Secret Tapes of Katarina Witt
July 26 -- When Katarina Witt glided onto the ice, the world watched every move of the beautiful East German figure skater. But behind the curtain, her East German communist government was watching even more closely.
The East German secret police, the Stasi, was one of the most ruthless and powerful secret police forces in the world, and the iron fist of the East German dictatorship. The Stasi's mission was not just to keep enemies out, but also to make sure its most valuable assets stayed there to make the country proud — including world-class athletes like Witt.
"They wanted to make sure that I'd always come home … that I would not defect," says Witt, who says she had no idea at the time that the Stasi were monitoring her. But when the Berlin Wall came down in 1990, the veil of secrecy opened up on the Stasi and the files they had been compiling for more than 40 years — including 27 boxes marked with Witt's name.
"It was the first time I was confronted with [what] they [had] done basically," says Witt. "My first file starts when I'm 7 years old … I was watched over my entire life wherever I would go."
‘Betrayed From Both Sides’
Witt got access to the files in 1992, when there had been rumors of her being a Stasi spy. After going through the pages that cover 17 years of the intimate details of her life, she says, "I would go through all the different emotions where you're just absolutely upset and you're furious … at times I was laughing … I was just completely in shock. How far they even would go."
As she read through the 3,500 pages, Witt realized it was not just anonymous Stasi agents sneaking around her personal life. She learned that the betrayal had been much closer to home: that some of her closest friends had even spied on her, telling the government her most intimate secrets.
Ironically, the unification of East Germany with democratic West Germany has created a new and perhaps more embarrassing threat to Witt's privacy: The once-secret files are now at risk of becoming public.
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