Well, there were defectors to the GDR from the West. While this was nowhere near the number of Germans who fled to the FRG, there were some prominent individuals who left for life on the other side of the Iron Curtain. Some of these defections were spies for the MfS, such as the NATO aide Ursel Lorenz, but others defected for personal or political reasons. The German racing legend Manfred von Brauchitsch to escape his tax bill and become a prominent member of the GDR sport scene. Most enigmatic was the case of Otto John, the head of the FRG's domestic intelligence service, Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz. John claimed in a series of widely publicized press conferences that the Bonn government was rife with unrepentant Nazis and that the US at best turned a blind eye to this, or even encouraged it.

John's statement (he would later claimed he was coerced when he re-defected) meshed well with the official line of the GDR in the first two decades of its existence, namely that it was the true antifascist Germany. Defectors like John buttressed the state's propaganda that behind the glitzy facade of the FRG's prosperity was the same social forces and monopoly capital that gave rise to Hitler. GDR spy fiction often had the stock trope of a spy who defects to the West, hurting his honest family and loved ones who believed in German socialism, to help the larger project of reforming and improving Germany. Likewise, state media also indulged in various morality plays that emphasized the crime and bad social mores of the West and pinned social problems like youth hooliganism on their contact with places like West Berlin and its crass consumerist culture. Ostpolitik of the 1970s led to a softening of this state line. The state media no longer depicted Bonn bureaucrats as brownshirts in waiting, but the emphasis upon the humanistic Germany allegedly enshrined by the GDR. The FRG might have been the home of material goods like Volkswagen, Porsche, and Sennheiser, but the GDR was the home of Goethe, Martin Luther, and other elements of higher German culture and humanism in this formulation.

This high value on German culture, albeit mediated through a socialist lens, was present in the GDR's self-justification from its inception. And it is worth stressing that it had more than its fair share of adherents among German intellectuals in the immediate postwar period. The diarist Victor Klemperer, for example, elected to stay in the GDR because he felt its values were more in line with what he valued as a German than the materialistic and very piously Christian FRG. Klemperer, who was as astute an observer of the SED dictatorship's hypocrisies as he was of the Third Reich, argued that the GDR was "the lesser evil," and this was a sentiment that had some currency after the wreckage of Nazism. It may have led to half-hearted support with the SED dictatorship, but it was still support.