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    Faust's Gold: Inside The East German Doping Machine
    Faust's Gold: Inside The East German Doping Machine
    Faust's Gold: Inside The East German Doping Machine
    Ebook237 pages2 hours

    Faust's Gold: Inside The East German Doping Machine

    By Steven Ungerleider, Ph.D.

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    About this ebook

    Steven Ungerleider's Faust's Gold is the stunning expose of the East German sports juggernaut of the 1970s and 1980s that forced young athletes to unknowingly take steroids.

    For nearly twenty-five years, East Germany's corrupt sports organization dominated international athletics. While the German Democratic Republic's secret "State Plan" was in effect, more than ten thousand unsuspecting young athletes--some as young as twelve years old--were given massive doses of performance-enhancing anabolic steroids. These athletes achieved miraculous success in international competitions, including the Olympics, but for many of them, their physical and emotional health was permanently damaged.

    Faust's Gold draws on the revelations of the ongoing trials of former GDR coaches, doctors, and sports officials who have now confessed to conducting ruthless medical experiments on young and talented athletes selected for Olympic training camps. It also draws on the extensive research of Brigitte Berendonk, who escaped from East Germany to begin a decade-long crusade to bring justice to her fellow athletes, and that of her husband, Professor Werner Franke. Berendonk's story, and those of her colleagues in the GDR, offers a unique insight into a bizarre regime.

    Faust's Gold is a true-life detective story that plunges into the dark, secretive world of the GDR doping scam, where elite competitors and their families are up against a formidable opponent: the East German secret police, known as the STASI. What emerges is a complex tapestry of the politicized modern Olympics that culminates in a powerful testimony to the massive wrong done by one Eastern Bloc nation to its world-class athletes.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Publishers
    Release dateMar 10, 2015
    ISBN9781466891852
    Faust's Gold: Inside The East German Doping Machine
    Author

    Steven Ungerleider, Ph.D.

    Steven Ungerleider, Ph.D., the author of several books, completed his undergraduate studies in psychology at the University of Texas, Austin, where he also competed as a collegiate gymnast. He holds master's and doctorate degrees from the University of Oregon and is a licensed psychologist consulting with college, Olympic, and professional athletes. Since 1984, he has served on the United States Olympic Committee Sport Psychology Registry and has covered the past seven Olympiads for various media, including AOL and the Atlanta Constitution. Mental Training for Peak Performance was named as a Book of the Month Club Selection for Men's Health magazine. Ungerleider lives with his family in Eugene, Oregon.

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    • 3/5
      Really good read!. Worth a read for people who are interested in sports doping

    Book preview

    Faust's Gold - Steven Ungerleider, Ph.D.

    PREFACE

    During the 1970s and 1980s, East Germany’s corrupt sports organization dominated international amateur athletics. In the three decades when the GDR’s secret State Planning Theme 14.25 was in effect, more than ten thousand unsuspecting young athletes were given massive doses of performance-enhancing anabolic steroids. They achieved near-miraculous success in international competition, including the Olympics. But for most, their physical and emotional health was permanently shattered.

    Faust’s Gold draws on the revelations of the ongoing trials of former German Democratic Republic (GDR) coaches, doctors, and sports officials who have now confessed to conducting ruthless and destructive medical experiments on young, talented athletes selected for the elite Olympic training camps. The book also draws on the extensive research of Brigitte Berendonk and her husband, Professor Werner Franke. Berendonk, herself a victim of the GDR’s doping machine, escaped from East Germany to begin a decades-long crusade to bring justice to those who were not so fortunate. Her story and those of her fellow athletes in the GDR offer an unflinching view of life in an amoral totalitarian regime, as well as a true-life detective story in which she and Franke are pitted against a formidable opponent: the East German secret police, known as the STASI. These elements are woven into the complex tapestry of the politicized modern Olympics.

    Over and above matters of sport and the culture of athletics, I have attempted to provide some insight into a nation obsessed with victory, no matter the cost. In following that obsession, the architects and agents of the GDR doping system forever altered our concepts of sportsmanship and competition.

    1

    Prologue

    In the late 1970s, I began to work as a sports psychologist with many elite athletes, some of whom went on to compete for our United States Olympic teams. Over the years, I kept hearing these athletes bitterly protesting the unfair advantage posed by the enormous change in the athletic prowess of the East German competitors, a change that observers assumed was due to some type of synthetic hormone.

    We would be in the locker room with these female swimmers, the U.S. athletes would tell me, and we would have to check the symbol on the door to make sure we had the right bathrooms. These swimmers—they were huge. They had shoulders like Dallas Cowboys, hair growing all over their bodies. It was quite startling, they reported. Many swimmers who competed internationally commented that it wasn’t just the physical attributes of the East German women that was troubling, but also their aggressive behavior. They would spit on the floor, one swimmer told me. They would look at you like they wanted to rip your tongue out. It was all a bit surreal, and very intimidating. The more complaints we heard, the more we coaches and consultants told our American competitors to just stay focused, don’t get distracted, and swim your best race; don’t worry about the other folks.

    In 1984, when I was appointed to the first sports medicine group of the United States Olympic Committee, I learned more about this issue. There were more rumors, more anecdotes, more drug testing, and speculation about the East Germans, but no proof. In the late 1980s a group of my colleagues went to Germany and met with officials in Leipzig, at the most prominent sports institute for GDR training. It was there that some informal documents surfaced that provided evidence that there really was a secret system in place to dope many GDR athletes. None of us had any idea of the scope of this plan, nor did we know that the dam was about to break.

    Years later, when I read about the work that former Olympian Brigitte Berendonk had done, documenting years of GDR doping, I became intrigued. Several of my colleagues encouraged me to call Brigitte and her husband, a highly respected molecular biologist named Werner Franke. After many conversations by phone, we finally met in Berlin. We agreed then that a psychologist, a molecular biologist, and a former Olympian who was now a schoolteacher might make a good team for the purpose of collecting and disseminating information as it came to light. More important, we agreed that the story had to be told.

    2

    The Big Oak Room

    The Thirty-fourth Superior Criminal Court of the Berlin Landgericht is a massive neoclassical building of smog-stained limestone block. The structure dominates the normally quiet streets of the surrounding Tiergarten. But on the Wednesday morning of April 20, 1998, the street outside the courthouse was anything but quiet. Remote television vans top-heavy with antennae jostled for parking spots, and a cluster of frustrated camera crews and still photographers shuffled in the chill spring sun, grinding their cigarette butts on the marble entrance steps, much to the chagrin of the police officers guarding the ornate bronze doors. Although Germany’s attention was focused on this courthouse, cameras and microphones were excluded from the proceedings taking place inside.

    Room 700, a cavernous chamber with oak-paneled walls and heavy rafters, was filled to capacity. Presiding Judge Hansgeorg Bräutigam sat perched high above the other adjudicators in a wooden boxlike structure. Three judges and two laywomen jurors sat on the wide, varnished bench that stood between two incongruous wood-and-glass cages, bulletproof witness stands built in the 1950s when the fledgling West German government continued the Nazi war crimes trials begun at Nuremberg in 1946.

    The six defendants in Room 700 today, however, sat at tables in open court. This 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.

    The charges of Criminal Case 28 Js 39/97 were Willful Bodily Harm inflicted by the six defendants on children, including the three witnesses in court today. The indicted men were two medical doctors, Dieter Binus and Bernd Pansold, along with four coaches and trainers, Volker Frischke, Dieter Krause, Rolf Gläser, and Dieter Lindemann. All had been part of the swimming program of the Sport Club SC Dynamo Berlin in the 1970s and 1980s, when the state-run organization was the hub of East Germany’s seemingly invincible elite athletic juggernaut. The specific accusations were that they had intentionally administered anabolic steroids and testosterone to nineteen unwitting, underage female swimmers between 1975 and 1989 in order to secretly and illegally enhance their performance—without regard for the well-documented serious health problems associated with these powerful drugs.

    The three prosecution witnesses in this trial, Birgit Matz, Carola Nitschke-Beraktschjan, and Christiane Knacke-Sommer, sat with their attorneys at a separate table, behind the federal prosecutors. Twenty-five years earlier, they had been among the GDR’s star teenage athletes, winning individual and team medals at the 1976 Montreal and 1980 Moscow Olympic Games. Now in their late thirties and early forties, the women were tastefully dressed in the subdued corporate mode of the prosperous 1990s European Union.

    But when the prosecutors called Christiane Knacke-Sommer to testify, her well-tailored suit could not hide her unnaturally wide shoulders and powerful arms. Like the other witnesses in the case, she had been a normal, healthy pubescent girl in the mid-1970s. Then her family sent her to live and train at SC Dynamo to compete for the greater glory of the state. Now, three decades later, she spoke of those years in an unusually deep voice that was tense, yet controlled.

    Among the spectators, listening intently to the testimony and imagining themselves in Christiane Knacke-Sommer’s place, were other former GDR athletes. Their names read like an Olympic lineup: Birgit Heike Matz, Ute Krause, Rica Reinisch, Birgit Heukrodt, Karen König, Andreas Krieger, Martina Gottschalt, Jutta Gottschalk. Some were unsure whether they should testify, whether they could testify, knowing that it would be not only painful, but also dangerous to do so. All were aware that they might be called upon to come forward.

    A prosecutor patiently led Christiane through the early years of her childhood in a small Saxon town near Dresden, then shifted to the months when she was first installed in the swim club dormitory and began her training regimen. SC Dynamo was a closed complex, she testified. The young athletes training there were isolated from their families and the outside world. Separated from her parents, Christiane had turned thirteen while at SC Dynamo. After a thorough initial physical and psychological examination, the medical and athletic officials in charge of the establishment determined that she had potential as an Olympic-class butterfly swimmer. For the next two years, she steadily advanced in club competition, and was finally selected for the coveted elite group from which GDR Olympic team members would be chosen. This group of swimmers was the responsibility of Dr. Dieter Binus and trainer Rolf Gläser.

    It was then that she was given the little blue pills. Christiane’s voice hardened as she continued her testimony. At first, she wasn’t concerned about taking the small tablets, the innocent color of robin’s eggs, which Rolf Gläser administered daily in strict four-week cycles. At the time, it did seem a bit odd that the trainer insisted that all the girls receiving these special vitamins swallow them in his presence. But Gläser dismissed the girls’ concerns, pointing out that the nutritional supplements had cost the state too much to be wasted on careless adolescents who might forget to take

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