BERLIN - Researchers at Berlin's Humboldt University claim West Germany's athletes were systematically doped - with government backing - from the 1970s at the latest.

The Sueddeutsche Zeitung newspaper publicised details from the unpublished 800-page report titled Doping in Germany from 1950 to today on Saturday, revealing the extent to which West German politicians were allegedly willing to promote drug use among athletes to ensure international success.

One interior minister is alleged to have said at the time: "Our athletes should have the same conditions and services as the Eastern bloc athletes."

The report claims that for decades the state financed experiments with performance-enhancing substances such as anabolic steroids, testosterone, estrogen or the blood-doping agent EPO.

It also states that an unspecified number of footballers in the 1954 World Cup-winning team received injections of the methamphetamine Pervitin, commonly known today as "speed", according to the newspaper. Publication of the report, which was completed in April, has been delayed due to privacy concerns and legal issues because athletes, doctors and politicians are named.

The authors say West German doping did not evolve as a response to East Germany's systematic doping under the Communist government, but rather that it operated parallel to it. The conditions for "systemic doping" were laid in 1970 when the Federal Institute of Sport Science (BISp) was founded under jurisdiction of the interior ministry, which is still responsible for sports.

"There's a systemic connection between research and forbidden substances and in using them for athletes," project leader Giselher Spitzer of Humboldt University told The Associated Press in a telephone interview last year. "That's why we call it systemic doping."