In December 1991, a Swiss magazine profiled a new coach at a gleaming gymnastics center in Liestal. Dieter Hofmann, they wrote, was a “coaching legend”—his East German athletes had won 52 Olympic, World, and European Championship medals. Now he was in Switzerland, “baking smaller rolls,” teaching part-time at a vocational school. The profile mentioned, briefly, that some had blocked his appointment to lead unified Germany’s team because of his past. But it went no further.
Over the next decade, two sets of articles would tell a fuller story. The first, released in 1993, documented Hofmann’s work as Stasi informant “Rose”—reporting on colleagues, providing a safe house for covert operations, and derailing careers to demonstrate loyalty to the East German state. The second, revealed in 2003, showed his role overseeing athletes during secret experiments with psychotropic drugs, including an incident where a gymnast lost control and had to be carried from the hall. Together, they painted a portrait of a man embedded in two overlapping systems of control: one focused on surveillance and political compliance, the other on pharmaceutical performance enhancement. Both required absolute secrecy. Both treated athletes as instruments of state policy rather than individuals with rights of their own.
United Germany’s Next Head Coach?
The autumn of 1990 was a moment of rapid, disorienting change in German gymnastics. As reunification accelerated far faster than anyone had anticipated, the two national federations—East Germany’s DTV and West Germany’s DTB—scrambled to negotiate a merger. What had begun in January as cautious discussions about future cooperation had, by summer, become an inevitable absorption. On June 28, the East German sports federation announced it would dissolve and join the West German system. The careful plans for a balanced partnership, for shared leadership, for an East Berlin office staffed with DTV officials—all of it evaporated. The DTB would absorb the five new Eastern state gymnastics federations under its existing structure, and East Germany’s DTV leadership would have minimal roles, if any, when the two federations officially merged at the German Gymnastics Congress in Hanover in September of 1990.
For Dieter Hofmann, the longtime head coach of East Germany’s men’s gymnastics team, this political reality meant his expected promotion to lead the newly unified national team had collapsed. In September, as the historic debut of the united German team approached, he sat down for an interview with the Berliner Zeitung. He was in crisis. What he called “a nasty press campaign” had derailed his appointment. The accusations stung: that he was a loyalist to the Socialist Unity Party of Germany, that he used “Stalinist” methods, that he “lacked human qualities and merely drilled the gymnasts.”
“That last point hurts me deeply,” Hofmann told the interviewer. “Yes, I always applied consistent training methods and demanded a lot from the athletes. But I was always there for their concerns and problems—around the clock.”
He described plans that had fallen apart. Until August, he said, discussions about his appointment had remained “objective.” He had been prepared to take the position “on the condition that officials, coaches, and athletes trusted one another.” Then the press turned against him. Now, the night before he was to travel to Munich for the historic debut of the united German team, he had “essentially ended my career as a coach—at least in my own mind.”
When asked about his relationship with the current West German national coach, Franz Heinlein, Hofmann maintained it had been “quite good” until recently. They had agreed in April “to work together to tackle what lay ahead—building a strong team for the 1991 Worlds in Indianapolis and the Olympics in Barcelona.” But lately, he noted carefully, “different tones have been heard, though I have the impression they are not coming directly from Heinlein.”
The interviewer pressed: What did his own top gymnasts think? “I don’t know,” Hofmann admitted. “The press reports very contradictory opinions, especially ones said to have come from Andreas Wecker. Sometimes he’s against me, sometimes he’s for me.”
As for the future of German gymnastics, Hofmann offered a warning wrapped in nostalgia. A gymnast’s career was short—six years at best. He worried that “proven principles of elite sport may no longer be adhered to,” pointing to examples from Japan, China, and Bulgaria, “where neglect in training, arrogance, or lifestyle issues led to weaker results.”
And what was next for him personally? “At the moment, I really don’t know. Perhaps my only remaining option is to go abroad as a coach.”
That’s exactly what happened.
A Fresh Start in Switzerland
At first, Hofmann took on several short-term consulting assignments, which took him from Canada to Italy to Australia. But by December 1991, he had landed in Liestal, a town near Basel, where a gleaming new gymnastics center had just opened. The weekly magazine Wir Brückenbauer welcomed him with an admiring profile. Here was a “coaching legend”—a man whose athletes had won 52 medals at Olympics, World Championships, and European Championships—now working part-time, “baking smaller rolls” as a vocational school teacher and gymnastics instructor.
The profile painted him as exacting but fair: quick to scold a boy sneaking too many water breaks, ready to tell a concerned mother that her son had potential but lacked diligence. It acknowledged, briefly, that some had blocked his appointment to lead unified Germany’s team, noting that “Hofmann’s past, which he—unlike many opportunists—did not deny, became his downfall—or his good fortune.”
The truth would take longer to surface.
The Letters Begin
In February 1992, a reader named Hanspeter Frey wrote to Wir Brückenbauer. Hofmann, he argued, was “a product of a state—now mercifully defunct—that carried out the most inhuman intrusions into the personal sphere of its athletes.” As “ambassadors in tracksuits,” Erich Honecker’s phrase for elite athletes, they had been forced to “bury their own sense of self. The Party—and its extended arm, the coach—thought, acted, and gave orders for them.”
Frey quoted all-around champion Mike Beckmann’s assessment when Hofmann had applied to lead the unified German team: “He would have to change considerably.”
Then, in September 1992, the Berliner Zeitung published a brief report: Hofmann’s name had appeared in Stasi files from Halle. He had worked for East Germany’s State Security Service between 1967 and 1981 under the code name “Rose,” listed as an “unofficial collaborator for conspiratorial duties/conspiratorial apartment provision.” Confronted by Swiss officials, Hofmann assured them “that no one had come to harm as a result of his statements.” The canton of Baselland requested further information from Joachim Gauck, officially titled the Federal Government’s Special Commissioner for the Personal Records of the Former State Security Service. Hofmann declared his willingness to cooperate.
What “Rose” Did
The reckoning came in November 1993, when the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) published the first detailed reconstruction of Dieter Hofmann’s work for the Ministry for State Security. His Stasi file—registration number VIII/1146/73—spanned two volumes and, as the newspaper put it, was “a meticulously organized record of harassment—some ordered by the state, others carried out with anticipatory zeal.”
The file showed that Hofmann’s contact with the Stasi began on May 19, 1965, when he first met with officers as an informant candidate. By 1970, he had been formally designated a GMS (Gesellschaftlicher Mitarbeiter Sicherheit), a “social collaborator for security.” In 1973, he and his wife agreed to provide their apartment as a “konspirative Wohnung”—a safe house used for covert Stasi operations.
The arrangement created a logistical problem: other trainers and functionaries of SC Halle lived in the same high-rise complex, and frequent visits from Stasi officers might arouse suspicion among the athletes. The solution was to also offer his services to Department XX/4, the division responsible for surveilling churches. This provided cover: if anyone noticed Stasi activity around his apartment, it could be explained as unrelated to sports. For this dual role, he received 20 marks per month, plus reimbursement for maintaining the apartment. A “destruction protocol” later documented 2,232.15 marks paid between March 1973 and December 1979 for that purpose.
When IM “Rose” received his Stasi final evaluation on November 20, 1989, it praised his “political reliability” and his ability to assert “his party-line standpoint, even with full consequence.”
What that meant becomes clear in the file’s case reports.
On September 22, 1970, after learning from the Stasi that one of his gymnasts had relatives in the West, Hofmann took it upon himself to remove the athlete from elite sport. Stasi First Lieutenant Knabe recorded: “Hofmann requested a consultation, informing me that, in accordance with our wishes and suggestions, he has removed the gymnast from competitive sport.” The athlete never learned the real reason. Hofmann instead held a series of meetings, convincing him that “his limits in elite gymnastics had already been reached.” Eventually, the young man agreed to become an assistant coach.
By then, the FAZ observed, Hofmann had become “a powerful man in GDR gymnastics,” and he used that power freely.
On March 31, 1971, he denounced a colleague slated to help prepare the team for the Munich Olympics: “His parents defected in 1960. There is ongoing correspondence.”
That same month, Hofmann filed another report: “It is generally known that the West German federation has the GDR’s training plans.” He accused a former fellow student—described as lacking “a positive attitude toward the GDR”—of leaking them to Eduard Friedrich, then West Germany’s national coach.
“False,” Friedrich said decades later. The man Hofmann implicated was Hans Semlow of Wittenberg, who had long faced inexplicable accusations of treachery. Confronted with IM “Rose’s” file, Semlow finally understood their origin: “Now a lot of things make sense to me.” Separately, the file also confirmed that Semlow had been removed from the 1960 Olympic preparation squad for ideological reasons, not sporting ones.
The Hofmann file was closed in 1989. The final note read: “He is personally prepared to continue supporting the Ministry for State Security in his current sphere of activity, both officially and unofficially.”
So What?
After the revelations, Wir Brückenbauer published an opinion piece that acknowledged the seriousness of the accusations while ultimately downplaying them. Yes, it was “embarrassing, embarrassing” that Hofmann had, at Stasi instigation, removed a gymnast from elite sport. But, the columnist argued, “that’s no reason to point the finger at the East German coach with your clean Swiss finger.”
Everyone in a leadership position in the GDR had been “entangled in some way with the state apparatus,” the piece continued. “Those who resisted were secretly regarded as heroes. And not everyone is born to be a hero. The Swiss, incidentally, no more so than the East Germans.”
Hofmann continued working in Switzerland. Under his direction, the North Swiss Artistic and Apparatus Gymnastics Center in Liestal became one of the country’s leading training centers for young talent. The Stasi revelations had not ended his career.
The Doping Accusations
In February 2003, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung published another investigation, this time into Staatsplanthema 14.25—”State Plan Topic 14.25″—the blueprint for East Germany’s state-sponsored doping program. One document, titled “Summary Presentation of the Results of the Research Work on State Plan Topic 14.25 during the 1984–1988 Olympic Cycle,” ran roughly 68 pages and had been prepared in September 1988 as a classified government document.
It confirmed what many already knew: that doctors and sports scientists, with the blessing of state leadership, had administered addictive amphetamines and organ-damaging anabolic steroids to elite athletes. But it also revealed something else. Between the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics and the 1988 Seoul Olympics, no fewer than 28 brain-active medications—psychotropic drugs—had been tested on athletes for potential performance enhancement.
Soccer players competed under the influence of these medications. So did female gymnasts from Frankfurt (Oder), fencers, shooters, and leading cyclists. The substance tested on many of them, lysine-vasopressin, was intended to heighten attention and concentration. According to the files, it was purchased from Sandoz in Switzerland and prepared as a spray by the Dresden pharmaceutical works “especially for us.”
For gymnastics, the document showed tests on male athletes, which, according to FAZ, were carried out “under the aegis of federation coach Dieter Hofmann.”
The article included a chilling detail: “One of Hofmann’s former athletes could testify to the side effects of these practices. During one of the secret test competitions, the gymnast lost self-control. Several teammates had to restrain him and carry him out of the hall. When the athlete later asked, confused, what had happened, he was told: ‘We thought you had been informed. This is a secret experiment.'”
Two Systems, One Man
The Stasi accusations and the doping revelations belonged, in some sense, to different domains. The Ministry for State Security focused on surveillance, suppression of dissent, and control of information. The doping program, coordinated through organizations like the Sports Medical Service and overseen by figures like Dr. Manfred Höppner, aimed at athletic dominance through pharmaceutical intervention.
But both systems required the same thing from people like Dieter Hofmann: absolute compliance, absolute secrecy, and a willingness to treat athletes as instruments of state policy rather than as individuals with rights and futures of their own.
In East Germany’s doping system, it was coaches—not doctors—who managed the daily routines. They handed out pills, supervised injections, tracked athletes’ physical responses, and maintained strict secrecy, often even from one another. Above them, senior sports officials organized the programs, centralized results, controlled access to international competition, and synchronized doping cycles with competition schedules to ensure performance peaked—and detection risk dipped—at the right time.
The Stasi’s role was to protect this system from exposure. After shot-putter Ilona Slupianek’s positive test in 1977 drew international attention, the agency formalized a comprehensive security plan in 1979 to coordinate protection of the doping program. By then, the Stasi had already been building a network of informal collaborators throughout elite sport—eventually numbering some 3,000—with coaches serving as both subjects and instruments of surveillance.
Dieter Hofmann operated within both structures. As IM “Rose,” he provided a safe house, reported on colleagues, and derailed careers to demonstrate loyalty. As federation coach, he oversaw athletes during experiments with psychotropic drugs—experiments that sometimes went wrong.
The Question That Remains
In that 1990 interview, when the accusations first began to surface, Hofmann insisted he had “always been there” for his athletes’ concerns and problems. He portrayed himself as demanding but caring, consistent but human. He probably believed this. Perhaps he saw a distinction between the professional rigor he demanded in training and the political compromises he made to stay in his position. Perhaps he told himself that by remaining in the system, he could at least coach well, could at least guide athletes to success.
Years later, when confronted with his Stasi file, he maintained, “I never harmed anyone.”
The files tell a more complicated story—one of a system designed to implicate everyone, to blur the lines between perpetrator and victim, to make collaboration seem like the only realistic path forward. Whatever Hofmann’s intentions, his biography became inseparable from the state apparatus he worked within.
When Hofmann died of COVID-19 in April 2020, the international gymnastics community remembered him as an innovator and mentor. The tributes focused on his technical knowledge shared generously, on a coach “always willing and eager” to help programs worldwide.
None mentioned “The Rose.” None referenced the Stasi files or the pharmaceutical protocols. The reasons for this silence likely varied. Perhaps it wasn’t the time or place. Perhaps it was a recognition that the Hofmann who worked internationally after reunification seemed fundamentally different from the one who had operated within the East German system.
His life was, in effect, split in two: the decades before 1990 and everything that came after. The contrast reveals how completely a person’s legacy can fracture: the generous mentor remembered at international coaching clinics existed alongside the figure documented in Stasi files who worked with “anticipatory zeal.” In the end, his story reflects the challenge of understanding any life shaped so profoundly by the German division—how do we account for both halves?
Appendix: A Timeline of the Press Coverage of Hofmann
September 1990: Dieter Hofmann Defends His Record
Infighting Behind the Scenes of German Gymnastics
Men’s Team Director Dieter Hofmann Is Deeply Worried / So Who Will Become the New National Coach?The Munich Olympic Hall will tomorrow at 3 p.m. host a historic gymnastics event. For the first time, a united German men’s team will compete again: three gymnasts from the still-existing GDR and three from the Federal Republic. Their opponents are a strong squad from the USSR and a team from the USA. But this gymnastics delicacy is overshadowed by jockeying for position over the post of future men’s national coach. The long-time GDR (DTV) men’s coach, Dieter Hofmann—a specialist respected around the world—had been earmarked for the job, yet he suddenly found himself making headlines. We spoke with him shortly before his departure for Munich.
BZ: How are you feeling personally right now?
Dieter Hofmann: Last night, I essentially ended my career as a coach—at least in my own mind. I actually didn’t want to go to Munich anymore.BZ: Why did you end up in the headlines just before the appearance of the united German team?
Hofmann: I need to go back a bit. I was prepared to take on the position of men’s national coach, on the condition that officials, coaches, and athletes trusted one another and tackled the upcoming goals—World Championships and Olympics—together. Until August, our discussions remained objective. But then a nasty press campaign against me began.BZ: What are the main accusations against you?
Hofmann: First, that I was a member of the SED. Second, that I used “Stalinist” methods in training. They say I lacked human qualities and merely drilled the gymnasts. That last point hurts me deeply. Yes, I always applied consistent training methods and demanded a lot from the athletes. But I was always there for their concerns and problems—around the clock.BZ: What do your own top gymnasts think about all this?
Hofmann: I don’t know. The press reports very contradictory opinions, especially ones said to have come from Andreas Wecker. Sometimes he’s against me, sometimes he’s for me.BZ: What is your relationship with the current men’s national coach, Franz Heinlein?
Hofmann: Up until recently, quite good. At the “Tournament of Masters” in Cottbus in April, we agreed to work together to tackle what lay ahead—building a strong team for the 1991 Worlds in Indianapolis and the Olympics in Barcelona. Lately, different tones have been heard, though I have the impression they are not coming directly from Heinlein.BZ: How do you see the future of German gymnastics?
Hofmann: A gymnast doesn’t have much time. At best, he can be at the top for six years. I think it’s possible that performances may decline, because proven principles of elite sport may no longer be adhered to. There are examples in world gymnastics—Japan, China, Bulgaria—where neglect in training, arrogance, or lifestyle issues led to weaker results.BZ: And what’s next for you personally?
Hofmann: At the moment, I really don’t know. Perhaps my only remaining option is to go abroad as a coach.Interview by Michael Jahn
Berliner Zeitung, September 29, 1990
December 1991: Wir Brückenbauer publishes a profile of Dieter Hofmann
New Beginning in Liestal
The former national coach of the GDR men’s gymnastics team, Dieter Hofmann, is now “baking smaller rolls” [i.e., taking on a more modest role].
The 165-centimeter-tall man with a great (coaching) past has his attentive eyes everywhere. Nothing escapes him. He sees even the smallest errors in a routine; he notices instantly when one of the boys slacks off.
For example, to one particularly thirsty pupil who leaves the gym twice in succession, he says: “You don’t just walk out of training to get a drink of water. You must use your time better; otherwise, it won’t work.”
And to a mother who inquires about her son’s performance, the coach replies: “Your boy has great potential, he is talented. Unfortunately, for the time being, he lacks diligence. That’s where both of us need to step in.”
Sensation
What is currently happening in Liestal is a true sensation in gymnastics circles. Since mid-October, in the newly opened “Northwest Swiss Artistic and Apparatus Gymnastics Center Liestal,” financed by the Sports Toto Fund, a coaching legend has been working as a part-time employee: Dieter Hofmann, 50 years old, who from 1982 until the collapse of the GDR served nine years as head coach of the men’s national team of the former gymnastics superpower.
During his tenure, his team won no fewer than 52 medals at Olympic Games, World and European Championships—five of them, incidentally, at the European Championships in Lausanne, which were also significant for our country. At that event, with two Swiss medals, the “Barcelona 1992 Project” was truly launched, sparking a new wave of Swiss men’s gymnastics enthusiasm.
After the collapse of the GDR, it was generally expected in German sports circles that Hofmann would rise to become head of the new, unified men’s gymnastics team. But some opponents blocked this. The newspaper Sport later commented: “Hofmann’s past, which he—unlike many opportunists—did not deny, became his downfall—or his good fortune.” The unemployed former GDR state employee then took on several short-term consulting assignments, which took him from Canada to Italy to Australia.
By chance, he came into contact with the project leaders of the then still-developing regional center in Liestal through a sports equipment company. He offered to help with advice and hands-on support, later came to Liestal in person to inspect the site, and, at a meeting with construction and gymnastics experts, contributed his extensive experience and knowledge to the planning.
The new modern regional training center, built at a cost of 2.3 million Swiss francs and in many respects similar to the one in Schaffhausen, seems to have prompted Hofmann to consider his own professional future. When the part-time coaching position was advertised, as usual, in the Turnzeitung (Gymnastics Newspaper), Hofmann himself, from Berlin, unexpectedly applied. The leaders of the new regional center immediately expressed strong interest.
However, to ensure full-time employment, an additional part-time post had to first be found. The canton offered him a half-time position as an ordinary gymnastics teacher at the vocational school in Liestal. Hofmann agreed—thus, despite some resistance from gymnastics circles, the Basel region had landed a “major coaching catch” thanks to refreshingly straightforward and swift action. Hofmann’s salary is now shared almost equally by the regional center and the canton, with a small contribution also provided by the Swiss Gymnastics Federation.
[…]
Wir Brückenbauer, December 18, 1991
February 1992: A Letter to the Editor Challenging Dieter Hofmann’s Past
New Beginning
BB 51/52: Former National Coach of the GDR Men’s Gymnastics TeamDieter Hofmann is a product of a state—now mercifully defunct—that carried out the most inhuman intrusions into the personal sphere of its athletes.
As “ambassadors in tracksuits,” as Erich Honecker called the athletes, they had to bury their own sense of self. The Party—and its extended arm, the coach—thought, acted, and gave orders for them.
When, after the collapse of this house of cards, Dieter Hofmann looked to the once “decadent West Germans” to put himself forward as national coach, all-around champion Mike Beckmann remarked: “He would have to change considerably.”
Hanspeter Frey, [redacted] Arlesheim
Wir Brückenbauer, February 5, 1992
September 1992: The “Rose”
Gymnastics Coach Hofmann Was Called “Rose” by the Stasi
Berlin/Basel. dpa/eb
Berliner Zeitung September 8, 1992
Dieter Hofmann, the most successful German gymnastics coach, worked for the East German State Security Service (Stasi) between 1967 and 1981. To his current employer, the district council of the Swiss canton of Baselland, the former East German national team coach—who has been employed for a year at the gymnastics center in Liestal—assured that no one had come to harm as a result of his statements. Hofmann turned up in the Stasi lists in Halle. According to these, the gymnastics expert was listed by the Stasi under the code name “Rose” as an unofficial collaborator for conspiratorial duties/conspiratorial apartment provision (IMK/KW). The district administrator of the canton of Baselland instructed the cantonal government to request information from the Gauck Authority about the impact of Hofmann’s Stasi activities. Dieter Hofmann declared his willingness to provide such information.
November 1993: The Details of Hofmann’s Ties to the Stasi Finally Emerge
The Former Head Coach of East German Gymnasts and His Moonlighting as Stasi Informant “Rose”
Dieter Hofmann’s Glowing Stasi Report CardBASEL. Dieter Hofmann has kept count. He credits himself with more than 220 medals at youth competitions; at the Olympics, world championships, and European championships, his athletes won 52 medals—gold, silver, and bronze—for the GDR. For a time, that medal shine impressed the German Gymnastics Federation (DTB), which initially wanted to keep the last head coach of the East German Gymnastics Association (DTV) in the same role after reunification. But the gymnasts rebelled—especially those who already knew Hofmann up close, such as Berlin’s Andreas Wecker. Hofmann, they said, was a loyal SED man, a hardline Stalinist, a concrete block. In the end, the DTB passed on the man who, in his own résumé, boasted of a “high and extensive degree of international recognition.”
Instead, the DTB hired Klaus Milbradt of Halle—whom it has since also parted ways with. In the Halle training center, Milbradt discovered a revealing legacy: detailed assessments of himself and other coaches, found in a locked metal cabinet that had belonged to Hofmann. By then, Hofmann had found a new job in Switzerland, at an artistic gymnastics center in Liestal near Basel. His application materials were impressive. When asked about Stasi involvement, he denied it. Only when Stasi lists surfaced in Halle in the summer of 1992—showing him as an informant under the code name “Rose”—did he admit to “a certain cooperation.” But Hofmann insisted on one point: “I never harmed anyone!”
The Stasi file of IM Hofmann (registration number VIII/1146/73) runs to two volumes. It contains a meticulously kept collection of petty harassments—some ordered by the state, others carried out with anticipatory zeal. The first contact between the Ministry for State Security and the informant candidate took place on May 19, 1965. In 1970 Hofmann became a GMS (a “social collaborator for security”), and in 1973 he and his wife agreed to let the Stasi use their apartment at Murmansker Straße 9 in Halle for clandestine purposes. It was a high-rise complex; since other coaches and officials from SC Halle also lived there, Hofmann offered to make himself useful to Department XX/4—the division responsible for spying on churches—so that the athletes wouldn’t become suspicious. For this, he received 20 marks per month, plus funds for operating the “conspiratorial apartment”: between March 1973 and December 1979 alone, 2,232.15 marks, according to a “destruction protocol.” When IM “Rose” received his final Stasi report on November 20, 1989, it praised his “political reliability” and noted that he had succeeded in asserting “his party-line position, even with full consequence.”
The file VIII/1146/73 provides bleak evidence of what this meant in practice. One example: on September 22, 1970, the Stasi informed Hofmann that one of his gymnasts had relatives in the West. A Stasi lieutenant named Knabe recorded: “Hofmann requested a consultation, informing me that, in accordance with our wishes and suggestions, he has removed the gymnast from elite sport.” The gymnast never learned the real reason. “Hofmann held several discussions, during which he convinced him that his limits in elite gymnastics had already been reached.” Resistance was futile—the athlete “eventually agreed and asked to be used as an assistant coach.” By this point, Hofmann was a powerful figure in East German gymnastics, and he exercised that power freely. On March 31, 1971, he denounced a fellow coach who was slated to help prepare the team for the Munich Olympics: “His parents defected to the West in 1960. There is still regular correspondence.”
The file shows another example from March 1971 of how IM “Rose” interfered in people’s lives. “It is generally known that the West German federation has access to the GDR’s training plans,” Hofmann reported. He suspected a former classmate of leaking them (“he has no positive attitude toward the GDR”), a man who happened to be a friend of Eduard Friedrich, then West Germany’s national coach. “False,” says Friedrich, now head of the Olympic training center in Rostock. The wrongly accused man was Hans Semlow of Wittenberg. Confronted with IM “Rose’s” reports, Semlow said, “Now a lot of things make sense to me.” He had been repeatedly confronted with this baseless accusation. The file also confirms that Semlow had been removed from preparations for the 1960 Olympics for ideological reasons.
The Hofmann file was closed in 1989. Its final note reads: “He is personally prepared to continue supporting the Ministry for State Security in his current sphere of activity, both officially and unofficially.”
HERBERT FISCHER
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, November 13, 1993
November 1993: So What?
After the revelations, Wir Brückenbauer ran an opinion piece in its “Wochenspiegel” (Weekly Reflection) section. While the author acknowledged the seriousness of the accusations, the piece ultimately downplayed them, framing Hofmann’s actions as part of everyday life in East Germany.
Dieter Hofmann
The past is not dead, it is not even past. Dieter Hofmann, head of the Northwestern Swiss Artistic and Apparatus Gymnastics Center in Liestal, is now feeling the bitter truth of this philosopher’s saying. The former East German national coach is accused of having previously worked for the State Security Service.
[Note: The quote at the beginning of the article is from William Faulkner.]
Hofmann apparently never made a secret of his past activities for the State Security Service. He merely assured people convincingly that it was half as bad and, moreover, that he had already given up informing back in 1981. But the former head of the Liestal sports center, Hanspeter Frey, now wants to prove the opposite. Based on research by a “Deutschlandfunk” journalist, he gained access to Hofmann’s informant files. These reveal that the former East German coach, at the instigation of the Stasi, had one gymnast removed from elite sport.
Embarrassing, embarrassing. But that’s no reason to point the finger at the East German coach with your clean Swiss finger. It is well known that in the GDR every citizen in a leadership position was entangled in some way with the state apparatus. Those who resisted were secretly regarded as heroes. And not everyone is born to be a hero. The Swiss, incidentally, no more so than the East Germans.
Thv
Wir Brückenbauer, November 24, 1993
February 2003: The Doping Allegations
On State Orders: Psychotropic Drugs for East German Footballers and Other Athletes
28 Brain-Active Medications TestedBERLIN. In the GDR, there was a state-mandated program to study the effects of psychotropic drugs on the performance of football players and other athletes. This emerges from the “Summary Presentation of the Results of the Research Work on State Plan Topic 14.25 during the 1984–1988 Olympic Cycle.” Prepared in September 1988 as a classified government document, it comprises roughly 68 pages.
This confirms not only that doctors and sports scientists, with the blessing of the state leadership, administered addictive amphetamines and organ-damaging anabolic steroids to elite athletes. A section in the “State Plan Project” dealing with brain-active substances shows that football players competed under the influence of these medications. Fourteen squad members from four top-division clubs were involved.
Up to now, Stasi files had only revealed that stimulants were used during the 1988 home match of the unpopular serial champions BFC Dynamo Berlin against Werder Bremen in the UEFA Cup. Next to the players’ names, the substances administered were listed. One BFC player described the effect of Aponeuron—the stimulant misused for sporting fraud in that match—as follows: “Contrasts and colors in the environment become clearer.” After the match, however, the researchers noted that the players were unusually exhausted, and they were placed under a short-term training ban.
According to the State Plan Topic, psychotropic drugs were tested not only in ball sports during the GDR’s final year. The report also includes references to their use on female gymnasts from Frankfurt (Oder), as well as on fencers, shooters, and leading cyclists. The substance tested on all of them, lysine-vasopressin, was intended to heighten attention and concentration. According to the files, the drug was purchased from Sandoz in Switzerland and prepared “especially for us” as a spray by the Dresden pharmaceutical works.
This experiment was not an isolated case. The secret study shows that between the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics and the 1988 Seoul Olympics, no fewer than 28 brain-active medications were examined within the state doping system for their potential performance-enhancing effects.
For gymnastics, tests on male athletes under the aegis of federation coach Dieter Hofmann—today coaching at the Swiss training center in Liestal—are documented. One of Hofmann’s former athletes could testify to the side effects of these practices. During one of the secret test competitions, the gymnast lost self-control. Several teammates had to restrain him and carry him out of the hall. When the athlete later asked, confused, what had happened, he was told: “We thought you had been informed. This is a secret experiment.”
Giselher Spitzer
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, February 18, 2003