Fresnes Prison

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Fresnes Prison

The prison Fresnes is a larger prison in Fresnes , department of Val-de-Marne , a few kilometers south of the French capital Paris . The complex houses a maison d'arrêt (detention center for prisoners on remand and convicted offenders with a term of up to two years) for men and one for women, as well as a prison hospital. Today it has room for 1,651 prisoners, but like most prisons in France it is severely overcrowded. The institute complements the Maisons d'arrêt in Fleury-Mérogis and La Santé in the Paris metropolitan area in the greater Paris area.

history

Emergence

Opening in July 1898

The prison was built between 1894 and 1898 by the French architect Henri Poussin. His architecture was novel and represented a break with the traditional prison architecture of the second half of the 19th century. Instead of arranging the building wings in a star shape, Poussin oriented them parallel to each other on both sides of a central part running at right angles to them.

Second World War

Memorial plaque for members of the Resistance imprisoned in Fresnes

The prison gained special importance when political prisoners were held there and tortured there under the influence of the Gestapo during the German occupation of France during the Second World War .

The prisoners during this time included Herschel Grynszpan , who had carried out an assassination attempt on a German diplomat in Paris in 1938, the Roman Catholic priest Heinrich König , the resistance fighter Suzanne Spaak , the French writer and university professor Jacques Lusseyran , the philosopher and fighter of the Resistance Valentin Feldman and the Austrian Trotskyist politician and resistance fighter Karl Fischer . The poet Jean Genet was also imprisoned in Fresnes during this period.

Since the end of the war

At the end of the Second World War, the former Prime Minister Pierre Laval was imprisoned here. The officer Jean Bastien-Thiry , who had planned and carried out an assassination attempt on President Charles de Gaulle , also came to Fresnes. The international terrorist Ilich Ramírez Sánchez ("Carlos") was later imprisoned in Fresnes from 2004 to 2006.

EPSNF prison hospital

The Établissement Public de Santé National de Fresnes (EPSNF) prison hospital, which is independent of the two penal institutions for women and men, is also located on the premises of the prison complex . It emerged from the central infirmary (Infirmerie centrale) of the prisons in the Seine department , which had been transferred in 1897 from the Parisian prison La Santé to the newly built facility of Fresnes. After a structural expansion in 1965, the facility had 216 beds in the 1980s.

In 1983, at the instigation of the then Justice Minister Robert Badinter, it was renamed Établissement Hospitalier Public National de Fresnes and fundamentally reformed. In particular, doctors and nurses who had previously been subordinate to the Ministry of Justice were withdrawn from its hierarchy and placed under the structures of the public health system. Likewise, the nuns who had previously worked in nursing were replaced by state-certified nurses .

With a change in the law in 1994, the hospital was renamed the Établissement Public de Santé National de Fresnes . The EPSNF is the only body in France for which the Ministry of Health and Justice share responsibility.

Web links

Commons : Fresnes Prison  - Collection of Images

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Fresnes. Etablissement pénitentiaire - maison d'arrêt. Ministry of Justice (France) , October 14, 2015, accessed on January 20, 2016 (French, prison website).
  2. ^ "Prisonnier" in France - En immersion à Fresnes. In: Paris Match . June 19, 2015, accessed January 20, 2016 (French).
  3. ^ Johannes Volker Wagner: National Socialism in Everyday Life. Film companion and historical reading book. Brockmeyer, Bochum 2012, ISBN 978-3-8196-0836-0 , p. 98.
  4. ↑ Information on the Yadvashem Memorial website , accessed on January 20, 2016.
  5. ↑ Information on the Buchenwald Memorial website , accessed on January 20, 2016.
  6. ↑ L'Humanité May 19, 2007 , accessed February 26, 2019
  7. ^ Karl Fischer, autobiography , in: Austrian Stalin victims. Memorial. Junius-Verlags- und Vertriebsgesellschaft, Vienna 1990, ISBN 3-900370-81-8 , P. 97.
    Fritz Keller: In the Gulag from East and West. Karl Fischer. Worker and revolutionary. ISP-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1980, ISBN 3-88332-046-3 , p. 72.
  8. ^ Stephan Barber: Jean Genet. Response, London 2004, ISBN 1-86189-178-4 , p. 30.
  9. ↑ Arrêt de Grande Chambre Ramirez Sanchez c. France. In: wcd.coe.int. European Court of Human Rights , July 4, 2006, accessed January 20, 2016 (French).
  10. ↑ L'histoire de l'EPSNF. Établissement Public de Santé National de Fresnes, archived from the original on January 23, 2018 ; accessed on February 27, 2019 (French).

Coordinates: 48 ° 45 ′ 49 ″  N , 2 ° 19 ′ 19 ″  E