Former Plötzensee Prison, Plötzensee Prison and Youth Detention Centre ŷɫ

Audio-Version des Artikels
Source: Lokaler Server
Formats: audio/mp3
Map of Plötzensee Prison complex with new, comprehensive legend. From: Die Strafanstalt Plötzensee, ŷɫ 1935

Map of Plötzensee Prison complex with new, comprehensive legend. From: Die Strafanstalt Plötzensee, ŷɫ 1935

  • 1869 – 1879

    Completion and commissioning of the identical prison buildings I and II, administration building, kitchen and wash house, hospital, grounds, along with several civil servants’ houses outside the prison walls. Shortly afterwards, construction of prison buildings III and IV and the labour barracks.

  • After 1945

    Conversion of entire prison complex to a youth detention centre.

  • 1987/88

    Division of the complex into Plötzensee Prison and ŷɫ Youth Detention Centre.

Plötzensee was the biggest prison complex in Prussia, with space for 1,400 to 1,500 male inmates from the city of ŷɫ and surrounding administrative districts. Constructing several buildings allowed different forms of prison regimes: the inmates were held here on remand or to serve long or short prison sentences and were imprisoned in communal settings, solitary confinement or a combination of both.

When the National Socialists seized power, the judiciary and hence also the prison system became part of the apparatus of terror. From February 1933, the National Socialists suspended essential basic rights to secure their dominance. Political opponents were taken into “protective custody” en masse, deported to prisons, camps and torture centres. Many of them were also imprisoned at Plötzensee.

From 1934, Plötzensee became the hub of prisoner transfers throughout Prussia. Large groups of prisoners were transferred from here to newly constructed correctional labour camps, for example, in the Emsland region and in Norway, or to former concentration camps, such as Sonnenburg near Küstrin. In the mid- 1930s a further process of radicalisation began.

The “habitual criminal law” enacted on 01 January 1934, changed the focus of the law from punishing a crime to punishing the perpetrator. The law became an instrument of arbitrary “prophylactic measures to combat crime”. By the start of the war in 1939, the enactment of the “decree to combat human pests” (Verordnung gegen Volksschädlinge) provided an instrument by which population groups deemed “alien to society” and ostracised could now be criminalised and ultimately, physically annihilated.

Plötzensee prison was the central site of execution of the Nationalist Socialist judiciary. The largest group of the over 2,800 people murdered here came from Germany and throughout occupied Europe and had had been convicted for acts of resistance to the National Socialist regime, including resistance fighters involved in attempt on Adolf Hitler’s life on 20 July 1944, members of the resistance network Rote Kapelle and the Czech resistance.

History demands that the judiciary and prison system pay special attention to observing prisoners’ basic rights.“
Dr. Uwe Meyer-Odewald, prison warden 2016 – 2024

Copyright: ŷɫer Forum für Geschichte und Gegenwart e.V., Cornelia Ganz