Rummelsburg prison

The abandoned building in the summer of 2006

Seal of the work house of the city of Berlin-Rummelsburg

The Rummelsburg municipal workhouse , later Rummelsburg prison , was the labor camp of the neighboring orphanage and was built at the end of the 19th century. After the Second World War and in particular the political division of Berlin , the facility was used as a prison for the People's Police . It offered space for up to 900 male prisoners and was intended to compensate for the prison shortage in the eastern part of the city. After 1990 the detention center was closed. The preserved buildings are put to a new use.

history

On behalf of the city of Berlin, six detention buildings as well as corresponding economic units and a separate hospital ward were built between 1877 and 1879 according to plans by the city building officer Hermann Blankenstein . The area on the Rummelsburger Bucht, surrounded by a high brick wall, served as a labor camp for the neighboring Friedrichs orphanage for around 500 boys who were picked up without parents in imperial Berlin and had to sit here. A single building, House VIII , served as a “penal and detention center for male corrigands” ( people to whom something needs to be corrected ).

At the time of National Socialism , the facility was converted into the municipal work and preservation house in Berlin-Lichtenberg . Special departments for homosexuals and 'mentally absurd' were also set up there during this period. With the participation of the criminal police , over 10,000 people were deported to concentration camps as anti-social on June 13, 1938 . One of the starting points for this action was the workhouse in Rummelsburg.

In World War II heavily damaged, some of the houses were rebuilt and further used as workhouses until 1,951th

A building of the men's prison in 1990

During the GDR era, several thousand prisoners were housed in the buildings in the 1970s and 1980s. There were also several hundred (West) German prisoners who were sentenced to long prison terms as escape helpers , until they could be “ ransomed ” by the government of the Federal Republic of Germany .

The detention center (then at 8 Hauptstrasse) was closed in October 1990. Later plans to move the Berlin judicial authority here failed due to resistance from the judiciary.

A famous prisoner in the prison was Erich Honecker , who spent one night in the in-house infirmary on January 29, 1990. In 1994, the abandoned detention center was used as a location for scenes from the film Men's Pension .

New use

Interior view of the prison during the renovation

In January 2007 the state-owned Wasserstadt GmbH sold a large part of the vacant buildings to the Berlin Maruhn real estate group , which is converting the buildings into condominiums and rental apartments for 40 million euros. Construction began in April 2007 and the topping-out ceremony for the first six buildings was held on September 15, 2007. The first new tenants moved in in January 2008; a total of 150 apartments and lofts are planned. The area is marketed as the BerlinCampus .

The above-mentioned House VIII on the bank has been converted into a hotel : five of the former prison cells have been painted in different colors. They received specially made simply designed steel furniture. There is a bathroom, but there is no television.

Memorial and information place

In 2013, the Lichtenberg district office launched a competition with the aim of designing a memorial site in connection with the prison. The graphic artist and designer Helga Lieser , together with Peter Francis Lewis and the landscape architect Jens Henningsen, submitted a concept that provides for three steles in front of one of the main buildings on Hauptstrasse. The metal steles are just as high as the now largely demolished wall around the prison area used to be - 5 meters. They are provided with different surfaces, each symbolizing an epoch of the prison: rust for the imperial era, matt for the Nazi era , gray for the GDR era . Another 18 notice boards at various locations on the former prison grounds are intended to tell short biographies of some of the former inmates. With this concept, the named artists won the competition. The district and the Senate financed the memorial and information site with 120,000 euros. The memorial was inaugurated on January 12, 2015.

literature

Thomas Irmer, Kaspar Nuremberg, Barbara Reischl: The municipal work and preservation house Rummelsburg in Berlin-Lichtenberg. On the past and present of a forgotten place where “anti-socials” were persecuted during the Nazi era . In: Memorial circular , No. 144 8/2008, pp. 22–31
Thomas Irmer, "... making the so-called asocial elements also ripe for destruction ..." - The Berlin workhouse in Rummelsburg between the beginning and end of Nazi euthanasia, in: Neuengamme Concentration Camp Memorial (ed.): Contributions to the history of National Socialist persecution in Northern Germany, Volume 17: "Euthanasia" crime, Bremen 2016
Thomas Irmer, The detention of social outsiders between social reform and annihilation - The Municipal Workhouse Berlin-Rummelsburg (1877–1990), in: Christian de Vito, Ralf Futselaar & Helen Grevers (eds.), Incarceration and Regime Change. European Prisons in and around the Second World War, New York / Oxford 2017, p. 110-126
Released from custody . In: Der Tagesspiegel , December 9, 2006