Dirk Schlegel and Falko Götz: The East Berlin footballers who fled from the Stasi

Dirk Schlegel and Falko Götz had been friends for years by the time they decided to risk everything.

They had grown up together, two football-obsessed kids from the same side of a divided Berlin. They lived close to the wall that had defined their city since it was built in 1961. Their world as children was divided into good and bad, west and east, capitalist imperialism and communist utopia. They both knew not to mention the western TV they secretly watched at home.

Schlegel and Götz rose through the same Dynamo Berlin youth teams. They were part of a sporting organisation embraced tightly by the Stasi - East 's brutal and invasive secret police. Erich Mielke, the infamous Stasi leader, was Dynamo's honorary president.

The two players had something else in common. In the eyes of the state, neither could be fully be trusted.

"We both had problems with the authorities and with Dynamo because our history was the same," Schlegel says.

"He had family in West and I had an aunt in England. That kind of thing was not good for our future. There was suspicion. But it was better for our friendship."

Götz made his senior debut for Dynamo in 1979, at the age of 17. Schlegel made his two years later, aged 20.

The two friends broke into their country's strongest team, despite difficult years in the youth academy. They say they were often wilfully overlooked, and their parents were told it would not be correct politically to see them rewarded - not with their background.

But their talent was impossible to ignore. As they developed, both players also began to appear for East 's national youth teams. As athletes, they were part of a very select number of citizens who travelled abroad - always under close scrutiny.

The Stasi monitored every aspect of East German daily life, gathering intelligence through a network of informers - and informers who informed on the informers. Some estimates suggest it employed one in every 63, external of the population. The structure was sophisticated, bold, all-powerful. The purpose was to keep order: to further the Communist cause. Football also played its role.

Mielke believed Dynamo should become the most successful side in East . They won the league a record 10 consecutive times between 1979 and 1988. There were often accusations of officials giving them preferential treatment,, external and - as Schlegel recalls - opposition fans hugely resented their victories.

While playing for East 's Under-21s in Sweden, Götz began to seriously consider an alternative.

"As I started to play regularly for Dynamo's first team, and internationally too, I began to understand more about what a career in football could mean," he says.

"I had to then ask myself the question: Where do I want it to take me? Do I want to play all the time in East with a club that doesn't offer the best treatment? That from one day to the next could say, 'thank you but now because of who you are, football stops'">