Unification Doesn’t Mean That German Teams to Meld Easily : Sports program: The budget for combined group is estimated to be less than half what dismantled East German machine spent.

East Germany’s athletic Miracle Machine was removed from its life-support system Wednesday.

Without a home and virtually penniless, it passed into posterity with the satisfaction that it achieved more with less than any other system for developing high-performance athletes in the history of international sports.

Although East Germany competed in the Olympic Games as a separate country for only 20 years, 1968-1988, it won more medals than all but three countries--the United States, the Soviet Union and Great Britain.

With a population of 16.7 million, it finished behind only the Soviet Union (population, 280 million) and ahead of the United States (population, 226.5 million) in the 1988 medal standings at the Winter and Summer Olympics.

But after Wednesday’s reunification, athletes from East and West Germany are merging. They will compete separately for the last time later this month at the World Rowing Championships in Australia. The first time they will compete as one team will be at January’s World Swimming Championships in Australia.

Typical of eulogies for the recently departed, members and observers of the international sports community were reluctant to judge East Germany’s sports system harshly.

“This was a piece of exotica,” said John Hoberman, a Germanic languages professor at the University of Texas in Austin and an author of syndicated columns and a book about international sports.

“The world has never seen a sports system like it and is not likely to again for some time. Like a rare, strange flower that bloomed and is now gone, it will be missed.”

Critics contended through the years that it was a little shop of horrors, alleging that the East Germans manipulated children into choosing sports careers and then used them in scientific experiments designed to enhance performances. For example, recent reports from a West German magazine, Der Spiegel, supply further evidence that the doping of East German athletes was systematic.

“East Germany developed the science of sports to the highest degree,” said Anita DeFrantz, an International Olympic Committee member from Los Angeles who competed as a rower against the East Germans. “But the athletes will have to tell the story about what really went on. Some of the stories might be rather frightening.

“At the same time, I think we created more of a mystique than there was. People wanted to believe there was something East Germany had that no one else did to explain why they were being dusted.”

After competing as part of a single German team until 1968, the East Germans emphatically arrived as a sports superpower at the 1976 Olympics in Montreal, where they won six more gold medals than the United States.

Four years later, U.S. journalist Doug Gilbert, in his book, “The Miracle Machine,” wrote that East Germany succeeded because it “gives sports a higher priority than it is given anywhere else . . . “

East Germany’s elite sports budget for the four years before 1988 has been estimated at $600 million, six times higher than the U.S. Olympic Committee’s budget for the same period.

But now there are new priorities. Faced with more pressing economic concerns, West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl recently agreed to contribute federal money toward the maintenance of the sports system established in East Germany. Government officials estimate that the budget for elite sports in unified Germany will be about $70 million a year, less than half the amount spent by East Germany alone in the past.

Consequently, as many as 20 of the 25 East German sports schools used to train and educate athletes from ages 8 to 18 might have to close. Some have been spared by opening their doors to non-athletes.

Likewise, the Sports College in Leipzig has become a general curriculum university. About 75% of the graduates devoted their careers to sports, many of them as coaches, but the number in the future is expected to be 5%.

The primary scientific centers, such as the drug laboratory in Kreischa and the sports science research facility in Leipzig, will remain open, leading to speculation that some of the abuses that allegedly occurred in East Germany might continue.

“They are doing with East German sports scientists what the United States did with Nazi rocket scientists after World War II,” Hoberman said. “The new German system also will be rigged in favor of performance.”

But will that performance produce a sum that is equal to its parts? If East and West German medals from the 1988 Summer Olympics were combined, the total of 142 would beat the Soviet Union by 10. But because the two countries were strong in several of the same sports, some medalists would not have been in Seoul if Germany had sent only one team.

Also, the unification is expected to be as difficult in sports as it is in other areas of society. Some athletes from both sides already are complaining about having to compete next to their former rivals.

When the East German women won the 400-meter relay at the European Track and Field Championships last month in Yugoslavia, one team member, Kerstin Behrendt, said: “The goal of our relay team is to continue running without any West German sprinters.”

There also is a question about the response of East German athletes when they discover that most of the coaches and administrators are West German, although the East German system was more successful. Many East German coaches already have accepted positions in other countries.

“I think what you’re going to see is a hybrid kind of system,” Hoberman said. “It will be relatively stronger than the old West German system but not as efficient as the East German system.”