"To call it doping is way off the mark," said Stenger.

Tim Meyer, a DFB physician, told Germany's sport news agency SID

that vitamin C does not enhance performance and thus is not on any list of banned substances.

"Vitamin C has no performance-

The German Football Association (DFB) has denied reports that players with the West Germany team which won the 1954 World Cup had used performance-enhancing stimulants but said they had received vitamin treatments.

DFB spokesman Harald Stenger told Reuters on Wednesday doping allegations against the 1954 side reported by Germany's ARD public television network and repeated on the front page of Germany's top-selling Bild newspaper were completely un-founded.

"The players were treated with glucose and Vitamin C -- as a means to help them regenerate," Stenger said when asked about reports some of the 1954 players had received injections after the former groundsman at the stadium in Berne, Switzerland said he found used vials in the drains of the dressing room.

enhancing effect," he said. "I can't imagine how it was against any rules."

West Germany's shock 3-2 victory over Hungary in the finals of the 1954 tournament, coming less than a decade after World War Two, lifted the ravaged nation as it emerged from its post-war trauma and helped trigger the ensuing "Economic Miracle".

A film about the team called "Das Wunder von Bern" (The Miracle of Berne) was a huge 2003 box office hit in Germany, released ahead of the 50th anniversary celebrations of that first World Cup title due later in 2004.

Bild quoted former West Germany physician Franz Loogen, 84, as saying he gave the players Vitamin C injections. The allegations were initially made in the ARD public television broadcast.

Loogen said he told the players lab rats given Vitamin C injections were able to swim three hourslonger.

Bild also quoted Walter Bro-ennimann, the former groundsman

at Berne stadium, saying drains were filled with vials.

"After the final match I found the empty vials in the drains," Broennimann said. He said he turned them over to a Swiss company and was asked to keep quiet aboutit.

One surviving player from 1954, Horst Eckel, told Bild he got injections but said it had nothing to do with doping.

"I received injections," he said. "It annoys and enrages me that 50 years later something like this is being whipped up. We didn't know what the word 'doping' meant at all."

The Financial Times Deutschland newspaper quoted Albert Sing, a member of Switzerland's 1954 World Cup Organising Committee and attache for West Germany, as saying he thought it was odd that the West Germany side got injections.

"I thought it was rather strange," Sing said.