Dynamo Berlin: Glory Turned Instantly to Despair and Shame

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.