Everything for the GDR: Athletes were deliberately not informed about the consequences of doping substances for their health. Image: picture alliance / Ulrich Baumgarten
34 years after the end of the GDR, it is still not certain what rights doping victims enjoy to alleviate their suffering. Your hope is fading. The Federal Administrative Court could resolve an unreasonable imbalance.
Ms. K. did not want to give an interview about the matter on Friday. She doesn’t want to be the center of attention, she says. She wants to concentrate. She needs her strength. All the facts are on the table. As a former top athlete, she has learned to live with defeats. It just has to be fair. Ms. K. is very matter-of-fact. Astonishing. She has been fighting for more than twenty years. She’s not interested in revenge. She wants to be understood – in the right place. She looks at the Federal Administrative Court. A groundbreaking decision is expected to be made in her case in Leipzig on Wednesday. “If the court decides against the GDR sports victims,” says Burkhard Bley, the state representative for Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania for coming to terms with the SED dictatorship, “then they will no longer have any options at all.”
March 2024. The GDR has been history for 34 years. Germans have known about state doping for almost that long. Descriptions and documentation of the poisoning of athletes, some of them minors, with drugs or substances specially produced by the state-owned company Jenapharm, some of which were not approved in the GDR, are not much more recent. Ms. K. no longer needs recognition as a doping victim. This has happened in about 1,650 cases.
