Marcel Krueger profiles one of Berlin’s grimmest memorials…
Named after the nearby lake, which is well-known to any serious Berlin city bather, Plötzensee prison was created by the Prussian government, under King William I, as a modern penal institution in the nineteenth century. Planned by architects Paul Spieker and Heinrich Hermann and built between 1868 and 1879 on the southern outskirts of Tegel forest north of the Berlin-Spandau Ship Canal, the red-brick “Strafgefängnis Plötzensee” originally had space for up to 1,400 inmates on a 26-hectare site complete with church and Jewish prayer area.
The largest prison in the entire German Empire when it opened, it was also the last place that those who received the death penalty in the German Empire (and subsequently the Weimar Republic) would ever see. From its opening in 1879 until 1933 there were 36 executions carried out in Plötzensee, all for charges of murder. The following twelve years, however, were infinitely more ominous.
Between 1934 and 1945, the notorious Berlin “People’s Court” or Volksgerichtshof—a kangaroo court set up after the Reichstag fire which ‘political offences’ including black marketeering, defeatism, and treason against the Third Reich—helped sentence more than 16,560 people to death, of which over twelve thousand were killed by April 1945. Almost 3,000 of those took place at Plötzensee.
After Hitler rose to power in 1933, the prison housed both regular criminals and political prisoners, and became one of eleven execution sites established in 1936 throughout Nazi Germany; together with Brandenburg Prison it was the main execution site in the central German Reich. Each site was operated by a full-time executioner carrying out the ever-soaring numbers of death sentences, especially after the penal law was tightened in World War Two; following a 1943 agreement with the Wehrmacht, Plötzensee also became a site for the execution of army members sentenced to death for desertion, conscientious objection, and “subversion of the war effort”.
Among those murdered in Plötzensee were people of all social classes and political persuasions whose intentions and desires did not fit into the National Socialist system; people like resistance fighter Cato Bontjes van Beek, a young woman who had worked with the “Red Orchestra” resistance group and was executed just weeks after her 22nd birthday; Tatar poet Musa Cälil, who had come to Berlin as a POW and set up a resistance group among fellow Soviet POWs; star pianist Karlrobert Kreiten, who was killed for confiding in a friend of his mother—who subsequently denounced him—that Hitler was an “insane man”; and Jewish kindergarten teacher Sala Kochmann, who had formed a resistance group with her husband Martin and committed an arson attack against a propaganda exhibition in the Berlin Lustgarten. Kochmann had to be carried to her execution on a stretcher because of the beatings she received from the Gestapo after her arrest.
The Nazis beheaded convicts with a guillotine and, from 1942, also by hanging; a beam was set up the execution chamber to serve as gallows for up to eight victims at a time. All executions were carried out in a small red-brick shed that had been designated a killing place after 1933 (before then executions were carried out with an axe in the prison yard, according to the old German imperial penal code). Condemned prisoners were held in the large cellblock named Haus III, directly adjacent to the execution shed, where the machinery of the Third Reich denied them any dignity—a public prosecutor informed the doomed prison inhabitants of their impending death on the evening before their execution or, towards the end of the war, just a few hours beforehand.
The…