United States Disciplinary Barracks

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New building
Cell of the USDB, Fort Leavenworth

The United States Disciplinary Barracks ( USDB ; German about Disciplinary Barracks of the United States ) is a penal institution of the US armed forces . The military prison is located in the area of Fort Leavenworth in the community of Leavenworth in the state of Kansas . It also houses soldiers sentenced to death under United States military criminal law . The United States Disciplinary Barracks are near Leavenworth Federal Prison , the Midwest Joint Regional Correctional Facility, and the Lansing Correctional Facility . These four major penal institutions represent a major economic factor in the Leavenworth area.

history

Exterior view of the former, now demolished prison building (1977).

The facility was established by federal law in 1874 as the United States Military Prison . Most of the prisoners themselves were used to erect the prison buildings. Construction began in 1875 and was completed in 1921. This first institution was designed to accommodate up to 1,500 inmates. From 1895 to 1903, prison inmates were also used to build the nearby Leavenworth Federal Prison.

In 2002, a modern prison with an occupancy of 521 inmates opened, replacing the aging buildings of the first military prison. Just two years later, the military administration began demolishing the old infrastructure for cost reasons. The prison has been discussed in recent years as an alternative to prison for prisoners from the wars in Afghanistan and the Iraq war who will be held in Guantanamo Bay if the prison camp there should be closed.

death penalty

So far, 29 executions have been carried out in Leavenworth, including a total of 14 of German prisoners of war who were hanged for murder on three days in July and August 1945. Their victims were fellow prisoners who were viewed by the perpetrators as spies who were eavesdropping on the prisoners for the US authorities, or as other traitors to the German Reich . The deeds for which the men came to the gallows in Leavenworth were therefore also referred to as fememord . On July 10, 1945, five prisoners were executed in an old elevator shaft of the US Disciplinary Barracks who, according to a military court decision , had beaten Private Johannes Kunze from the Africa Corps, born in 1904, to death in Camp Tonkawa ( Oklahoma ). Executed on July 14, 1945, two other prisoners in the same elevator shaft, which in Camp Aiken ( South Carolina another corporal from the Afrika Korps, born 1920) Horst Gunther had strangled and then hung dead when it would be suicide. Seven former submarine drivers, who had lynched the informant of the US authorities and former submarine driver Werner Drechsler in the Camp Papago Park camp on March 12, 1944, were lynched on August 25, 1945 at an especially large one built for this purpose Gallows hanged because never in the entire 20th century were so many convicts executed in the United States.

The last execution by the US military was on April 13, 1961 of John A. Bennett . All those executed so far have been hanged , but lethal injection has been designated as a more modern execution method for the future. As a rule, the executed offenders are buried in the attached prison cemetery.

Known inmates

Movies

swell

  1. ↑ What are the alternatives to Guantanamo? - Politics - msnbc.com
  2. ↑ Fort Leavenworth Historical Society: German POW Execution ( Memento of August 28, 2008 in the Internet Archive )
  3. ^ Carl Manning: Graves Recall Executed German POWs. Los Angeles Times , March 1, 1998.
  4. ↑ Paul Carell , Günter Böddeker : The prisoners - life and survival of German soldiers behind barbed wire . Ullstein, Berlin 1990. Chapter A Fememord and Its Consequences , pp. 77–91.
  5. ↑ http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/15/opinion/sunday/chelsea-manning-the-us-militarys-campaign-against-media-freedom.html?_r=2

Web links

Commons : United States Disciplinary Barracks  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Coordinates: 39 ° 22 ′ 42.1 ″  N , 94 ° 56 ′ 7 ″  W.