Mandy Wötzel speaks out | Page 2 | Golden Skate

Mandy Wötzel speaks out

Ptichka

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Jul 28, 2003
It is simply not true that everybody in the GDR who travelled outside of the Eastern Bloc was a member of the Stasi/Stasi informer.
Some facts:

By the most conservative estimates by 1989 Stasi had 91000 full time employees and 300000 informants (wikipedia); some put the figure of informants closer to half a million. Also, there were about 3000 informants among athletes in 1989 (source). Now, if there were 3000 informants among athletes, figure out how many GDR athletes could travel abroad, and yes, you will get the picture - most GDR athletes cooperated with the Stasi.

There were plenty of athletes and officials who never were a member of the Stasi and obviously those got to travel to competitions just as well. The people who WERE Stasi informers were of course used to spy on those athletes and officials when they were abroad.
IMHO you're making an erroneous assumption here. You're assuming that once someone became a Stasi informant they were no longer suspects. That's simply not the case. Clearly, when an athlete becomes an informant only for the sake of his career, his heart is no really in it, and he may very well say something "subversive", and he could certainly try to defect. So no, the idea was indeed for informants to spy on each other.

Also, you have to understand how extensive the system is. The article I cited above describes one informant who passed on "information about his colleagues' extra-marital affairs, sexual orientation, drinking habits and political leanings." My guess is that the current investigations would tend to dismiss those informants who only ended up infoming on their cheating drunkard friends.

Of the about 160 officials that were checked for past Stasi involvement only 3 were discovered to have Stasi ties (plus IIRC about 6 others, who had Stasi ties, but whos ties were determined to have been "minor").
I do not really have a good response to that. However, let me take an educated guess. I would guess that most of those 157 officials were contacted by Stasi, probably agreed to spy, and then managed to scrape by pretending to have nothing of value to report.

Let me also mention that I do not excuse Steuer's actions. Unfortunately, neither German investigators not Steuer himself make it easy to form a real opinion in his case because we simply don't know what exactly his involvement did. I do not trust the reports that simply say that it was "serious", nor do I trust Steuer who is denying it all.

Finally, two little anecdotes. Back in Russia in the 80's, my parents had two friends who were contacted by KGB with orders to inform. Both were family men in their mid-30's, both Jewish, by now both live in the US. Both were engineers, never travelled abroad, but had hobbies that often put them in contact with foreigners.

One guy, F, refused flat out. A week later, F got a draft notice - he was being sent to Afghanistan (he was never in the military before, but all men are considered reservists, and all men who got higher education had a military rank, usually a leutenant). At first he ignored it, but draft notices kept coming, and it became clear that they were serious. This being Russia, of course, there was a way out. With every person F knew engaged in a search, finally someone found some secretary who for a large bribe moved his folder from one pile to another. He never got another notice again.

The other guy, G, did not refuse, because he understood that while he had no intention to cooperate refusing flat out was really asking for it. He told all of his close friends to be careful about what they say in front of him for the time being - there was always a possibility that there was another informant in a group, and G wouldn't very well be able to deny hearing something that another informant has alerady heard. Then for about a year he played dumb, did not pass on any information, but did not refuse either. Finally, the agents got exasperated with him and went away. There were no reprisals as in the case with F because he did not actually refuse to do anything.

What I'm trying to demonstrate here is how incredible difficult it was to shake off KGB even for mature men who did see the moral wrong of informing, and were willing to do just about anything to avoid it. Now compare it with a boy of 14 being approached with those same requests. Whereas both F and G had their careers, families, and hobbies, Steuer at 14 only had his athletic career to live for. Therefore, the fact that he technically became an informant is not something I would consider a problem. What could very well be a problem is a kind of information he passed on, and that is not something we can judge at this point.

Sorry for the extra long post, I usually try to avoid it.
 

76olympics

On the Ice
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Mar 4, 2004
I am perplexed as to why Steuer denies this if it is true and if it was as pervasive as so many people state it was (including Witt who defended Steuer). That is what bothers me about him. If you participated -whether through belief, fear, or simple youth, just come clean about it. Evidently, the proof is there and several people knew about his involvement. Is he hoping that the file gets "misplaced" ? That's my only caveat about him at this point. It's also perfectly possible that Mandy dislikes him for very plausible reasons despite their former involvement. I don't think you can completely discount her opinion because they broke up.
 

SusanBeth

Final Flight
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Jul 28, 2003
Ptichka- Great post! It really made me think. I don't know what I would have done myself, so I can't judge. I'd like to think that I would take the high road, but I'm not a teenager. Kids that age might like to make a show of rebelling, but they still look to authority figures for guidance. It wouldn't have been easy for adults either. They have families. I am an adult with children. What if they were threatened? There's no easy way here.
 

maruru

Rinkside
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Mar 20, 2004
Just wanted to say this is one of the most fascinating threads ever since I started reading the forum. So, thank you :)
 

backspin

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Dec 30, 2003
Joesitz said:
Telling on your colleagues was not unusual in the US during the late forties and early fifties.

Joe

Perhaps, but that didn't lead to them being jailed & tortured.
 

SusanBeth

Final Flight
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Jul 28, 2003
backspin said:
Perhaps, but that didn't lead to them being jailed & tortured.

Some in the film industry were deprived of their careers. They were blacklisted by the studios. I don't know if any went to jail, but it wouldn't suprise me if they suddenly developed all kinds of legal problems.
 

Ptichka

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Jul 28, 2003
Just wanted to add to what SusanBeth said that the vast majority of the spying people did for GDR or KGB did not result in those things either.
 

gkelly

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Jul 26, 2003
Joesitz said:
Telling on your colleagues was not unusual in the US during the late forties and early fifties.Joe

Once when I was browsing through the library stacks at my college, I came upon an old English language textbook from Russia (uchebnik angliskogo yazika), published in the late 1950s IIRC. I flipped through the book and ended up reading a story (in English, it was in a later chapter by which point the students should know enough English to read it) about a woman from Idaho who got into trouble with the Loyalty Department at the company or government agency where she worked because she was supposed to be an informer, tried to draw out her coworkers by asking leading questions about what they thought of communism, and as a result was turned in by another informer for being a suspected communist.

Of course the irony of her overzealous search for people to inform on coming back to bite her was the main point of the story. But I found it interesting that that kind of paranoia was something the Soviet textbook writers chose to emphasize in their portrayal of American life.
 

heyang

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Jul 26, 2003
I think recall that Joe McCarthy had Lucille Ball watched because she dyed her hair red - therefore, she was suspected of communism. I have no idea if this is true or not since I wasn't alive at that time. I just think I read it in a Lucille Ball biography.
 

RubyNV

Rinkside
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Feb 11, 2006
Not because of hair color

Crazy Joseph McCarthy and his helpers accused Lucille Ball of being a
Communist, because to please her grandfather, Fred Hunt, she once registered as a member of the Communist party. It was a very big deal at the time, and Lucy probably only remained in show business because of her immense popularity. Many, many show business folks were blacklisted--their livelihoods stolen from them. Desi Arnaz came on stage just before showtime on the "I Love Lucy" set and gave an emotional speech about how the only thing about his wife that was red was her hair, and that even that wasn't genuinely red!!
 
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