Police headquarters at Alexanderplatz
The police headquarters at Alexanderplatz is the former seat of the Berlin police presidents and part of the central administration of the Berlin police at Alexanderplatz .
Two buildings have become known under this name:
- 1890–1945 Police Headquarters at Alexander- / Dircksenstrasse
- 1945–1990 Police Headquarters Keibelstrasse (for East Berlin )
Since 1990, the entire Berlin police headquarters have been located at Platz der Luftbrücke , while parts of the police administration are still housed in the Alexanderplatz building.
Police headquarters at Alexander- / Dircksenstrasse
The Berlin Alexanderplatz police headquarters is also known in German and Prussian history as the Red Castle . As early as 1885, the capital of the Reich planned this facility as a "German Scotland Yard ". The original building was erected in 1886–1890 under the direction of the Berlin City Planning Officer Hermann Blankenstein . At the time, this building was the largest building in Berlin alongside the Berlin City Palace . An expansion followed in 1900 under the direction of Paul Thoemer . In 1933 the complex became the headquarters of the Berlin Gestapo . During the Second World War , the building suffered severe damage during the Allied air raids and the Battle of Berlin in 1944 and 1945 and was never rebuilt. In 1957 the last remains were removed, so that a parking lot was created. The Alexa shopping center has been located on the site since 2007 .
As early as 1896, the Presidium had an identification service, a Bertillon record file, a register of missing persons and offenses, and from 1899 had its own photo studio. The police chief of Berlin was charged with the practical management of all police and affiliated administrative structures in Prussia. In the building on Alexanderplatz there were not only municipal police structures, but also special departments such as the Prussian censorship authority. The distribution of tasks for the Berlin police was thus the standard for Prussia and the later German Reich .
“The building, which is free-standing on three sides, measures 196 m on Alexanderstraße, in the overall straight front 196 m, on Alexanderplatz 92 m and joins the curves of the viaduct on the third free front facing the tram. It encloses eight uncovered courtyards, which - as far as office space is adjacent to them - have a width of at least 17.50 m and a length of 53 to 60 m, and a glass-covered central courtyard, which provides a weather-protected room for loading or unloading files Forms gatherings of the protection team and at the same time creates a passage across the building in an approximate extension of Kaiserstraße.
In addition to the various departments of the police administration: government department (I), commercial department (II), building department (III), the criminal and moral police (IV), the passport office and servants' office (V), the department for violations (VI) and the political police In the building is still the central office, the form magazine, the main police box office, the medical commission, the command office and the reserve and mounted department of the protection team with the necessary stables and a covered riding arena, the central telegraph station, the police prison with the associated ones Administration and utility rooms and finally five service apartments for the police president and four senior officials as well as nine service apartments for sub-officials. In order to cope with this need for space, in addition to the basement, four storeys were required. The apartment of the police president and the senior government councilor occupy the Alexanderplatz front on the main floor.
Three front buildings, four transverse wings and two intermediate wings accommodate the administration rooms and the service apartments, while a special fifth transverse wing is used for police custody for people who have been arrested, and on five upper floors, the three upper floors of which are set up for solitary confinement, the police prisons for men. The women's prison and an apartment for the superintendent are located on the fourth floor of the front building on the tram. In total, the prisons have space for 328 men and 94 women. The stables and guard rooms for the mounted guard are attached to the prison wing as two special two-story intermediate structures with a glass-covered riding arena in between. "
Police headquarters at Neue Koenigstrasse / Keibelstrasse
The building was erected in 1930/1931 for the department store company Rudolph Karstadt AG based on a design by Karstadt in-house architect Philipp Schaefer in Neue Königstrasse . As it quickly turned out to be too big for a department store or warehouse, Rudolph Karstadt sold the representative house in 1934 for 15 million Reichsmarks (adjusted for purchasing power in today's currency: around 68.3 million euros) to the Reich Ministry of Finance . This set up the Reich Statistical Office , which, among other things, statistically recorded the Jewish residents of Berlin and collected central information for the conduct of the war.
The building suffered destruction at the end of the Second World War and was restored from 1947. Until the split in the Berlin police force in 1948, the seat of the Berlin police president was in different locations in the Soviet sector of the four- sector city of Berlin . When in July 1948 the democratically elected Magistrate Schroeder suspended the Police President Paul Markgraf ( KPD , from 1946 SED ), who was appointed by the SMAD in 1945 , for serious breaches of duty, he remained in office with Soviet approval and took his seat in the Karstadt building, which was ready for occupancy. The police president appointed by the magistrate, Johannes Stumm , moved the presidium to Friesenstrasse in the American sector. With the split in the Berlin police force, the split in Berlin began in the summer of 1948 .
.
The former department store on Neue Königstrasse, from 1966 Hans-Beimler-Strasse, served as the central administration of the People's Police in East Berlin until 1990 . A remand prison (UHA II) was established in the courtyard in 1951 . Its construction extends over eight floors and had 100 prison cells . The Greater Berlin Administration of the State Security had a "permanently manned base" in the building, which UHA II also used. After 1990, at least two film recordings took place in the prison building (for the men's pension and The Lives of Others ); there were no other uses until 2007. Then Berliner Immobilien Management GmbH (BIM) took over the entire property and was able to completely renovate it for 47 million euros .
The Senate Department for Education, Youth and Science moved into the former Karstadt building . There were new police stations (section 57) on several floors in Keibelstrasse, but the main user is the BIM. The first floor was redesigned into a learning location Keibelstraße in 2018 in coordination with the Monument Protection Office and opened on February 18, 2019. Schoolchildren aged 15–20 years can visit the cells and the exhibition and deal intensively with the history of the place and the fate of some prisoners (such as Norbert Bisky , Michael Brack or Toni Krahl ).
Web links
- History of the site Information on the history of the VP presidium on the Keibelstrasse learning site website .
Individual evidence
- ↑ Jürgen Thorwald : The hour of the detectives. Becomes and worlds of criminology. Droemer Knaur, Zurich and Munich 1966, pp. 31–33.
- ↑ Jürgen Thorwald (1966), p. 33 f.
- ↑ Berlin and its buildings: with 2150 illustrations in the text, 18 collotype plates, 1 memo board and 4 attachments / edit. and ed. from the Architects' Association in Berlin and the Association of Berlin Architects, 1896, Volume II & III, page 125ff
- ↑ Keibelstrasse 29–36 in the Berlin address book 1935> Karstadt, R. (AG) and rescue center .
- ↑ Historical : About the building on Otto-Braun-Straße / Keibelstraße , accessed on February 19, 2019.
- ^ Anne Kaminsky (ed.): Places of remembrance. Memorial signs, memorials and museums on the dictatorship in the Soviet occupation zone and GDR . 2nd, revised and expanded edition, Links, Berlin 2007, ISBN 978-3-86153-443-3 , p. 114.
- ↑ Martin Klesmann: Plan for a difficult place. In: Berliner Zeitung , February 19, 2019, p. 11 (print edition), Former GDR prison opens as a place of learning (online edition).
Coordinates: 52 ° 31 '10.9 " N , 13 ° 24' 55.2" E