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Steffen Freund: How I Resisted the Stasi

Berlin, venue for the 2015 Champions League final between Barcelona and Juventus, was a very different city 27 years ago. Then, with the Berlin Wall still standing, East Germany's secret police, the Stasi, would often target sports people as potential informants.

It's 1988 in the German Democratic Republic, known to most as East Germany, still over a year before the fall of the Berlin Wall.

A future German international and Champions League winner is thrown into a dark room in Brandenburg before two men sit him in a chair, click on their torches and shine them directly into his eyes. But Steffen Freund did not fall apart.

He tells Steve Crossman what it was like standing up to the Stasi and recalls the day the wall came down.

Picture: Getty

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5 minutes