Police history collection of Saxony

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Dresden police headquarters , from Pirnaischer place seen from

The Police History Collection of Saxony is a museum collection of the police in the Saxon state capital Dresden . It includes the remains of the Dresden Crime Museum, which was one of the world's largest crime history collections in the period before the end of World War II .

Location

The collection is housed in the police headquarters on Schießgasse in the inner city of Dresden, owned by the Dresden Police Department . It is located in several attic rooms of the police headquarters, which was completed in 1900 . The building stands between Neumarkt and Pirnaischer Platz . The Dresden City Museum in the Landhaus is directly adjacent; The Frauenkirche and the Kurländer Palais are in the vicinity . Other Dresden museums nearby are the Dresden Fortress Museum and the museums in the Albertinum .

Collection and exhibition

The collection comprises a total of around 4,000 objects (as of 2017) from the 17th to the 21st century.

A considerable group of the exhibits make up old police teaching materials shown in showcases, including a “typology of born criminals” based on the offender type theory of Cesare Lombroso . In addition, old pieces of equipment can be seen, including uniforms and a crested helmet that was designed for the Dresden police on the Austrian model, as the Saxon king did not tolerate police officers with Prussian spiked hats in his royal seat . A painting of “Karajan vom Schillerplatz ”, handed over in 2018, comes from the period after the reunification .

The collection also contains almost 350 police weapons from all eras. These include a muzzle loader from 1680, one of the oldest objects in the collection, and submachine guns from the GDR special units, as well as tear gas cannons from West Germany obtained from the Commercial Coordination Department . You can also see old hiding places for weapons, such as a mini pistol in a book and a “stick shotgun”. It was a weapon disguised as a walking stick , which poachers used to deceive foresters until the early 20th century. The collection also contains original murder weapons, including a nail gun that was used to kill lovers in Saxony at the beginning of the 20th century.

A valuable part of the collection are several sets of counterfeit postage stamps . Further exhibits are warning cards for 10 and 20 marks from the GDR , which the German People's Police distributed to speeders, as well as original wanted photos of Luigi Lucheni , the murderer of Empress Elisabeth of Austria-Hungary (“Sisi”).

Regular operation of the exhibition and its permanent public presentation are not possible for organizational reasons. Only registered groups of visitors can visit the police museum. Commissioner Wolfgang Schütze from the Prevention Service of the Dresden Police Department is in charge of the tour.

history

The museum has its origins in a training collection created by the Saxon police at the end of the 19th century . A royal ministerial decision had resulted in significant criminal cases being documented for police training in Dresden from 1894 onwards. Many of the objects consisted of teaching materials for budding criminologists who learned to draw crime scene sketches, secure traces and decipher secret script.

The officials carried the first pieces together in a simple cell in the Coselpalais under the supervision of the government council and later Dresden police president Paul Koettig (1856–1933), who headed the criminal department of the Royal Police Directorate in his hometown from 1894 . This former seat of the Dresden police was replaced from 1895 to 1900 by a nearby new building, the police headquarters . The rapid growth of the collection meant that when the new construction of the police headquarters began, separate exhibition rooms were planned. During this time the Dresden police were one of the pioneers of modern criminalistics in the German Empire. In addition to the early founding of its own criminal police, Dresden was the first German police authority to introduce the method of dactyloscopy , the proof of identity by fingerprinting.

In the 1920s, the collection had grown to around 70,000 exhibits. This means that one of the world's largest police museums was located in Dresden at that time. Because of the impending air raids on Dresden , a large part of the objects had to be relocated to the barracks in Albertstadt from 1944 . Their future fate is mostly uncertain; the subsequent drastic decimation of the collection is probably related to the Second World War and its aftermath. It is possible that part of it was already lost in the air raids in February 1945. Other objects may have been brought to the Soviet Union as spoils of war by the Red Army .

“The highlight of a special kind in the history of the Dresden police force was the large police exhibition in 1958 in the north hall, today's military history museum . For the first time, the police offers an overview of their various branches of service and shows the structure of the People's Police since 1945.… In the first days after the opening of the show, 70,000 visitors come, it is a great success. "

Only after the fall of the Wall did the Dresden Police Department try to concentrate the remaining exhibits, which only correspond to a fraction of the original collection, on Schießgasse and make them accessible by prior arrangement. Instead of an entrance fee, a radio device converted into a donation box invites you to donate .

As part of the Dresden Museum Summer Night , the collection was accessible to a larger audience for the first time in September 2017 without prior notification.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Dresden's secret museum? Police Saxony, 2017, accessed on January 31, 2019 .
  2. ↑ Illustration of the comb helmet as part of a tour of the police history collection on Feierabend.de
  3. ↑ Sebastian Burkhardt: "Dresdner Karajan" causes a surprise on Schillerplatz. In: DAWO! Dresden weekly newspaper. October 28, 2018, accessed January 31, 2019 .
  4. ↑ Karsten Schlinzig: Dresden police history. In: Stadtmuseum Dresden (Ed.): Dresdner Geschichtsbuch . Volume 9, Altenburg 2003, p. 111
  5. ↑ Keeping a close eye on offenders. In: Sächsischer Bote , September 26, 2006.
  6. ↑ Heiko Weckbrodt: From the shotgun to the Sissi murderer. The Dresden Police Museum reflects centuries of criminal history - you can only visit it after registering. In: Dresdner Latest News , issue from 3./4. September 2011, p. 17 ( online article ).
  7. ↑ from Karsten Schlinzig: Dresden police history. in: Stadtmuseum Dresden (Hrsg.): Dresdner Geschichtsbuch. Volume 9, Altenburg 2003, p. 121
  8. ^ Projects of the IPA Dresden: Police History Collection. International Police Association (IPA) - Dresden Liaison Office, accessed on January 31, 2019 .

Coordinates: 51 ° 3 ′ 2.5 ″  N , 13 ° 44 ′ 38.5 ″  E