Forty years ago, the two young GDR stars Falko Götz and Dirk Schlegel gathered all their courage and took advantage of a chance to escape. You are lucky and can escape the Stasi. But only in retrospect do they realize what dramatic consequences their escape could have had.
“Today I can only marvel at this youthful recklessness – or courage.” Forty years after his spectacular escape with his teammate Dirk Schlegel, it dawns on Falko Götz from time to time how lucky the two of them were back in the fall of 1983. “The consequences – or what could have happened during the escape – you only realize afterwards, with a little more life experience,” the former GDR selection player and later Bundesliga professional and coach told the “Kicker” on his 60th birthday – and thoughtfully emphasized: “I sometimes have in my head what could have gone wrong back then.”
It all began forty years ago on the morning of November 2, 1983, when Jürgen Bogs, the BFC Dynamo coach, gave his team half an hour of free time in Belgrade in the shopping heart of the Yugoslavian capital – under strict eyes, of course of fellow travelers from the GDR. But the two young players Falko Götz and Dirk Schlegel managed to escape the Stasi guards in an unobserved moment.
They ran through the back exit of a store and took their first steps towards freedom. A few meters around the corner, they handed a panicked and sweating Yugoslavian taxi driver twenty West Marks. They told him to take them to the Federal Republic embassy as quickly as possible. The man was happy to take the money – because the journey took little more than three minutes. Then Götz and Schlegel were safe for the time being.
To Munich in training pants
But the following twenty-four hours were tough again. The embassy had the two drive to Zagreb, almost four hundred kilometers away, that afternoon – just out of Belgrade. The diplomats used the first moments of uncertainty and confusion among the BFC Dynamo officials to bring Falko Götz and Dirk Schlegel away from the immediate vicinity of the team and as far away as possible. Meanwhile, the BFC officials told the team a fairy tale that afternoon: Götz and Schlegel were in police custody because they had been caught trying to shoplift. At some point during these intense hours, the UEFA Cup game against Partizan that evening came more and more into focus. Berliners tried desperately to return to some normality.
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In Zagreb, Falko Götz and Dirk Schlegel received new papers. Later, at the border with Austria, they were supposed to tell the officials that they had been robbed. Completely. These are replacement documents from the embassy. Of course, the real names of Götz and Schlegel were not on these papers. And so, while the game was going on in Belgrade, the two of them sat nervously in a car heading to Ljubljana. A night train to Austria was supposed to start there at midnight.
And it actually worked: the two men in training pants reached Munich the next morning. The escape was successful. The fact that their decision to leave Yugoslavia as quickly as possible was the right one became clear to both of them just a little later when they looked at the display in a kiosk. Götz and Schlegel could see themselves on the front pages of the newspapers. The headline was emblazoned in thick letters: “GDR player escaped!”
“It’s all connected somewhere”
At that time, Falko Götz was 21 years old, Dirk Schlegel was only one year older. And both players were lucky. They reached Bayer Leverkusen via Jörg Berger, who had only fled four years earlier. Five years later, Falko Götz won the UEFA Cup final with Bayer against Espanyol Barcelona.
The coach who welcomed the two former BFC Dynamo players to Leverkusen in the winter of 1983 was called Dettmar Cramer. The first player to move to the Bundesliga through normal, legal channels after the fall of the Wall in 1989 was Andreas Thom. At that time he came from BFC Dynamo. He had previously won the championship there five times under his coach Jürgen Bogs. Now, of course, he went to Bayer Leverkusen. The first game that Andreas Thom played for his former club from the GDR was on November 2nd, 1983.
The man from Rüdersdorf near Berlin ended up in the team that day because two team members took their chance to escape while strolling through Belgrade that morning. Andreas Thom also took advantage of his chance. Dynamo reached the next round of the UEFA Cup that evening and from then on it was impossible to imagine the BFC team without the striker, who had just turned 18 years old. Dettmar Cramer, the first trainer of Falko Götz and Dirk Schlegel in the Federal Republic of Germany, once said as original as it was apt: “It’s all connected somewhere. You can pull out a hair on your butt and your eyes will water.” A true sentence!
Looking back, Falko Götz says of the decisive day in his life forty years ago: “Making this decision, following through with it and then taking advantage of the opportunity in the Federal Republic is a very important point in my life. I really wanted to be in the Bundesliga play, that was firmly in my head.” And that’s exactly what Falko Götz achieved. His youthful courage was rewarded – even if he couldn’t have foreseen the consequences at the time.