http://www.leftwatch.com/articles/2002/000059.html
Thursday, May 09, 2002
Katarina Witt, the ice skater who won Olympic Gold medals for East Germany in 1984 and 1988, was among several people who sued in order to prevent the release of the secret files that the Stasi secret police kept about her. Witt maintained that they included too many personal details about her life. But the files also apparently show Witt, as The Daily Telegraph put it, "as one of the East German regime's most willing accomplices."
This should not be too surprising given Witt's frequent defense of East Germany. In 2001 she was quoted as saying, "I will never turn round and say I lived in a horrible country and had a horrible time because the success I have today would never have been possible if I had grown up in the West. All the groundwork was laid in East Germany."
The file portrays her as a willing sycophant of the East German regime, who tried to flatter Stasi agents and agreed not to defect in exchange for lavish perks from the Communist state.
Of course this could have just been simple puffery from Stasi agents, but there is something odd about this explanation if true -- why did Witt leave this out of her autobiography?
In her 1994 autobiography, Witt quoted liberally from her Stasi file, which she had complete access too. When asked how much of the file she had used, she said that she referred to most of it except for items of a personal nature such as her love life, which she maintained that were largely invented. In fact while fighting an expensive legal battle to keep her Stasi file sealed, she maintained that the reason it would be wrong to release the file was due to the salacious but erroneous material about her sex life.
Coupled with earlier comments that "life under communism wasn't so bad" and that with their extensive surveillance of her, Stasi had just been "doing their duty" and Witt begins to look more like a collaborator than a victim of the East German state.
Sources: <A HREF="http://www.msnbc.com/news/748454.asp?0si=-">Thin moral iceNew revelations from a skater’s Stasi files recall an oppressive era</A>. John Fund, MSNBC.Com, May 7, 2002.
Stasi files reveal Katarina Witt was willing accomplice. Tony Paterson, The Daily Telegraph (London), May 5, 2002.
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