http://www.boston.com/dailynews/148/world/Katarina_Witt_said_to_be_suppo:.shtml

Katarina Witt said to be 'supported' by former East Germany's secret police

By Associated Press, 5/28/2001 13:32

BERLIN (AP) Katarina Witt was ''significantly supported'' by former East Germany's secret police, according to the government agency that controls the Stasi files.

A lawyer for the star figure skater last week asked a Berlin court for a temporary injunction blocking the release of her Stasi file to journalists.

''It's not about fear,'' Witt told the Bild newspaper. ''The point is that I don't want to see my life spied on and laid open a second time.''

The Stasi files agency says that at the court's request it will hold off releasing material on the 1984 and 1988 Olympic gold medalist.

However, spokesman Christian Booss on Monday confirmed reports that the agency considers Witt not only a victim but a beneficiary of the communist system a person who was ''significantly supported by the Stasi.''

Witt was a product of former East Germany's powerful sports machine. She was among top athletes who enjoyed extra privileges, including freedom to travel abroad.

Witt has acknowledged she had contact with the secret police. But she stressed to Bild that she never worked for the Stasi, ''and that is very clear from the file.''

The East German government relentlessly spied on its citizens. The Stasi kept a network of 85,000 full-time spies and 170,000 voluntary informers.

Witt said she was ''shocked'' when she first read her Stasi file. ''Sometimes I had to laugh, then cry.''

''The Stasi had my life under almost complete surveillance from when I was 9,'' Witt told Bild. ''Among the `harmless' things was that they had copied my love letters.''

Booss rejected suggestions that intimate details of Witt's life would be made available to the public, noting they would be blacked out.

''Some of the spicy or apparently spicy details about Witt's life that are currently in circulation were published by her in a biography after she privately viewed her file in 1993,'' he said.

Witt's move follows a similar attempt by former German Chancellor Helmut Kohl. He is fighting the release of his files to journalists and to a parliamentary committee investigating a slush fund scandal touched off by Kohl's 1999 admission that he accepted illegal campaign donations as chancellor.

-- Anonymous, May 29, 2001