Missile from the East

It's dead silence.

A hundred thousand people there. Didn't register

It is absolutely another world.

The concentration levels are so high, it's a sort of spiritual mental state.

Nothing can stop you.

By accepting death you lose the fear of it.

That's Grand Prix racing.

Degner was a spectacular rider. A very very fast rider.

My father was a racing driver.

It was all racing.

This was his life

He was a star in East Germany...

..but he definitely thought he would get a better life in the West.

I was born on 22nd September 1931 in Gliewitz, which is now Poland.

My father died a few days before the end of the war.

And then we had to emigrate from Poland.

When the Russians were conquering again parts that Germans had conquered before,

then all these people who were Germans flew to be saved from the Russian troops,

and there he was also with his mother and his sister fleeing in this track.

We went to East Germany, settled down there,

then half a year later my mother died, so I was 14-years-old without any parents.

Peter had a tough upbringing.

I wouldn't have wanted to be an orphan in East Germany at the end of the war.

It was a shocking place after the war. Absolutely awful.

All those eastern countries were bashed and bombed by the Russian and the Germans.

East Germany was just completely trashed.

I could see that he had a very tough childhood.

His father was extremely strong

He tried to educate X by beating him.

I think this is a very dark part of his life.

From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic

an iron curtain has descended across the continent.

Nikita Khrushchev made it clear he believed the communist world could bury the West.

Even if there were only one communist in the State Department,

that would still be one communist too many.

The Soviet Union launches Sputnik One on October 4th 1957

Two atomic colossi are doomed malevolently to eye each other indefinitely across a trembling world.

There was competition at every level.

Eastern bloc athletes competing in the west was enormously important.

The communist regime were very intent on proving that there way of being

and of running things, of running a society was superior in every way.

MZ was an East German motorcycle racing company.

If you were an East German you aspired to having a motorcycle

and MZ made those motorcycles.

Walter Kaaden was an exceptional engineer.

He was probably the person who advanced 2-strokes faster than anybody else did.

He harnessed the harmonics of the exhaust system, which made the engine a lot more efficient.

It was all done so low-key. They were a monied company.

The materials they used weren't the best materials

because they were limited behind the Iron Curtain in those days

They looked a bit tinny.

Ernst I could tell admired Kaaden greatly,

but I could also tell that Kaaden admired Degner greatly because of his ability as a rider.

and of course as an engineer.

When you were watching them together

it was almost like a father and son relationship, he was that close to him.

They saw that he is not only a good racer,

he would also be a very big part of the development of the engines.

The innovation was absolutely incredible.

They were two stroke wizards.

East Germany was a small nation that came out of the ashes of fascism and the second world war

and that was -in theory trying to create a fairer non-fascist, non-capitalist world

But East Germany had an extreme system of repression of its own people.

In those days it was frightening. Quite brutal.

The GDR was an extraordinarily intrusive, malicious surveillance state.

There was an organisation called the Stasi in East Germany,

which was in effect the secret police.

Everybody in East Germany was informing on everybody else

because that was the culture sadly and tragically that existed.

“Shut your mouth. Don't speak.” You have to live like a mouse.

You just keep schtum.

You could do nothing without being spied on.

You could do nothing without having it reported back to the government.

They wanted to keep everything literally under control and everyone under control.

My father was observed by the Stasi all the time.

If my father was meeting known or unknown, some Stasi person,

this person was writing down all the conversation he had with him.

To give it to the party members.

People tried to live a normal life in abnormal or extreme circumstances.

He had a very special status in East Germany.

He enjoyed getting special treatments.

They also gave my mother a job at MZ, so they both could be together in the same company.

He had a better car than everybody else -

and - he could travel to the west, which normal people couldn't.

But compared to what he saw in West Germany it was still very little.

To come back from behind a restricted country, that must have been like us going to Disneyland.

I remember them feeling very out of place.

Chelira and Mondal and MV and all the top names in Italy were there then,

so you were really going into the country and the world

that was at the top of the Grand Prix racing scene.

MZ were hardly known and little thought of

and certainly not thought highly of.

They were persona non grata in the motorcycle racing world after the war.

Jimmy Matsumiya was an absolute gentleman.

He came over as Suzuki's representative. He was always dressed immaculately.

My name is James Akira Matsumiya. And for the British, I'm Jimmy.

I was at the Italian Grand Prix circuit of Monza.

Suzuki wasn't successful.

I had to bring Suzuki's performance up, but I didn't know what to do.

Ernst got a very good start.

He was first into the first corner.

He won by inches against the Italian hero Ubbiali in a very nose to nose race.

“It was very exciting” he said.

He was telling me the story quite often.

I was trying very hard to find out the secret of why MZ is so strong.

My job is to make Suzuki company successful. So I started to look at Ernst Degner.

It was making Ernst a star rider.

This high speed missile that was coming out of East Germany.

The name Degner and the name MZ were becoming rapidly known.

People were starting to look at these hand beaten aluminium bikes from behind the Iron Curtain.

Ernst Degner was projected into a world of international motorcycle racing,

which took him out of East Germany into countries all over the world

where the standard of living was infinitely higher than the one he was used to.

I believe Degner, as a member of the Communist State

and as a top motorcycle racer, was actually paid sort of a basic wage.

So seeing people like Jim Redmond, Tom Phillis, Mike Hailwood, Phil Reed

who had loads of money, loads of status, must have hit Degner like throwing a bucket of cold water at him.

He would have liked to have been in the west because of the freedom that we had.

He would have loved to have been with us every weekend with no restrictions -

Not being watched. Not being kept back.

He could see then that life on the other side of the curtain might be interesting.

I think this was a time when they started to think about trying to find a way to escape.

The Isle of Man TT is the greatest motorsport event in the world.

It is totally and absolutely unique.

The circuit goes through towns and villages.

The hazards were the fact that you had hedges, ditches, trees, garden gates, ordinary roads.

And it's hurt me so many, many times.

When you hit something solid, that was it.

Mr Suzuki came to the Isle of Man.

And he said, “Jimmy, we must win the motorcycle racing in Europe.

"Then people will recognise that Japanese motorcycle is worth buying."

So, my job was to try to bring Suzuki's performance up to the level of MZ.

At the TT I was staying in the same guest house, the Fernleigh Hotel,

along with Jimmy, Degner and the other riders.

Jimmy Matsumiya – he was ambitious. He was determined to get Suzuki to the top.

I was at the bar.

And then I bumped into Ernst Degner.

I said, “Entschuldigung”.

He said, “You, you spoke German.”

So I said, “Yes.” “I learnt German in school.”

So my association with Degner had started.

In those days they had a chief commissar with them, Herr Hartmann, who watched their every move.

And he had the ability to stop that race meeting for them and take them back home.

These East German two strokes, radically altered in the engine departments are sounding terrific.

And here's Ernst Degner on his East German MZ.

Degner had broken the lap record in practice.

The BBC did the TT in the Isle of Man

and I used to go round all the individual camps and I talked to Degner.

And he certainly had a lot inside his head as a rider and a mechanic

and someone who had worked very closely with Walter Kaaden.

There were three Japanese Suzukis, but they had been in trouble during practice.

None of these seemed to have any chance of winning.

Well we had known in this team two or three people from the Communist Party.

So Matsumiya and I had to talk together very secret.

One day, when he was in my room Degner said, “Jimmy, I love jazz, do you like jazz?”

So I said, “Yes, I used to play drums.”

I got a gramophone.

I intentionally made the volume of the jazz music higher and we are talking.

I never thought he knew jazz song.

Degner and myself put together through the music.

Degner was trying desperately to escape from Eastern Germany.

At that time, I'd made up my mind that we must get some technology from MZ one way or another

We must have a better engine.

So I was trying to build up the relationship. I thought that Degner is important to us.

Degner started to feel that I am trustworthy friend.

One day after dinner, Degner and myself went to the top of the cliff, to the edge of the land.

You can see there's nobody around.

I still remember it was very windy and the sea was very rough.

And when we are looking at the sea -

Degner said, “Jimmy, beyond there there's civilisation. Britain, America, even further you have Japan.”

“I have only one way to go back.”

“To the small cage called Eastern Germany, where I don't have any freedom whatsoever.”

I feel sorry for him.

So I said, “Ernst, I can give you my word of honour,

you have money waiting for you when you defect.

Now, how shall we construct your defection plan?

Everybody is compromised in the way that the State is compromised.

And in that sense it broke people.

Both the people who worked for it, who were morally broken and the people that they oppressed.

We know now that Kaaden was a part of the Stasi.

so even lets say one of his friends, his team mate, was always around him was observing him.

He didn't have a choice did he? He wouldn't have been in the job if he hadn't said yes.

If he'd said, “No, I don't agree to doing all this”, Kaaden wouldn't have been an engineer.

This was a regime that effectively used fear as fuel and it ran on betrayal.

It asked of people to betray themselves and to betray the most fundamental relationships in their lives.

Any top rider desired the World Championship. And Ernst was a very, very determined person.

Because East Germany and the Iron Curtain countries were deprived of

the spectacle of top international motorcycle racing, they got the most enormous crowds there.

He was so close to being world champion but he was sick of not doing what he wanted to do