BERLIN – The German Athletics Association is proposing the cancellation of all national records set before the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 to make a clean break from the doping scandals of the Communist era.

Later this month, the association, the DLV, will invite athletes from the old East and West Germany to defend their sporting careers or volunteer evidence of how they were doped.

Although most doping cases occurred in East German athletes – whose masters were keen to show off the strengths of Communism – the sweeping measure has been proposed “out of fairness to all newcomers.”

It is yet to be seen how the world body, the International Association of Athletics Federations, might react. Five East German records still stand.

The DLV’s investigation follows various court cases by athletes against former trainers who administered performance-enhancing steroids and the drugs companies that produced them.

Claimants have included a female shotputter who was forced to have a sex change and a swimmer who suffered infertility and depression.

The DLV’s initiative has been provoked by an official request by Ines Geipel for her record to be struck from the books. She and her partners won the 4 x 100m relay in 42.20 seconds, a record that still stands in united Germany.

Ms. Geipel and her teammates were administered doses of blue pills they were told were vitamins but which were an anabolic steroid, oral turinabol.

But many former athletes are angry. A decathlete from Bavaria who has held the national record since 1984, Jurgen Hingsen, told a sports magazine: “The DLV can’t question my record. It will unleash a wave of legal claims which I will take part in.”