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AT WITT’S END – SKATING STAR GEARS UP FOR PRIVACY BATTLE OVER INTIMATE FILES E. GERMAN COMMUNISTS KEPT ON HER

FROM the age of 7 until her early 20s, East German ice skater Katarina Witt was followed, filmed and photographed – without her knowledge – wherever she went.

Love letters were steamed opened and read.

Trips to the toilet, even bedroom romps with her boyfriend, were monitored by video cameras. Friends and family were tailed and grilled.

But it wasn’t a stalker who was keeping tabs on the two-time Olympic gold-medalist, it was her own government.

The 35-year-old skating legend is now fighting to keep these detailed files out of the hands of German journalists who are dying for a peek.

“I feel I have the right to look at them, but nobody else should,” Witt told The Post in her first American interview about the matter. “It shouldn’t be made public.”

Witt first mesmerized the world at the Sarajevo Olympics in 1984 with her striking good looks, sunny personality and athletic grace.

It didn’t seem to matter that she represented a gloomy and severe communist country; she was everything her homeland wasn’t.

But back home in Berlin, Witt’s prodigious gifts had earned her a larger posse of Peeping Toms.

East German officials were so terrified their prized citizen would defect, they ordered the Stasi, the country’s infamous secret police, to tail her day and night.

At one point, nine agents were assigned to operation “Flop,” the code name for Witt.

TODAY, her files fill 27 boxes and more than 3,500 pages.

“They are so personal, like a diary,” Witt said from Los Angeles, where she lives part-time and trains. “I feel like I was spied upon already by the East, and I don’t want to be spied upon again by the West.”

When the Berlin Wall fell and the Stasi was disbanded in 1990, Witt was allowed to see her files. She says she was “shocked” by the level of the surveillance.

“I did not give permission for any of it,” she says. “I see myself as a victim.”

She fills her time now with a host of projects: a line of jewelry, a workout book and production plans for skating shows. Her next appearance in the States will be Nov. 11, at the Divas on Ice show in Trenton, N.J.

But Witt is also gearing up for her privacy battle in Berlin.

She won a temporary injunction May 25, but her formal hearing is scheduled for later this summer.

“In general, I just think, why can they give away everything there is to know about me?” she says. “I want to be able to say what will be given away.”

Witt’s New York-based manager, Gail Parenteau, puts it more bluntly: “Who really wants their bathroom transcripts made public?”

AT FIRST glance, particularly considering Germany’s strict privacy laws, Witt appears to have a strong case.

But she’s been labeled a “beneficiary” of the former Communist regime: She got an expensive car, an apartment and another car, this one for her parents.

Some feel this compromises her “victim” status.

While Witt agrees she was a favored daughter in one sense, she points out that her earnings were snatched up by the state.

In 1988, for example, Witt made $4 million. She was allowed to keep just $750,000, and only $150,000 was given to her in U.S. currency.

Between 1984 and 1988, Witt’s most marketable years, the East German government forced her to turn down more than $3.1million in endorsements from the West.

“To say I was privileged in any way is laughable,” Witt says.

Despite such detailed rebuttals, Witt hasn’t convinced her doubters. Rumors persist that she aided the Stasi in some way, possibly tipping off officials about teammates who might defect.

Witt has vehemently denied such accusations for years. She’s making a public stink, she says, on principle alone.

“Honestly, there is nothing to hide,” she says. “I never worked for the Stasi. That is clear from the files.”

WITT admits she was approached by the Stasi to tattle on fellow athletes, but says she declined.

In one case, a best pal defected, and Stasi agents were “all over” Witt for not tipping them off.

“They really gave me s— about that one,” Witt remembers. “They wanted to know why I didn’t tell them what I knew. But I would never do that.”

One Stasi expert isn’t so sure.

John Koehler, a longtime adviser to Ronald Reagan and author of the 1999 book “Stasi: The Untold Story of East German Secret Police,” says it’s “a possibility” Witt was an informer.

“She already revealed some of the juiciest stuff in the files in her [1994] autobiography and, unlike here, people in Germany don’t care who you slept with and when,” the German-born Koehler explains. “My feeling is, if you have a clean vest, go ahead and show it.”

But Witt fears that “something might be printed out of context. Then I would always be defending myself, explaining things when I haven’t done anything wrong. I have harmed no one. I just want to move on and live my life.”

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The shadow network

The Stasi (1950-1989):

* Originated as a branch office of the KGB, which itself even became appalled by some of the Stasi’s tactics, including keeping families of dissidents hostage and making spouses spy on each other.

* Ratio of Stasi officers and their informers to East German citizens was 1 to 6.5, making it the most powerful secret police force in the world in relation to population.

* When the Stasi archives were opened in 1990, thousands of canning jars were found holding bits of cloth containing body odors collected by agents – so suspected dissidents could be tracked down by bloodhounds.