Plötzensee Prison (German: Justizvollzugsanstalt Plötzensee, JVA Plötzensee) is a men's
prison in the
Charlottenburg-Nord locality of
Berlin with a capacity for 577 prisoners, operated by the State of Berlin judicial administration. The detention centre established in 1868 has a long history; it became notorious during the
Nazi era as one of the main sites of capital punishment, where about 3,000 inmates were executed. Famous inmates include
East Germany's last communist leader
Egon Krenz.
History
The prison was founded by resolution of the
Prussian government under King
William I and built until 1879 on the estates of the Plötzensee manor, named after nearby
Plötzensee Lake (Plötze is the local German name of the
common roach, cf. Płoć in
Polish). The area divided by the
Berlin-Spandau Ship Canal opened in 1859 was located at the outskirts of the
Tegel forest northwest of the Berlin city limits in the
Province of Brandenburg. The theologian
Johann Hinrich Wichern had established the
EvangelicalJohannesstift borstal nearby, which in 1905 moved to Spandau–
Hakenfelde. In 1915, the lands east of the canal with Plötzensee Lake were incorporated into Berlin (the present-day
Wedding district), the remaining area around the prison walls became part of the Berlin
Charlottenburg borough upon the 1920
Greater Berlin Act. Since 2004, it belongs to the Charlottenburg-Nord locality.
The original name of what is today Haus 1 was Strafgefängnis Plötzensee, which also translates to Plötzensee Prison. Up to 1,400 inmates lived on premises of 25.7 ha (64 acres) including a church and a Jewish prayer area, then the largest prison of the
German Empire. After
World War II, the buildings demolished by the
bombing of Berlin were rebuilt and housed a
youth detention center (Jugendstrafanstalt Berlin) for offenders between the ages of 14 and 21. When it in 1987 moved to a newly built annex on Friedrich-Olbricht-Damm in the west, Haus 1 of Plötzensee Prison again became a men's prison with capacity for 577 inmates.[1] Upon the end of the
Cold War and
German reunification, the last communist East German leader
Egon Krenz, convicted for manslaughter by Schießbefehl order at the
Berlin Wall, from 2000 until 2003 served his sentence there.[2]
In 1983, a modern women's prison was built south of Friedrich-Olbricht-Damm on the
Bundesautobahn 100 (Stadtring) highway, since 1998 it houses the JVA Charlottenburg for about 300 adult male prisoners, mainly
drug addicts.
One in three inmates of the prison is incarcerated for repeated public transport
fare evasion.[3][4] In December 2021, Plötzensee was the first prison visited by
Arne Semsrott as part of his
Freiheitsfonds initiative, which pays for the release of people in prison for unpaid public transport fares.[5][6]
Plötzensee Memorial
During
Imperial and
Weimar Republic eras until 1933 there were 36 executions carried out in Plötzensee, all for murder and all by
beheading with an
axe according to the old German Strafgesetzbuch penal code. After the Nazi Machtergreifung, the prison housed both regular criminals and political prisoners. Plötzensee was one of eleven selected central execution sites established in 1936 throughout Germany by the order of
Adolf Hitler and Reich Minister of Justice
Franz Gürtner. Each was operated by a full-time
executioner carrying out the rising numbers of death sentences, especially after the penal law was again tightened in
World War II. By a 1943 agreement with the
OKW they became also responsible for the execution of
Wehrmacht members according to
German military law. The convicts were beheaded by a stationary
guillotine (Fallbeil), from 1942 also by
hanging.
During the Nazi regime, an official record of 2,891 people convicted by the Berlin
Kammergericht, the notorious "
People's Court" under
Roland Freisler and several Sondergerichte, were executed in Plötzensee, initially with an axe in the prison's courtyard. From 1937 the convicts were beheaded with a guillotine brought from
Bruchsal Prison and installed in a backyard work shed, a ground-level brick building near the prison walls, to where the victims had to walk from a nearby cell block. In 1942, a beam was assembled in the same room, serving as gallows for up to eight victims at one time. The bereaved were obliged to pay a fee of 1.5
ℛ︁ℳ︁ for each day the detainee had spent in prison plus an extra execution charge of 300 ℛ︁ℳ︁.
Executions of opponents of the Nazi regime
About half of those executed were Germans, most of whom were sentenced to death for acts of
resistance against the Nazi regime, among them members of the
Red Orchestra, the
20 July plot and the
Kreisau Circle. 677 executed prisoners were from
Czechoslovakia, among them many members of the
Czech resistance to Nazi occupation from 1938 to 1939 onwards. 253 death sentences were carried out against
Poles, and 245 against French citizens. These people included both the members of resistance organizations and people who were deported to Germany for
forced labour. About 300 were women.
After execution, their bodies were released to
Hermann Stieve, an anatomist at the medical college of what is now
Humboldt University of Berlin. He and his students or assistants dissected them for research purposes. Stieve was especially interested in the effects of stress on the
menstrual cycle, and wrote 230 papers based on this research, among them one that demonstrated that the
rhythm method was not an effective method of preventing conception.
After an
RAF air raid in the night of 3 September 1943 irreparably damaged the guillotine and destroyed large parts of the prison buildings, State Secretary
Curt Rothenberger in the Reich Ministry of Justice via telephone ordered the immediate execution of the Plötzensee condemned. About 250 people—six of them "erroneously"— waiting in rows of eight were hanged during the so-called Plötzensee Bloody Nights from 7 to 12 September. The last execution was carried out on 20 April 1945. The remaining inmates were liberated by the
Red Army in the course of the
Battle of Berlin five days later.
Today the execution shed is a memorial site operated by the
Memorial to the German Resistance institution to commemorate those executed by the Nazis. Separated from the prison area, it was dedicated by the
Senate of Berlin on 14 September 1952 in the remaining two rooms with its drain and the preserved gallows. The guillotine had been dismantled after the war and disappeared in the
Soviet occupation zone. Onto the execution room a memorial wall was built "To the Victims of Hitler's Dictatorship of the Years 1933–1945". In 1963, the
Catholic Diocese of Berlin erected its memorial for the victims about 2 km (1.2 mi) to the west in the commemorative church of
Maria Regina Martyrum, the nearby
Protestant Church of Plötzensee was inaugurated in 1970, featuring a
Danse Macabre cycle (Plötzenseer Totentanz) by
Alfred Hrdlicka. Both institutions are site of the annual
Ecumenical Plötzensee Days. Several streets in the surrounding Charlottenburg-Nord housing estates were named after executed resistance fighters.
Executed prisoners
Abdulla Aliş (1908–1944), poet who fought in World War II; beheaded
^"The Kreisau Circle" p. 47(12) Gedenkstatte Deutscher Widerstand
^"The Kreisau Circle" p. 25(12) Gedenkstatte Deutscher Widerstand
Sources
Oleschinski, Brigitte; Gedenkstätte Deutscher Widerstand (1994). Gedenkstätte Plötzensee (in German). Berlin: Gedenkstätte Deutscher Widerstand.
ISBN3-926082-05-4.
OCLC32033090.
Cox, John M. (2009). Circles of resistance : Jewish, leftist, and youth dissidence in Nazi Germany. New York: Peter Lang.
ISBN978-1-4331-0557-9.
OCLC316736955.