SA prison in Papestrasse
The SA prison in Papestrasse was located in the basement of the Werner-Voss-Damm 54a building in Berlin 's Tempelhof district from March to December 1933 . The house was originally a building of the railway barracks on General-Pape-Strasse . The prison was a facility of the SA field police . This or the SA Feldjägerkorps (since October 1933) was a special unit that existed from 1933 to 1936 within the National Socialist Sturmabteilung (SA). Around 2000 people were arrested in the SA prison in Papestrasse in the course of 1933, 500 of whom are known by name today. About 30 of them died as a result of abuse or its consequences.
The Schöneberg railway barracks
During the Franco-Prussian War of 1870/1871, the importance of the railroad for troop transport and supplies had become apparent. The 1st Railway Regiment of the Prussian Army was established for these functions . In 1874/1875 the first barracks were built in Schöneberg west of the Anhalter Bahn near today's Kesselsdorfstrasse. In 1892 and from 1905, two large barracks areas for additional railway regiments were built east of the Anhalter Bahn in the north of the circular line. Today's Werner-Voss-Damm 54a building served as a non-commissioned officers' home around 1908 .
The barracks area in the Weimar Republic
After the First World War , the extensive barracks on General-Pape-Strasse remained in state ownership. In 1921 the main supply office and later the Berlin-Tempelhof tax office as well as various businesses were housed here. What happened to the Werner-Voss-Damm 54a building during this period is not known. At the beginning of 1932 it was given to the ethnic Protestant "Christian Kampfschar", led by the German-Baltic Baron Wilhelm von der Ropp , and used it as a residential and training home for unemployed young people until it was taken over by the SA field police.
SA prison 1933
The prisoners were recorded using prisoner numbers, with which the prisoners were registered by the SA field police. The lowest known number so far is No. 43 for the inmate Herbert Drescher, issued on 15./16. March 1933. On April 1, 1933, Erich Simenauer received the prisoner number 235. The highest number found so far is 1842 from prisoner Karl Klötzer at the end of November 1933.
Many of the prisoners were KPD and SPD members, trade unionists and also Jewish doctors and lawyers. Among them were personalities such as the social democratic Schöneberg city councilor Franz Czeminski , the neurologist Fritz Fränkel , the editor of the Rote Fahne Erich Gentsch , the neurologist and psychoanalyst Kurt Goldstein , the clairvoyant Erik Jan Hanussen , the owner of the department store Nathan Israel , Wilfrid Israel , and the Catholic Erich Klausener , head of the police department in the Interior Ministry.
Especially at the beginning of the National Socialists' takeover of power, the SA field police turned their attention to the advocates of the Weimar Republic , for example: Max Sievers , chairman of the Freethinkers , who was in the cellars of Papestrasse after the SA occupied his association house in March imprisoned, and Max Ebel , managing director, as well as Walter Friedeberger , who were both arrested during the occupation of the main association of German health insurance companies for the Berlin medical outpatient departments. Max Ebel died shortly after his imprisonment under unexplained circumstances in the SA prison in Papestrasse.
There were many mass arrests and denunciations :
- In March, a group of Bewag works councils and numerous employees of the Friedrichshain employment office were arrested while they were working and held in Papestrasse.
- In April almost the entire board of directors of the Schöneberg housing estate Lindenhof - including Franz Czeminski - was brought there.
- In April the anti-Jewish measures and the exposure of a Schöneberg KPD group led to many arrests.
- When, in May 1933, during the dissolution of the trade unions, the association building of the textile workers was occupied by the SA, union chairman Martin Plettl was among those who were brought to Papestrasse.
- Gerhard Rosenbaum and his Jewish father, a property manager from Schöneberg, were arrested in March 1933 on charges made by a resident and taken to the Papestrasse prison.
- Arno Philippsthal , a Jewish doctor resident in Biesdorf , came to the detention rooms of the SA field police in the same month, probably also because of a denunciation.
Gerhard Rosenbaum and Arno Philippsthal both died from the abuse they suffered there.
The arrests continued: in September and October 1933, large groups of KPD members from the Reinickendorf and Prenzlauer Berg districts came to the Papestrasse SA prison.
Women were also imprisoned in the SA prison in Papestrasse, according to the resistance fighter Minna Fritsch , a member of the KPD, and the librarian Hertha Block, after whom the Hertha Block Promenade in the north of the east-west green corridor was named in 2012 . The women were detained separately from the men. There was also a separate cell for members of the SA and NSDAP who were incarcerated for actual or alleged violations of duty.
There is no information on the use of the building for the subsequent years 1934 to 1946.
After 1945
Some buildings on the barracks area, which had been badly damaged by the bombing raids in 1944/45, were demolished in the post-war years. The less damaged house Werner-Voss-Damm 54a could be restored. Small businesses and a large kitchen, which served as a warming room in the winter of 1947/1948 , were operated in the building. Various traders have been using the building since then. Meanwhile, the location and the events of 1933 fell into oblivion.
The anti-fascist city tours of the Arbeitsgemeinschaft Jugend in Mariendorf and the Association of Victims of the Nazi Regime / Association of Antifascists brought the former SA prison back into focus from 1980. In 1981 the Tempelhof district office of Berlin then put a memorial plaque on the Werner-Voss-Damm 62 building to commemorate the "victims of the early Nazi terror in the cellars of the General-Papestrasse barracks" (plaque).
However, the exact location of the former SA prison on the former barracks site was unknown. It was not until 1992 that the civic engagement of the Papestrasse history workshop enabled the historical location to be located in the Werner-Voss-Damm 54 A building.
There, the room layout, doors and wall paintings of the basement rooms have largely been preserved in their original state, which gives the place its high level of authenticity. Today there are still some original traces from 1933 in the cellar. One trace is a pencil drawing with the profile of a head to which the name of a prisoner is added in Latin and Hebrew script . A plaque commemorates this trace.
memorial
In March 1995, the art exhibition SA prison 1933 General-Pape-Strasse used the historic basement rooms with photos, pictures and installations, making them publicly accessible for the first time. In June 1999 , an exhibition was opened in a branch of the Robert Koch Institute , General-Pape-Straße 62, in which, in addition to the history of the SA prison, the lives of some persecuted doctors and health politicians who were starting in the Weimar Republic are shown what was then a new type of social medicine . They are the fates of Lydia Rabinowitsch-Kempner , Fritz Fränkel , Arno Philippsthal , Erich Simenauer, Kurt Goldstein , Max Leffkowitz and Max Ebel.
The present-day Tempelhof-Schöneberg district and the State of Berlin also worked intensively with the Papestraße history workshop to create a memorial for what happened.
The memorial was opened by the Tempelhof-Schöneberg Museums on April 7, 2011 as the SA prison Papestrasse memorial . It is one of the very few concentration camps of the Sturmabteilung, largely preserved in its original state .
On March 14, 2013 - exactly 80 years after the establishment of the SA detention cellars - the district museums in Tempelhof-Schöneberg are opening a permanent exhibition in the memorial site of the SA prison Papestrasse, which provides detailed information on the history of the site. On the east side of the basement there are three cells and a washroom; on the western side a documentation exhibition, a memorial room for the victims and a publicly accessible archive room.
A free public tour takes place every Sunday at 2 p.m. There are various educational programs for schools and adult groups, among others in cooperation with the Topography of Terror Foundation .
The memorial is embedded in the Papestrasse history trail of the Südkreuz History Quarter project run by the Tempelhof-Schöneberg District Office. This course goes through the entire former barracks area and extends to the heavy load body north of the area.
The SA prison in a detective novel
The SA prison is a setting in Volker Kutscher's novel March fallen. Gereon Rath's fifth case . The work describes the events in the spring of 1933. The main character, Kommissar Rath, has to go to the SA prison, among other things, in order to free a business friend of the gang boss Johann Marlow from the clutches of the SA men.
literature
- Kurt Schilde , Rolf Scholz, Sylvia Walleczek: SA prison Papestrasse. Traces and certificates. Overall Verlag Berlin: Berlin 1996, ISBN 3-925961-17-8 .
- Irene von Götz, Petra Zwaka (ed.): SA prison Papestrasse. An early concentration camp in Berlin. Metropol Verlag: Berlin 2013, ISBN 978-3-86331-117-9 .
- Matthias Heisig: The SA field police and their prison - historical place, historical processing and memory of a headquarters of the early Nazi terror in Berlin. In: Yves Müller / Reiner Zilkenat (ed.) Civil War Army . Research on the National Socialist Sturmabteilung (SA). Peter Lang Edition: Frankfurt am Main 2013, pp. 195–219, ISBN 978-3-631-63130-0 .
Web links
- Torture Prison: How the Terror Began. Video documentation (3:20 min) on spiegel.de from April 8, 2011
- Website for the exhibition in the memorial site SA prison Papestrasse
Individual evidence
- ^ Memorial site of the SA prison Papestrasse: inmates
- ↑ Geschichtparcour Papestrasse ( Memento of the original from January 16, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (PDF; 4.95 MB)
- ^ Matthias Heisig: The SA field police and their prison - historical place, historical processing and memory of a headquarters of the early Nazi terror in Berlin. In: Yves Müller / Reiner Zilkenat (ed.) Civil War Army . Research on the National Socialist Sturmabteilung (SA). Peter Lang Edition: Frankfurt am Main 2013, p. 196 f.
- ↑ Historical traces , memorial site SA prison Papestrasse, accessed on May 31, 2017.
- ^ Matthias Heisig: The SA field police and their prison - historical place, historical processing and memory of a headquarters of the early Nazi terror in Berlin. In: Yves Müller / Reiner Zilkenat (ed.) Civil War Army . Research on the National Socialist Sturmabteilung (SA). Peter Lang Edition: Frankfurt am Main 2013, p. 206.
- ↑ Josef Kloppenborg: National Socialism: Memory of Persecuted Doctors In: Deutsches Ärzteblatt , vol. 2000
- ^ Robert Koch Institute (ed.): Persecuted Doctors in National Socialism: Documentation for the exhibition on the SA prison General-Pape-Strasse , self-published by the Robert Koch Institute Berlin 1999, ISBN 3-89606-030-9 .
- ↑ Memorial site of the SA prison Papestrasse, House 54 A , Senate Department for Urban Development Berlin , March 2013, accessed on March 6, 2017.
- ^ Memorial site of the SA prison Papestrasse: Educational offers for schools
- ↑ Plan of the Südkreuz history quarter , accessed on March 6, 2017.
Coordinates: 52 ° 28 ′ 32.14 " N , 13 ° 22 ′ 12.11" E