Telegraph Grainy pornographic films made for officers of the People’s Army of former Communist East Germany have surfaced in the Stasi files in Berlin. Movies with titles like Glass Dreams, Private Werner’s Big Surprise and F***ing for the Fatherland were made by a secret unit set up within a barracks of the army in Biesdorf in East Berlin.

While the west fretted about the Cold War turning hot, soldiers based at Biesdorf were measured all over to see if they were well-enough endowed to play in the blue movies that mimicked those of the west in both style and substance. Officially, to the overlords of the politburo, pornography was a disease of capitalism that held no place in the socialist paradise behind the Berlin Wall.

Unofficially, 160 officers and men beavered away with 16mm cameras to produce pornographic movies that were shown to top brass of the army in East Germany and for visiting generals from other Warsaw Pact nations. According to the Stasi files, an “amateur film circle” was set up in Biesdorf in 1982 to make the films. Dietmar Schuertze, 57, who now works as a media spokesman for the modern-day Bundeswehr, was back then both a sound assistant and actor in the parade ground productions. “They were made, essentially, in secret but nothing got done in that man’s army without the approval of the brass,” he said. “They were made for their consumption anyway.” Some of the less shocking segments of the movies were shown on MDR TV on Wednesday night in Germany.

“I didn’t recognise myself,” said one soldier “Neither did my wife, thank God.”

Well, communist jack-booted secret police have needs too. And yes, I know the difference between the Nazis and the East German Stasi.