The purpose of this research is to examine the record of the state-sponsored Olympics program of East Germany, also called the German Democratic Republic (DDR in German), from 1966 through the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. The plan of the research will be to set forth the social, cultural, and historical context in which the GDR's Olympic-competition project emerged and then to look at evidence of how it operated, how it was perceived and discussed during its most active phase, and how it has been perceived since being exposed as deceptive and fraudulent in the context of German reunification.
The Munich 1972 Games of the XX Olympiad, historically noteworthy chiefly because Palestinians murdered eleven Israeli athletes and one policeman, made athletic history as well. Athletes from the GDR were especially impressive, taking 20 gold, 23 silver, and 23 bronze medals--the third highest number of medals after the US and USSR. In Mexico in 1968, by contrast, the GDR had come in fifth in the international medal count, bringing nine each of gold and silver and seven bronze. The level of GDR competitiveness from 1972 through 1988 was striking not least because its population was about 17 million, a fraction of the population of the world's chief Cold War rivals. By 1992 in Barcelona, the GDR had been collapsed into the Federal Republic of Germany; German athletes took home the third most medals, behind rather than ahead of the Americans for the first time in a decade.
German reunification was only one changed variable for German athletes by 1992. Those from the former GDR were also no longer part of a state-run athletic-development program marked, as the Associated Press was to report in 2000, by "'systematic and overall doping in (East German) competitive sports' from 1974 [sic] until the Berlin Wall came down in 1989."
The top-secret East German doping program functioned from 1966 until 1989, when the GDR collapsed. This was...