Figure skating icon Katarina Witt always suspected her government secretly spied on her, but she never imagined the extent of East Germany’s surveillance as the country’s communist regime feared the double Olympic gold medalist would defect to the West.
In a recent interview with the Daily News, Witt recalled the shock she felt one day in 1993 when she visited the archives of the GDR’s notorious secret police, the Stasi, and found thousands of documents obsessively cataloguing her personal life back to early childhood.
“There were records on my entire life back to age six or seven,” Witt said earlier this month. Friends had informed on her and hidden recording devices had captured her private conversations.
But Witt, who also benefited from close ties to the Stasi during her career, says there’s a big difference between East Germany’s paranoid surveillance state and the massive dragnet of electronic communications the United States has apparently been conducting in recent years — a program exposed this summer by former intelligence contractor Edward Snowden.
“You live in a democracy and a free country,” Witt said, drawing a distinction between the GDR and America. “And people now, the younger generation with Facebook, you give a lot of privacy away on your own free will.”
While Witt understands the argument that state surveillance shouldn’t alarm law-abiding people, she says people are naive if they don’t think storage of their email, telephone and other electronic records doesn’t make them vulnerable.
“You start to worry when it goes into the wrong hands and is used for the wrong reasons,” she says, pointing out that some of the intelligence reports about her were totally inaccurate.
Witt and the watchful eyes of her government are the subjects of a new documentary, “The Diplomat,” that is part of ESPN’s Nine for IX series. Directors Jennifer Arnold and Senain Kheshgi traveled to Germany, reviewed public archives and spoke to Witt and some of her closest confidantes, weaving these interviews with archival footage of the 1984 and 1988 Olympics, where Witt was presented as “the most beautiful face of socialism.”
Witt is still scarred by the backlash the German public inflicted upon her in the early 1990s when the Stasi files were opened and revealed how many special favors Witt and her family received in addition to having their lives blindly manipulated. But the non-judgmental open-mindedness of the American directors appealed to her.
“They came into my biography without any baggage,” Witt said. “I was happy to tell my story to somebody completely fresh. I’m happy and moved by what they made.”
