Marcel Kreuger charts the fascinating past of one of Berlin’s most famous prisons…
“Tegel Prison lies to the northwest of Berlin and borders a small lake and the Borsig Locomotive Company housing estate. As I drove onto Seidelstrasse, its red-brick walls heaved into sight like the muddy flanks of some horny-skinned dinosaur; and when the heavy wooden door banged shut behind me, and the blue sky vanished as though it had been switched off like an electric light, I began to feel a certain amount of sympathy for the inmates of what is one of Germany’s toughest prisons.”
– Phillip Kerr, March Violets
It is surprising sometimes how much of today’s Berlin is still held together by the old bones of the German empire. The Amtsgericht district court in Wedding from 1906 is still an Amtsgericht, Plötzensee Prison from 1879 is still a working prison, and the Rotes Rathaus from 1871 is still the main town hall of the city.
Another red brick behemoth from imperial times is somewhat off the beaten track, and often bypassed by those on the way to the Tegel neighbourhood and the lake of the same name in summer: Tegel Prison. Passing by the prison on Seidelstrasse, there is not much that indicates a working male prison with a capacity for almost 900 prisoners, over 600 employees and a layout of more than 130,000 square meters.
The modern facilities are all hidden behind the original red brick administrative buildings from 1898 and the impressive crenellated main gate. But the prison is not a place where men are kept under lock and key, unseen from the world, and the structure has a prominent place in Berlin history.
Just like nearby Plötzensee Prison, Tegel was planned as a massive detention centre representing a more humane enforcement of sentences, complete with workshops, allotments and its own church. Construction began in 1896, and in October 1898 Tegel Royal Penitentiary opened—and closed again quickly and firmly behind the first inmates. By 1913, the structure regularly housed around 1,500 prisoners on average.
One of its most famous inmates before World War I was Wilhelm Voigt, the infamous “Hauptmann von Köpenick”, who, out of work in 1906, had dressed as a Prussian officer and ordered a contingent of troops to the town treasury of Köpenick town hall, where he raided the coffers.
His robbery exposed the blind belief of Germans in the Prussian army and received a large media response. He was apprehended shortly after and served a term of less than two years in Tegel, leaving after an official pardon by Emperor Wilhelm II. Voigt spent the next years on a press tour of Germany, appearing in his “Hauptmann” uniform and publishing an autobiography in 1909.
With the outbreak of World War I there was no more making light-hearted fun of the Prussian military. In 1916 one wing of Tegel became a military prison with staff provided by the Prussian Army. After the end of the war and the fall of the empire in 1918, the prison was renamed Tegel Penitentiary, and remained one of the main prisons of Berlin throughout the duration of the Weimar Republic. The narrative of one of the era’s most important books, Alfred Döblin‘s “