Peggy Hughes takes a guided tour of one of Berlin’s grimmest GDR sites…
It’s hard to believe, standing where I am, that this prison kept its purpose secret. From my current vantage point at a cobblestoned corner just inside the yard of the enormous, bleak-looking structure, I can spy two watchtowers, squat concrete walls, and curling stretches of barbed wire that trail off into the distance. Little is left to the imagination about the fate of anyone kept inside.
And yet, that’s what our guide is telling us. Not one ordinary civilian in Berlin, he says, his collar turned up against the cold, knew this prison existed. He points to the 3D model around which we are huddled, a sprawling map of concrete blocks that mirrors the compound behind us. The streets beyond these walls, he explains, were populated solely by prison guards to maintain the compound’s secrecy. On the city maps of East Berlin, the site was marked as an empty space from the early 1970s onwards.
The prison is these days known as the Gedenkstätte Hohenschönhausen, a memorial site of the place where political prisoners of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) were interrogated, tortured and imprisoned between 1951 and 1989. Critics and escapees of the East German state were smuggled here for questioning and, according to the 15-minute video that begins our tour, confessions were extracted through insidious methods. In total, around 11,000 people were imprisoned here; once procured, prisoners were marched to court and handed a lengthy sentence in a criminal jail.
Now a research centre as well as an important voice that speaks loudly on human rights and freedom, the centre runs tours daily in both English and German, that reveal the horrors of the compound’s history to a steady stream of tourists and school groups. Even more compellingly for anyone interested in this era and this place, the tours are not only run by historians and researchers—around 50% of the guides themselves survived imprisonment here.
Our guide for this tour is a fascinating and fast-talking historian, Nicholas. He begins our tour in the underground section of the prison, reached via concrete steps and a bunker-like corridor that feels decidedly spooky. Striplights blink from the ceiling like a horror film and old pipes line the creases where the wall meets the roof. It feels like a cellar, because it is: the space began its life as a storage space for the industrial kitchens—the Nation…