The East German Ministry for State Security (Staatssicherheit), better known as the “Stasi,” permeated every aspect of life for the hapless residents of the communist state for over four decades until the great German reunification.
In their heyday, the Stasi ran their own football team: Dynamo Berlin. The club was one of East Germany’s most successful clubs, but was never a popular one.
The story of Dynamo has mirrored the violent mood swings of eastern Germany in the past few decades. Glory turned instantly to despair, followed by failure, bankruptcy, and shame.
Things started out well enough for Dynamo. As football was the nation’s most popular sport, the Stasi decided it needed a successful football club to bolster its reputation and popularity with the masses. The army and other government bodies were doing the same, so why not the secret police?
Rather unsurprisingly if you take their ruthless style of monitoring the people into account, the Stasi employed slightly less ethical methods to achieve success. In fact, the fans of most other clubs greeted Dynamo in their home stadiums with chants about the “champions of cheating.”
Here's just a quick look at the various incidents surrounding Dynamo. If they were a goal down, a key member of the opposition team would often be mysteriously sent off for no perceivable offence. In other instances, injury time might be extended, until the equalizing goal materialized. The Stasi even forced players to sign for Dynamo.
All these antics made Dynamo Berlin an unstoppable force in GDR football. The club won the GDR title 10 years in a row between 1979-1988, a record not many clubs can boast about.
It also made them the most hated team in GDR football. It wasn’t just envy of the results Dynamo had achieved, but mostly anger about the way Dynamo had achieved them.
After the great German reunification, the ties to the Stasi were obviously cut, but the burden of history proved almost impossible to live down. With hardly any real fans, the club was not very interesting to sponsors and the club was struggling.
As other former GDR-clubs gloated, Dynamo was unable to impress, even at a lower level. The club kept crashing out whenever the club had a real shot at winning promotion to a higher division.
The lack of success eventually led to financial despair. The irony of a former representative of the GDR’s communist system not coming to terms properly with the capitalist system commonly used in the West is neither lost on me nor on many other football fans.
9 comments Last one added 5 months ago — Leave a Comment
Maire Ofeire 6 months ago
Surely their record of 10-in-a-row is null and void for cheating?
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Guido 6 months ago
The GDR league is defunct, but I do believe their record still stands.
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Alex Stamp 6 months ago
Nice piece Guido, this story was quite amazing and I wonder if you have ever heard of Lutz Eigendorf? He was a former Dynamo player who fled to the West in 1979 and then died in mysterious circumstances four years later, and it was revealed some years later that the Stasi had had him assassinated for his defection.
Out of interest, have you ever read Football Against the Enemy by Simon Kuper, he discusses Dynamo Berlin in one of his chapters. It's a brilliant book
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Guido 6 months ago
I was going to write about Eigendorf next. I saw a documentary on his life last week. An interesting tale.
I have the book lying around, but I never quite had the time to pick it up yet. It's on my "to do"-list.
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Samrin Hasib 6 months ago
nice article, guido. ten titles in a row...impossible to achieve without cheating.
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Guido 6 months ago
I think Celtic and Rangers achieved similar feats. Perhaps Rosenborg as well?
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Daniel Kaiser 6 months ago
Great Article, Guido!
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Guido 5 months ago
Thanks Daniel.
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steve winkler 5 months ago
the amount of factually wrong and ill-informed nonsense that gets posted on the internet these days is truly amazing and your article is a prime example. just to clear up a few facts:
1.) berliner fußballclub dynamo (that´s the club´s correct name. they´re commonly called bfc) was neither the team of the stasi, nor run by it. the dynamo sports organisation (sportvereinigung dynamo) was the umbrella organisation of all clubs (there were loads of them) who went under that name in the former g.d.r.. the ´patrons´of that organisation were the stasi (secret service), the police and the customs. the head of the stasi (erich mielke) was the chairman of said organisation and as such of all clubs who went under the name dynamo. not just in football but also in handball, track & field, wrestling, biathlon, swimming, fencing, boxing... even ice hockey. the current german champions eisbaeren berlin were the ice hockey branch of sportclub dynamo berlin (bfc were the football branch of said club from 1954 to 1966) until 1990. btw ice hockey in the g.d.r. only survived because mielke was a massive fan of the sport and as such secured the existence of the world´s smallest ice hockey league - consisting of the 2 !!! dynamo teams from berlin and weisswasser - until 1990. there you go, fans of sports trivia.
2.) no-one was ever forced to join bfc. all sports in the former g.d.r. were centrally organised. there were centres of excellence (so-called leistungszentren) all over the country in which talented youngsters were gathered (depending on the regions they came from, and on the kind of sport). in football bfc was one of those centres (others were dynamo dresden, 1.fc magdeburg, carl-zeiss jena, 1. fc lokomotive leipzig). the vast majority of players at bfc were products of their excellent academy, others (like thomas doll, who came from then relegated hansa rostock) joined at a very young age. the same happened at other east german top clubs: the east german all-time top goal scorer, joachim streich, joined magdeburg from rostock, midfielder hans-uwe pilz joined dresden from zwickau, defender rüdiger schnuphase went from erfurt to jena etc.pp.. players joined bfc (dresden, magdeburg, jena...) because they wanted a) to win trophies and b) to increase their chances of playing internationally (with their clubs as well as with the east german national team). bfc admittedly benefited from the system, probably more than any other football club in the former g.d.r., but they can not be held responsible for that as the system was not of their making.
3.) so far there has been absolutely no proof that the stasi were involved in eigendorf´s death (although it is likely they did).
4.) bfc dynamo did not "cut their ties" to the stasi, simply because they didn´t have to. the stasi was dissolved in early 1990, long before german reunification. as said before, bfc was not more a stasi club than e.g. dynamo dresden, dynamo potsdam, dynamo klingenthal etc. pp.. admittedly mielke was a huge fan of bfc and there were a number of seriously odd decisions in the 80s which benefited bfc and suggested that mielke ordered refs to blow in bfc´s favour but indication is no proof.
5.) bfc as a club were hugely unpopular all over east germany, for a plethora of reasons: 1.) because of dodgy ref decisions that at least helped them win 10 titles on the trot. whether or not those decisions were actually decisive in the title race is pure speculation and there are even statistics that suggest otherwise. 2.) the stasi link. 3.) they were a team from berlin, the capital of the former g.d.r.. people in other parts of the country generally hated berlin (as the standard of living in east berlin was considerably higher than in the rest of the g.d.r. because the government & and party headquarters being there) and berliners (who had/have the reputation of being arrogant snobs). bfc´s fiercest local rivals fc union berlin who like to portray themselves as an opposition team (which, if you ask me, is utter rubbish as one of their ´sponsors´was the regional branch of the ruling party) were not very popular outside of east berlin either (although admittedly not as despised as bfc). and then there were regional rivalries, too. fans of jena hated erfurt more (and vice versa) than they hated bfc. the same goes for lok leipzig and chemie leipzig, dresden and riesa, aue and zwickau...
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