The doping of athletes in the former East Germany: A critical assessment of comparisons with Nazi medical experiments

Introduction

In 2001 the American sports psychologist Steven Ungerleider published a damning critique of the East German system of planned and extensive use of performance enhancing drugs, Faust’s Gold: Inside the East German Doping Machine. This is the only monograph published in English on this subject, which has been influential in setting the tone and context for public understanding of this subject matter. It has been widely cited in the international media, the author has been interviewed in feature programmes, and the book has regularly been cited in academic work. It is an accessible piece of non-fiction writing that draws upon individual athletes’ biographies and gives a strong flavour of the characters, events and health consequences faced by women given male hormone drugs. It may be not be a rigorous historical study, but it is worthy of critical analysis due to the ways in which it both draws upon simplistic discourses and makes a meaningful contribution to the creation of new (problematic) discourses. It may be one-dimensional and emotive, as will be shown, but these are precisely the features that make it appealing to readers seeking to have their presumptions confirmed or at least to provoke debate (see for example, Fata, 2010). Moreover, Ungerleider is well-connected to the development of knowledge in other ways. He has worked closely with two German experts – Werner Franke and Brigitte Berendonk – who were responsible for publicizing the scale of the doping program after the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 and who helped informed the subsequent trials of doping doctors and policy officials as well as promote their ant-doping critique through the media.

By way of brief background, it has been estimated that 10,000 East German athletes were given anabolic steroids and substances to improve their performance (Spitzer, 2006). The policy to systematically use steroids was made with the express approval of the highest levels of government, and focused on sports likely to bring Olympic medals. This emerged from a view that international competitive events were an opportunity to show the world how successful the country had become. The GDR athletes were often referred to as ‘diplomats in tracksuits’; sport was used ‘as a political lever to break the diplomatic isolation of the GDR and to demonstrate the superiority of socialism over capitalism’ (Dennis, 2000: 114). As the former IOC vice-president and the founding chair of the World Anti-Doping Agency, Dick Pound (2004: 251) wrote:

Sport was an East German national priority and was virtually the only foreign policy it was able to exercise under the stern gaze of the Soviet Union. [The East German sports minister] Ewald was reported to have said that there were two elements involved: power and glory.

Steroids were used by GDR athletes in the late 1960s but the integration of drugs into the training methods of a range of sports federations became widespread from 1972, and formalized in State Plan 14.25 in 1974 (Spitzer, 2006). The use of male hormones on women caused particularly rapid increases in muscle power and sports performance but also resulted in a host of negative physical side-effects. However, such was the power of the state to enforce secrecy – and the success of the internal testing procedures – that there was no evidence of this doping system until the GDR ceased existence in 1989. The internal testing involved analysing athletes’ urine samples in a laboratory that was accredited through the IOC Medical Commission to carry out anti-doping work, to ensure that steroids had ‘washed out’ of their bodies before they set off for international events. However, the secrecy involved in this whole project meant that even the athletes did not know why they were asked to provide urine samples. Secrecy was ensured through strict rules, and the doping program was positioned within the national security apparatus – more specifically within the Ministry of State Security, more notoriously known as the Stasi. The incredible success of the GDR in the Olympics (finishing in the top three throughout the 1970s and 1980s), combined with accusatory rumours and the use of steroids in other countries, suggested that there was a problem of doping that the sports authorities failed to stop. It was not until an attempt to deal with past crimes began as part of the process of German re-unification that legal proceedings were enacted to bring the architects of this doping system to justice. It was only then that the full extent of the system, the details of how it worked, and its long-term physical and psychological impacts were recognized.

To research his book, Ungerleider interviewed female athletes who gave testimonies to the state prosecution of those individuals charged with supervising the doping system. His approach was unashamedly critical, as can be seen from the title, and the language used throughout is highly emotive. His interviews with the former athletes, and the remorseful doctors, emphasize the human tragedy integral to the doping system.

Ungerleider presented some aspects of this history in a way that alluded to Germany’s Nazi past, and in particular to the famous post-war criminal trials at Nuremberg that brought to justice government officials, soldiers and scientists who had committed atrocities:

This [doping] trial was the first in a series scheduled over the next two years to determine guilt of a different magnitude, but similar in nature to that of the Nazis. Almost fifty years after the Nuremberg trials had begun, the cruelty of another totalitarian regime, the communist Deutsche Demokratische Republik, had now come before the bench of justice. (2001: 4)

The comparison implied here is with the medical experimentation on prisoners of war that was conducted by Nazi doctors. In that environment there was no informed consent or, for that matter, any other ethical parameters; moreover, the sheer scale of the research was such that millions of subjects were abused. A supporter of Ungerleider’s approach was the renowned writer on the Holocaust Professor Deborah Lipstadt, whose written works document extensively the suffering involved in the prisoner of war camps and who has been involved in public arguments with Holocaust deniers such as David Irving. She provided a quote for the book’s back cover: ‘Faust’s Gold documents how another generation of German doctors used their medical expertise to cause harm to their patients.’

Given Lipstadt’s high scholarly profile, such a description raises the stakes regarding the ethical relationship between the GDR and doping. No longer does it seem sufficient merely to contain the description and analysis within the disciplinary and ethical parameters of sport. Indeed, references to these historical contexts suggest many things beyond sport: that there is some continuity between Nazis and communists; that the doping system was a highly abusive example of medical experimentation that ignored individual health for the sake of some higher purpose; and that the athletes were like the Holocaust victims: exploited and abused, not informed of what was going on and treated like human guinea-pigs.

The central question of this article is whether such a comparison stands up to critical scrutiny. As historians, we are interested both in the ‘correctness’ of empirical evidence and in the influence certain ideas have. The idea that East German doping can be compared to Nazi science needs to be tested against other forms of evidence. However, there is an important purpose which is related to, but different from, straightforward accuracy. If this idea is a myth, indeed a dangerous myth, that leads people to misunderstanding then it is worthy of critical attention from an ideological standpoint as well as that as factual details. Discourse, power and stereotyping are inextricably linked – thus there is a sociological dimension to this study that is bound up with the debate over historical methods, results and arguments. That said, there is a complicating factor which is that the historiography of Nazi medicine and politics is also much more subtle and complex than many people give credit to. So when authors in the field of sports draw upon simplistic myths of totalitarian Nazi Germany, then they make more than one error. However, it is beyond the scope of this article to delve into the details of the Nazi regime, rather we shall retain the focus on doping-specific discourses and how the GDR has been mistakenly compared to Nazi Germany.

Documentary evidence: Some methodological considerations

In order to address the central question, as above, the following aims have been developed. We shall first elaborate upon the Nazi comparison thesis; second, we shall provide a counter-narrative using available primary source evidence; and finally make some concluding observations. However, before approaching these thematic issues, we briefly examine the nature of the documents which have informed our study.

A copy of the records from the court cases from the late 1990s were given to the University of Texas at Austin in the course of developing the Dr Steven Ungerleider GDR Collection in Honour of Professor Werner Franke and Brigitte Berendonk (see http://www.lib.utexas.edu/taro/utcah/00139/cah-00139.html). This collection contains extensive records of scientific and medical reports, official Stasi files from the Federal Commissioner for Stasi Records, legal documents from various German courts, as well as articles, correspondence, and manuscript material. In 2009–2010, large sections of this were translated into English. Of especial importance were the testimonies and police prosecution statements generated as part of the legal proceedings.

The methodological issues relating to using archival documentary sources have been the subject of some recent debate within sports history (Booth, 2006; Johnes, 2007). Most historians would agree that archives cannot be comprehensive, that there are processes of selection and representation that occur in both the creation of the archives and its use by the historian. As Johnes notes, archives are not ‘simple repositories from where truths can be simply retrieved’ (2007: 133). In the case of the GDR doping program, we need to be aware of the political and social context within which the archive was produced, how it connects with other forms of evidence, what is present and what is absent, and how to most appropriately select evidence from the archive to develop historical analysis and insight.

The political and social context for the court proceedings included an attempt at ‘transition justice’ (Yoder, 1999: 59) in the re-unification of Germany. This involved the creation of the Investigatory Commission on the Working-Through of the History and Consequences of the SED Dictatorship in Germany, which by the end of the 1990s had initiated over 22,000 investigations into criminal activity perpetrated through the GDR regime, 1553 defendants were charged and 181 convicted (Yoder, 1999). Most of these were for some of the more salient abuses such as the shooting of people trying to escape the GDR by climbing the Berlin Wall. What is important though is that the investigations that produced the archives pursued the line of attack that in order to prosecute those in power, evidence of abuse – especially of minors – had to be convincing. The individuals who came forward to testify were almost all women, most of whom claimed to have been given steroids without their consent, and who could describe the short- and long-term negative health effects from their use.

The court proceedings are only one aspect of the larger set of historical documents related to the GDR and doping. There are, in addition, extensive files of Stasi reports, scientific research projects, media coverage and other related material. Taken together, these constitute the most extensive evidence relating to any case of doping in the history of international sport. However, many documents were destroyed in the late 1980s when it was clear that the political system was changing, and many of the existing documents have not been translated into English. For the purposes of this article, the court documents provide the opportunity to discuss individual experiences and, importantly, the ways in which individuals came to reflect upon life in the GDR. The archive is not complete in any sense. It contains reflective descriptions based on memories from events over a period between the late 1960s and the 1990s. The testimonies are constructed according to the specific questions and themes of the trials, and defendants’ accounts are more likely to be challenged in court than those of prosecution witnesses. Not all the testimonies are in the archives, and not all athletes came to testify; the latter fact suggests that many athletes did not feel compelled to complain about the steroids they were given.

Comparisons with Nazi medical experiments

There is a simplistic attempt at historical continuity regarding German society, as Dimeo (2007: 154) suggested, some scholars find it ‘tempting in retrospect to blame communist countries for taking what ostensibly seems to be “Nazi science” and applying it to the sports environment’. Since there is a perception that steroids and amphetamines were used by Germany during the Second World War (see Hoberman, 2005), and since doctors carried out inhumane experiments in the prisoner of war camps, the connections are all too easy to make. Moreover, Ungerleider posits a one-dimensional view of the political environment when he claims that the GDR was ‘the product of two evil dictatorships’ (2001: 19), being the Third Reich and Stalin’s Soviet Union. He goes on to claim that the ‘crimes of the STASI police – and of their accomplices in the doping program – were not remotely of the same magnitude as those committed by the Nazis. But the two regimes have a unique relationship, linked as they are by a sinister past’ (2001: 19).

During the period of the trials, the German media and public were sensitive about over-playing the comparison between the GDR’s sports doping and the Nazi experiments. This did not stop, however, one of the prosecuting lawyers publicly from accusing Dr Lothar Kipke of being ‘the Joseph Mengele of the GDR doping system’ (2001: 83). He elaborated, ‘“You are the perversion of the art of curing people. How could you harm these young women, and know the consequences of these drugs?”’ (cited in Ungerleider, 2001: 83).

Dr Kipke was the chief doctor of the swimming team, and was found guilty of more than 50 charges of causing bodily harm to athletes (BBC, 2000). Ungerleider goes on to develop the comparison:

the systematic doping could be seen as history repeating itself, a reinvention of Aryan supremacy . . . a new forum for building strength, courage, and superiority through medical experiments . . . Kipke’s disavowal of direct responsibility for harm evoked responses given at other court proceedings nearly half a century ago. (2001: 84)

Dr Kipke’s defence had been that he simply did what he was told to do, and that he did not know if there were any potential side-effects to the drugs. This interpretation is reminiscent of the doctors and soldiers who claimed that during the Second World War they were given no choice but to follow orders. The comparison made above between Kipke and Nazi doctors is therefore one which relies upon the notion that the doping system was as bad as the Nazi medical abuse; but also that it was a complete totalitarian system in which individuals at all levels were denied autonomy. Of course, as noted previously, this is also a gross over-simplification of the social and political dynamics of Nazi Germany – the GDR comparison is a myth based on a myth, but nonetheless harnesses the power of that earlier myth to support what seems to be common sense interpretations.

Ungerleider continues along this theme when discussing the testimony of another ‘doping scientist’, Dr Rösler who – in contrast to Kipke – wanted the resolution of taking responsibility for her actions even though she claimed that it was not until 1993 that she realized what the side-effects of the doping drugs could be:

To this day, Rösler does not understand why so many doctors and senior sports officials are still in denial, suppressing the truth about doping and the dangers of the chemicals. ‘I have friends who tell me that if I had not injected these teenage swimmers … someone else would have stepped in and replaced me. Of course, that was the same excuse used during the Third Reich, that if we didn’t respond to Hitler, another doctor would have fulfilled the function. I should have shown more courage’, she said with sorrow. ‘In Nazi Germany we did what we were told to do. The GDR doping machine was no different; we were just carrying out our medical orders, never questioning the system that was good to us, just doing our job. Have we not learned anything?’ (Ungerleider, 2001: 112–123)

The Nazi comparison thesis relies heavily upon the notion that the GDR was a dictatorship. However, Ungerleider is not the only scholar who has proposed such an idea in relation to doping history. Spitzer is another important scholar who draws out the comparison between East German sport and the Nazi regime. He describes the political system as a ‘Leninist monster’ (2006: 58), and claims that the government aimed for ‘absolute control of internal affairs’ (2006: 63). From this representation of a closed society, dominated by the ruling class, and disavowing individual agency, it becomes more plausible to draw comparisons with the organizational structure of German society under the Nazi regime. Spitzer furthers his line of argument by claiming that ‘most of those with responsibility for developing sport in the GDR were former ‘‘Hitlerjungen’’, members of the Nazi Youth organization’ (2006: 59). One example given is that of Manfred Ewald, who was the sports minister between 1961 and 1988, and who led the doping system. Spitzer argues that he was a ‘high ranking Nazi’ before transferring allegiance at the end of the war, and whose biography illustrates the argument that ‘in the GDR, doping was a Leninist strategy without ethical borders or health limits’ (Spitzer, 2006: 60). Crucially for this article, the clear associations with totalitarian regimes have been made by Ungerleider and Spitzer. Doping, inhumane experimentation, and the forced compliance of victims and perpetrators are all bound up with the imposition of political systems on the everyday lives of citizens. The outcome appears to be the same, regardless of whether the politics are Nazi or communist.

The other component of the Nazi comparison thesis is what Spitzer calls the ‘mandatory’ nature of the doping, which ‘constituted a serious violation of the human rights of many athletes’ (2006: 58). Athletes were not given a choice: once an individual reached a certain standard of performance their coach would provide them with the pills. The coach would be following the instructions of the doping working group, and each sports federation would have a doping programme. The doctors would support the coaches in their delivery of the pills. However, the athletes were often told that these were simply vitamins, while pressured not to discuss them (or any other aspect of their training) with family, friends or other athletes. Franke and Berendonk called the doping system ‘one of the largest pharmacological experiments in history’ (1997: 1262) which ran for more than three decades without the ‘informed consent’ (1997: 1275) of the athletes. Even if athletes had been told, many were too young to make a choice, did not have access to external support networks for advice, and may have rationalized that their success as an athlete involved taking certain risks. Moreover, the full range of side-effects was not widely known, and there is some uncertainty as to how much the authorities and doctors realized about health risks.

Given that there was an absence of informed consent, the GDR doping system may be said to contravene the Nuremberg Code, which was developed in the aftermath of the Nazi doctors’ trials to provide a framework for fundamental human rights in medicine (Schmidt, 2007). The first principle of the Code is that ‘The voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential’ (Schmidt, 2007: 105). The Code provides a historical connection to Nazi Germany – any violation is a recognition that the crimes of the 1940s are being repeated.

Developing the Nazi comparison

When drawing from the testimonies to discuss whether the GDR doping system resembled the Nazi medical atrocities, several key themes need to be addressed. Evidence to support the comparison would point to these specific features: that subjects were experimented upon without their knowledge or consent; that coaches and doctors were simply following orders and had no choice; that the athletes were victims of an inhumane medical experiment.

There are many examples from the witness statements at the post-unification court cases to show that the Nuremberg Code was ignored. One of the athletes, Birgit Matz (1996), said that ‘I started taking all of these pills, especially the blue and egg-yellow pills, when I was thirteen, or at the latest fourteen. My parents were not told that I was taking medications.’ She was not given any choice in the matter, and was forced to take drinks and pills while being watched by her coach, and no-one told her what she was taking.

Another athlete, Darja Strobach (1998), said similarly, ‘it was made very clear to us that we were not to discuss this with anyone, not even our parents’. And similarly, when Ute Krause was asked ‘Were you pressured in any way to take drugs?’, she replied, ‘That wasn’t a problem; we were all children.’

Kirstin Otto (1997), who won six swimming gold medals at the 1988 Olympic Games, reported to the court that she was not aware that her urine analysis in 1989 had shown a testosterone level of 17:1, much higher than the anti-doping policy regulations which were 6:1 and later lowered to 4:1. According to her testimony, she knew nothing about the doping drugs she had been given until the story was publicized in 1990. She also provided a written statement in October 1997 augmenting her oral testimony, which included the following: ‘During my athletic career . . . I never knowingly consumed illegal performance-enhancing medications. I never gave anyone permission to administer illegal performance-enhancing substances to me.’ Otto’s account is further complicated, however, by her denial that she experienced any of the side-effects associated with steroids, and her anger at the accusation that she cheated to win her medals.

The experiences related by swimmer Carola Beraktschjan (1997) also point to abusive, uninformed experimentation. In the course of her testimony, it was presented to her that the documents relating to Dr Kipke, showed that she ‘participated in a large-scale experiment, related to performance-enhancing drugs, from April to July 1977’. Beraktschjan replied to this, ‘If I was involved in this research, I didn’t know about it’, and she further said that while she had received injections she was ‘not allowed to look at the discarded vials used during the injection, which would have told us what we were being injected with’.

Shot-putter Birgit Boese (1996) explained how she was forced under supervision to swallow pills and consume liquids, and told these were simple vitamins that would improve her sports performances:

In addition to the liquid in the glass, there were three pills lying on the table. They were about as big as contraceptive pills. One pill was light blue, and other two were white. I didn’t know what these pills were. I never saw the original packaging.

When she reported the side-effects to team doctors, such as her voice deepening and facial hair growth, she was told that such symptoms were not unusual. She reported, ‘no one had told me what I was taking, much less indicated that the medications had anything to do with hormones’. During her court appearance, she agreed that the pills she was given looked like the pills of Oral-Turinabol shown to her in a photograph. Subsequent medical treatment which included hormone therapy in 1985 (ten years after being given the ‘pills’ and drinks by her coach), led to such severe side-effects that a doctor ‘told me that I must have taken hormones some time before’. The hair growth had been the focus of unwanted teasing from fellow athletes, but also meant she had to continue plucking hairs from her chin every day through to when she gave her testimony to the police in 1996. She pointed to other evidence of doping abuses such as that the other athletes in her group ‘also received the pills’, and that fellow athlete Irina Meszynski ‘had even worse symptoms. Her voice deepened much more than mine, and I thought that she looked more like a man than a woman.’

Such cases support the argument that doping was carried out in a way that was experimental, without the consent of the athletes or their parents, some of which included girls of childhood age (for example, Birgit Boese was 12 years old when she was first given doping pills and drinks). The court testimonies focused on gathering together as much evidence of these secretive procedures as possible. Other athletes testified that they were given injections, they suffered side-effects, and that the doctors and coaches simply dismissed their appeals for help and information. Birgit Meineke (1997) reported that one doctor told her that she probably inherited a deep voice from her mother, and that when one of the athletes asked Dr Kipke about the acne she was suffering, he replied ‘You girls don’t get enough love!’

Some evidence from those who planned and supervised the doping system can also be used to support the argument that gaining consent was not seen as important. A member of the ‘uM’ ¹ workgroup, which planned the detail of the doping programme, Manfred Matuschevski (1999), said that ‘I knew that there were cases, from the early years of GDR sports, in which athletes were not told that they were being given performance-enhancing drugs’. He also admitted that the system did not fully protect athletes: ‘there was no official procedure governing how athletes were informed about the drugs they were taking’. In this regard, he discussed the ‘uM’ group, which was the small committee overseeing the doping:

The ‘uM’ workgroup never discussed how athletes should be informed about the possibility of side-effects . . . The group never discussed whether or how parents should be informed when ‘uM’ was administered to their children. But it was quite clear that young people were not to be told too much about the drugs or their side-effects.

Dr Elke Karin Schramm (1996) said, ‘neither the girls nor their parents were informed about the side-effects of these substances’. And Dietberg Frieberg (1998), who was part of the uM group testified that ‘the uM programme enabled coaches and physicians to supply performance-enhancing substances, such as Oral-Turinabol and testosterone, to athletes, without any explanation of the possible side-effects’.

These comments, and others from the doctors and sports administrators who testified, show that in many cases senior members of staff were aware that drugs were being forced on young athletes without their consent, their parents’ involvement, or any discussion of the potential risks. The instructions given were to implement the uM programme, and that seemed more important to fulfil the programme than to engage in a discussion with the athletes about potential risks. Those who might have suspected any problems were bound by the very strict rules of secrecy that applied to many of the government-led policies and actions in the GDR. In such a way, the totalitarian nature of the social and political system does echo the Nazi party’s determination to control all aspects of citizens’ lives. However, it is important that we now consider counter-arguments to the proposition that the GDR doping situation was similar to that of the medical atrocities committed by Nazi doctors.

The Nazi comparison: Counter-arguments

Most of the authors cited above have approached the subject of GDR doping from the perspective of sport. This means that the discussion is framed by the ethics of sport, that is, the promotion of healthy physical activity and the spirit of fair play. As Møller (2010) has described, the debate on sports doping often refers explicitly or implicitly to purist ideals that reflect a traditional, romanticized notion of sporting behaviour that is also tied up with notions of amateur sport. However, if we were to shift the perspective away from the moralistic assumptions surrounding sports and drugs, and approach this issue from a wider social historical angle, the nature of the issue changes. McAdams (2001) outlines the history of German re-unification and the ways in the crimes of the GDR were adjudicated in the 1990s. He argues that the GDR’s ‘human rights and abuses’ were ‘more modest’ than those found in Nazi Germany (2001: 1). Moreover, he identifies examples of ‘glaring crimes’ as ‘the shooting of would-be escapees at the Berlin Wall and the kidnapping and murder or political opponents by the Minister of State Security or Stasi’ (2001: 2). In other words, sports doping hardly registers as a significant issue in the 1990s ‘reckoning with communist rule’ (2001: 2) in unified Germany. McAdams in fact only mentions sport once in his monograph, and that was to express his surprise that it was considered worthy of criminal investigations. Alongside judicial corruption, espionage, mail tampering and electoral fraud, he describes ‘athletic doping’ as a ‘lesser offence’ that in other truth and reconciliation settings (i.e. post-dictatorship Argentina, the former Yugoslavia) would ‘have received little or no attention’ (2001: 2).

Adams’s failure to explore sports doping reflects other examples in German historiography under which the issue is not treated with the same critical awareness as has emerged in the sports studies literature. For example, Dennis (2000) briefly outlines the system for organizing doping, but his critical comments are limited to a couple of sentences:

Drugs, notably anabolic steroids, were used to an unprecedented degree as part of a central programme organised by [the state] … Cases are well documented of the systematic administering of minors with drugs, especially swimmers and athletes, without their parents’ permission. (2000: 114–115)

We can see then that compared to the broader social, legal, political, economic and cultural activities of the GDR, and what was deemed important in the process of ‘reckoning with the past’, that sports doping was not comparable to either the more salient crimes of the GDR’s regime or to the Nazi past. That is not say it was irrelevant, as sport has often been seen as less important than other controversial social, political and economic (or indeed criminal) activity. However, the point remains that the sort of emotive scandalizing found in Ungerleider’s book, and in subsequent media coverage, is not found in the more ‘mainstream’ accounts of GDR history.

In terms of the details of how ‘uM’ was distributed, the most pertinent question is whether all athletes were duped or deceived into taking unhealthy substances. There are a number of testimonies that would contradict Spitzer’s notion that the GDR doping system was ‘mandatory’. Innes Geipel (1997) said, ‘It was clear to me … that these pills were doping substances.’ Ute Krause (1997) supported this by saying that while she and her fellow athletes were not explicitly told about the doping, ‘Unofficially, we all knew something was going on.’ Although most of the athletes who testified explained that they had been compelled not to discuss their ‘pills’ with anyone, there are some indications of an informal breaking of this code of silence. One of the athletics coaches at the sports club Dynamo Berlin, Bernd Madler (1999), said:

the topic of performance-enhancing drugs was rarely, if ever, discussed among the coaches. In my opinion, the athletes discussed the drugs among themselves more often than the coaches. I think the athletes were probably better informed than the coaches on this matter. I can still remember that the athletes used to joke about this topic.

However, the evidence on this issue is rather complex. Some other testimony accounts highlight the coaches’ desire to exceed the ‘uM’ programme and to actually overdose their athletes. This would lead to internal investigations – to which the coaches responded with some acrimony (Matuchevski, 1999). In other words, the doping system had its cracks and flaws. Athletes may well have had suspicions at to what was going on, which they seemed to have shared with each other (if not their parents). Coaches made some self-directed decisions to override the restrictions imposed by the ‘uM’ workgroup. Moreover, the coaches sometimes complained that the GDR sport system was too conservative with doping compared to those found in other countries (Schramm, 1996). Manfred Höppner (1997), the leader of the ‘uM’ group, also discussed this point: ‘there were a few instances when coaches would return from international competitions abroad, and they would bring us medicinal bottles that they had fished out of other team’s trashcans. They wanted us to see if it was anything that might be useful to the GDR.’

We can say therefore that the system was not a completely totalitarian ‘machine’, and that not all athletes were fully uninformed. More broadly, it could be argued that the athletes gained material and social benefits from their sports success, and that their short-term health was protected as much as possible. There are also areas of doubt. It is not clear what knowledge the doctors, research scientists, policy-makers and coaches had knowledge of the potential risks involved. Some assumed that the side effect problems would stop once the athlete stopped taking the drugs.

There are also doubts about the large number of athletes who did not come forward to testify. Almost all the witnesses were women whose could claim to have been abused and suffered the consequences of the medical experiment. However, some like Kirstin Otto (1997) did not belong to that category, as she claimed not to have experienced any side-effects. Others simply did not present themselves as part of the prosecution so we do not know how many athletes were physically or emotionally traumatized. And it seems likely that male athletes suffered fewer side-effects and may indeed have felt the steroids enhanced their physique and performance.

In conclusion, a number of scholars have been rather dramatic in their presentation of GDR doping as being similar to the Nazi war crimes. Using the testimonies available from the post-unification court cases we have attempted to challenge the Nazi comparison and to open up further questions about the contradictions, complications and ambiguities contained within the archive of evidence. It is simplistic, one-dimensional and misleading to assume that everything was ‘evil’ or ‘abusive’ with the GDR sports system. Recognizing that does not mean we ignore the critical factors, but just that we widen the scope of debate to include individual agency and self-determination in order to gain improved insight into what happened and why.