure that had I gone back they’d have made an example of me. I would probably have ended up in jail anyway, but, regardless, my mind was made up. It was hard, but I needed to concentrate on building a new life.
DIETER
There were only two professional teams in West Germany but one of them, Torpedo,1 was based in Schweinfurt. That’s only about 190 kilometres from Mitterteich, so I wrote to them with a list of my results from the GDR. I told them I had some bureaucratic problems to resolve, but I asked if they’d consider offering me a professional contract for the following season. They replied straight away. They sent a cheque for 200 marks to cover the travel expenses, and told me to go for a meeting as soon as I had my paperwork sorted out. In the meantime Sylvia’s dad got me a temporary job at a plumber’s yard.
When they granted me asylum they gave me 100 marks and a voucher for a new suit. More importantly, it meant that I was free to come and go as I pleased, without having to report to the police station every day.
DIETER
One day a couple of journalists from Bild turned up offering me quite a lot of money for my story, but I said no. I didn’t want it to become a media circus, and I had no intention of allowing it to be used as a propaganda instrument.
I’d left my friends and my family behind, and I didn’t want my name associated with anything which suggested that the east was inferior or that the people were ignorant. In Neues Deutschland they always portrayed the FRG as immoral, and so I assumed the West German press would be the same.
The other thing is that I was still living in fear of the Stasi. I knew they had agents in the west, and I couldn’t afford to rub their noses in it. I didn’t want to provoke them because for all I knew I might have been putting my own life at risk. Then there was always the hope that the border would be opened again, and I didn’t want to compromise my chances of going back if that happened. I just closed the book on it and got on with my new life as best I could.
Bild published a story anyway. Apparently in the GDR they were saying that when I’d defected I’d stolen their bike.
DIETER
I went to see Torpedo on 22 July, and they offered me a contract for the following season. They wanted to let the dust settle first, so they suggested I do some amateur races to keep myself fit until then. They gave me a job in the factory in the meantime, and organised a place for me to stay. I started work the following day, and they organised lodgings for me.
On a Friday evening I used to ride home to Mitterteich. I’d spend the weekends there if I wasn’t racing.
EBERHARD
My birthday was 1 August, and they called me in again. They told me I’d have to leave the sport club and go back to work. They said I could ride, but that the state would no longer be supporting me. In defecting my brother had betrayed the republic, so there was no way I could carry on representing the country. They weren’t aggressive at all, and they weren’t threatening me. They just informed me calmly, and then I left.
I was heartbroken.
DIETER
As I understand it they interviewed my former colleagues, and they were dumbfounded by what I’d done. I know that Täve, for example, said I was the very last person he would have expected to defect.
To be honest, though, for the first six weeks I had very little contact with anybody, just letters from my mum. I had no idea what was going on.
GERHARD
I was a cyclist, and I knew Dieter and his dad because I lived near Flöha. Obviously everybody knew what had happened, but among the cyclists you spoke about it under your breath. You had to be very careful what you said because it was a political issue. You didn’t talk about politics in the GDR because you didn’t know who was in the party. You didn’t want to lose your place in the sport club, so you knew better than to speak about
it publicly.
Then I was one of five brothers, and our dad had died when we were young. We’d worked our fingers to the bone to be able to keep the family farm, and we didn’t want to run the risk of having it taken off us.
RAINER
People might have wondered why he defected, but nobody talked about it. The only people talking about it publicly were party members.
MANFRED
It was a sort of moot point. They didn’t tell us anything, and I guess it was because they didn’t want it to become a cause célèbre. We spoke about it among ourselves, but only in passing and not when the officials were around.
MANFRED
I don’t know the upshot of it all because my cycling career finished in August. We were at the Tour of Yugoslavia, and we were doing extremely well. We’d won a lot of prizes, but then the trainer told us that there was a new rule. He said that from now on all the prizes would go straight to the federation instead of us, and they would decide whether or not we were given them. We were extremely upset, and I took it upon myself to have it out with him. It almost became a fight, and that was the end of my cycling career. I was twenty-five, and they said I should think about taking up football.
So all those things combined – the Melichow incident, criticising the training, being a Christian, not joining the party, not being one of the DHfK group – had ended up costing me a great deal.
AXEL
It was the Tour of Yugoslavia. Joop Zoetemelk was winning the GC, and I was second. He and I were much the strongest.
Ford were sponsoring the race, and the first three on GC were each going to get a car. The three cars were mounted on a truck in front of the peloton, so we saw them every day; it was a big incentive, as you can imagine. Then one of the GDR functionaries came up to me and said, ‘You know that if you win the car you don’t get to keep it? It goes to the GDR embassy in Yugoslavia, not to you personally.’
What happened? I finished fourth.2
DIETER
I hadn’t thought for one minute that there would be any particular issues for my parents. I knew that a cyclist named Joachim Bässler had defected in 1957 and there hadn’t been any consequences for his family. I was the fifth Wismut athlete to leave, albeit the first since the wall had gone up. I knew that Ampler had been planning it as well. He had a brother in the west and he’d planned to defect while he was in Sweden. As far as I know they did some kind of a deal with him. They made him marry his girlfriend, and that was that.
So there hadn’t been any particular consequences for any of them, and anyway the GDR constitution stated that everyone had the right to work in the profession of his choosing. That’s all I’d decided to do. They had delegated me to Giessen in the first place, and I’d simply decided to stay there to become a professional cyclist. I still think they wanted to make an example of somebody before the Olympics, and I guess I handed them the opportunity.
Would I have defected if I’d known? I really don’t know, to be honest.
EBERHARD
It was a difficult time for me, and also for my dad. He’d had the job he’d always wanted, and his dream had always been to see his two sons ride the Peace Race together.
He told me that an official from the town hall had informed him he ought to feel ashamed. He’d said he ought to feel like a thief because of what Dieter had done.
My dad was a very quiet person, very introvert. He never let anybody see the effect of what had happened, but he suffered terribly. He wasn’t angry, no. He wasn’t the sort to get angry, but he was hurting so much that it was all he could do to try to survive. He was sixty years old, and he ended up doing a nothing job in a bike factory. It was the end of his dream.
GERHARD
Once a month I’d deliver straw to Karl for his rabbits, and he’d call by while he was out on his bike.
He was a very quiet person, and he didn’t tell you what he was feeling. I think maybe he just internalised everything. He had his animals and his smallholding, and he busied himself with those things.
He’d lost his work at the sport club, but I carried on taking my bike for him to fix. He never asked anything for doing it because he was someone who liked to help other people. I carried on taking my bike because I thought it was something I could do to try to make life a bit easier.
EBERHARD
I still maintain that Dieter must have known there would be problems for us, because as a GDR sportsman you were under close surveillance all the time. If they said you had to watch a certain TV programme you watched it, and they were always being schooled about how to conduct themselves in the west. For me it must have been clear to him that there would be consequences for the people left behind.
DIETER
I had no contact with anyone, just the letters my mum sent. I don’t know how many were opened, nor whether they were intercepted. My guess is that they allowed most of them to reach me to remind me of how hard it was for my parents. That way I might be tempted to go back, to relieve them of the suffering.
It was a very harrowing time for them, because they were being made to pay for something they’d known nothing about. It was hard for me as well, because I was responsible for their being treated like criminals. That’s why the letters from Sylvia are all gone. They destroyed them for fear of the Stasi using them as evidence against them.
SYLVIA
So the paradox was that he couldn’t go east to see his family any more than he’d been able to go west with his old GDR passport.
At first we lived in fear that the Stasi would come for us, but there was no contact. The only hint I ever had that they were watching us was one time he came to pick me up from work. A car pulled up outside with a GDR registration plate, and so I just said, ‘Look, don’t pick me up any more; it might be dangerous.’
His mum sent him letters and food parcels, which was the only thing she was able to do. We were getting food parcels from the GDR, but they’d take two or three weeks to arrive. She’d send jars of jam, fruit, things like that, but by the time they showed up the jars would be broken and the fruit would be putrefied anyway. We’d have to throw them out, but it was the only contact she had with him.
DIETER
I got a letter from my mum. It said, ‘They’re coming next week to pick up the prizes you won.’ My dad told me a guy he knew from the town hall had been instructed to do it, but he’d refused. Apparently he said he was retiring in a few weeks, and he wasn’t prepared to start acting like a bailiff. In the end the mayor had to go and do it himself. The point is that they had no right to treat them that way. The GDR constitution stated that everybody was free to work as they saw fit, and I hadn’t even been living with them when I’d defected. They’d forced me to change residence to the sport club, so they had no legal entitlement to anything from that house.
My mum was extremely upset, as you can imagine. She couldn’t believe that they were being treated that way, and nor could a lot of the people in Flöha. Letters of support started arriving at my parents’ house, but they were anonymous. I was a criminal, and people didn’t want to risk being seen to support me.
DIETER
When I’d left I was still owed a lot of prizes from the Peace Race. The way it worked was that in addition to what we were paid by the cycling federation, prizes were awarded locally. Companies, schools, local councils and sport clubs all across the route would donate things, and at the end they always held a big gala where the team was formally presented with what they’d accumulated. We’d been extremely successful so I was owed a TV, binoculars, crystal, porcelain … I’d say that the value of what they owed me was around 6,000 marks.
Normally you got it a fortnight or so after the race finished, but because of the Olympic qualification it was held over. Why? Well, having all four Olympic qualifiers was a big objective in the GDR, because cycling was one of the most prestigious sports. They promoted the idea that we had the best race – the Peace Race – and the best riders in Europe. The FRG had
professional cyclists, so it followed that their best amateurs wouldn’t be as good as ours, otherwise they’d have been signed by trade teams. Then they made out that we had the best coaches, the best support, all those GDR propaganda things.
I’d left the country, but it didn’t alter the fact that I’d been one of the team. I’d contributed a lot, and they had a legal obligation to reward me. But when my dad asked for what was rightfully mine, they just refused outright.
IMMO
The Olympics were in October.3 I went with Hoffmann, but obviously the FRG guys travelled independently. The official policy was that we weren’t allowed to have contact with them, so we couldn’t train with them beforehand. We’d maybe chat in the Olympic village in the evenings, but only when our handlers weren’t around. So on a personal level there was no animosity, but we weren’t a team. We came from different countries and we barely knew one another. During the race I crashed and had to change bike, so I only finished forty-fourth.