Lehrter Strasse cell prison

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Cell prison, around 1855

The cells Lehrter Strasse prison , even detention center Lehrterstraße , prison Moabit   or cells Moabit prison   called, was a prison in the Lehrter Strasse 1-5 in today's district Moabit of the Mitte district of Berlin . The building was built in the 1840s under King Friedrich Wilhelm IV. As the " Prussian model prison Moabit" and was considered a particularly modern prison at the time, because the prisoners were housed in individual cells instead of the communal cells that had been common up until then.

In 1957/1958, the Lehrter Strasse cell prison was demolished. On October 26, 2006, the Former Cell Prison History Park in Moabit was opened on the site .

location

Lehrter Strasse cell prison on a city map from 1884
Cell prison from an aerial photograph (orientation: north left), July 1886
Site plan from 1896

The former prison site, which is around six hectares in size, is to the east of Lehrter Strasse at the confluence with Invalidenstrasse , in the immediate vicinity of today's Berlin Central Station . To commemorate the victims of National Socialism, a memorial stone was erected on the traffic island at the corner of Seydlitzstraße and Lehrter Straße , which was later moved to the entrance area of ​​the memorial park.

Not to be confused with the cell prison is the former Wehrmacht prison , Lehrter Straße 61, which was used as a branch (house 3) of the Plötzensee correctional facility until 2012. On the property, Lehrter Straße 60, there was also a branch of the Tiergarten district court . Both buildings have been empty since 2013 and are no longer used.

history

The planning to build a model prison was preceded by a prison reform by King Friedrich Wilhelm IV shortly after his accession to the throne. In the cabinet order of March 26, 1842, he approved the construction of the prison according to plans by Carl Ferdinand Busse as a copy of the British penal institution in Pentonville near London . In 1849 the work was finished. The five wings arranged in a star shape, each containing individual cells that can be monitored centrally, a church, various civil servants' residential towers and a prison cemetery were part of the facility.

Even before the entire building was completed, the so-called “ Poland Trial ” was conducted against 256 Polish separatists , including Ludwik Mierosławski . The church interior served as the courtroom. The death sentences and imprisonment sentences announced in December were never carried out and the first inmates of the model prison were released after two months.

Between 1856 and 1860, the German lawyer Carl Eduard Schück (1804–1873), an avowed supporter of solitary confinement modeled on the Eastern State Penitentiary in Pennsylvania , was director of the prison.

National Socialism and Gestapo Special Department

From 1940 onwards, parts of the cell prison were used by both the Wehrmacht and the police and, since the assassination attempt on July 20, 1944, also by the Gestapo as remand prison. Suspicious participants in the resistance against National Socialism were imprisoned here, for example the later Bishop Hanns Lilje .

Immediately after the attack, on July 21, 1944, Heinrich Müller, Head of Office IV of the Reich Security Main Office, founded the “July 20th Special Commission”. Of the approximately 400 employees in this special Gestapo department, a few dozen were placed in the Lehrter Strasse cell prison. The action, initially intended as a temporary measure, was retained as a permanent part of the prison until the end of the war. The Gestapo made among others for stricter prison conditions for sympathizers of the attack and did the transfer of prisoners between other prisons and concentration camps as well as to the frequently with torture -related interrogations in the "house prison" of the Gestapo in the basement of the building Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse  8. Many of People's Court of Prison, sentenced to long prison terms or to death, men directly or indirectly involved in the coup attempt spent time in the cell prison.

The detention measures carried out by the special department included handcuffing the hands in front of the stomach during the day and behind the back overnight. In addition, the prisoners' legs were tied to the wall next to the bed with chains at night. A lamp stayed on at night. It was only covered with a cloth when there was an air raid. This also applied to the cells with inmates who were not connected to the attack. They were not allowed to put their hands under the covers while sleeping; the guards wanted to avoid suicide attempts. The diet of all prisoners at this time was disastrous; some lost up to 30 kilograms in prison within a few months. Medical care was also not guaranteed. Numerous inmates became seriously ill. Prelate Otto Müller, who was involved in the conspiracy of July 20, suffered a breakthrough of a stomach ulcer in the cell prison and died on October 12, 1944 in the nearby police hospital.

Many prisoners only survived imprisonment through gifts from relatives and friends. Networks of mainly women formed around the prisoners who tried to deliver food, medicine and books, mostly by bribing the guards.

Among those imprisoned in the cell prison were several clergymen from the resistance, such as the Jesuit Augustin Rösch . Admitted on January 13, 1945, undetected by the guards, he set up confessions and daily holy masses. Those working in the prison orderlies covered the illegal Catholic actions. The hosts for communion were smuggled into the prison by two women in specially made linen bags.

Most of the resistance sympathizers were waiting in the cell prison for their trial before the so-called People's Court , so they had the status of remand prisoners and were questioned about their alleged crimes. Two rooms near the entrance were intended for this purpose, but they were rarely used because the prisoners were almost always transported to the Gestapo prison three kilometers away for questioning. Torture was the rule there, mostly through beatings and flogging, but also the pulling of teeth and fingernails. The former police director Paul Hahn reported on his return to the cell prison after hours of torture by, among others, criminal inspector Herbert Lange :

“I was tied up by car, of course, and brought to Lehrter Strasse under cover by two SD henchmen. When I got there, I saw from the expressions of the officers who received me that my appearance was striking. My face was swollen and smeared with blood, my lips bloodthirsty and chapped. After being tied up for the night, hands behind my back and feet attached to the wall, I sank onto the cot. "

- quoted from Tuchel

On the night of April 22-23 , 1945, 16 prisoners were taken to the nearby ULAP site under the pretext of being released and murdered on the orders of Heinrich Müller . The executions were carried out by 30 SS men under the command of Kurt Stawizki with a shot in the neck . Among the murdered were Klaus Bonhoeffer and Albrecht Haushofer , on whose body the Moabit sonnets that were written in prison were found. The young communist Herbert Kosney survived the execution seriously injured and was later able to report as an eyewitness. These executions are known as end-of-war crimes.

During the Second World War , the church and parts of a cell wing were bombed out in a British air raid on the night of November 22nd to 23rd, 1943. The looting of the interior furnishings was serious shortly before the end of the war on April 26, 1945, one day after the last prisoners were released. Two days later, the prison director, Government Councilor Oskar Berg, suffered a heart attack while leaving the air raid shelter .

After the Second World War

The building complex was used by the Allies as a prison from October 1945 to March 1955 . At the end of 1946, the Western Sectors' only execution site was established. At least twelve executions took place there between January 1947 and May 1949, including those of the convicted euthanasia criminals Hilde Wernicke and Helene Wieczorek. The last execution was carried out with the guillotine on May 11, 1949 of Berthold Wehmeyer , who had been convicted of murder and rape the year before .

After the demolition at the end of the 1950s, only parts of the prison wall and three civil servants' houses remained, which are now listed . The cemetery was deedicated , the law enforcement officers' department remained fenced. The former part of the cemetery for the prisoners was used for an allotment garden . The prison site was leveled and used as a parking lot for the Post Stadium . The eastern part of the parking lot was transferred to the Tiergarten civil engineering department in 1962, which used it as a storage space. In 2003, work began on the former cell prison Moabit historical park , which cost 3.1 million euros . On October 26, 2006, the park was presented to the press and opened to the public. On February 17, 2007, the project by the Berlin landscape architects Glaßer und Dagenbach received one of two first prizes in the national competition of the Association of German Landscape Architects for the intensive examination of the history of the place, the cooperation with the residents and the successful design of the details.

Prominent inmates

  • "Former Cell Prison Moabit History Park"

  • Quote from Albrecht Haushofer's Moabiter Sonnets

  • Symbolic cell

  • View from a stylized prison cell over the park

  • Panorama of wing A (north) with residential building

  • Memorial plaque for the Nazi victims, Lehrter Straße 5

"Jump in a triangle"

The idea of ​​isolating prisoners from one another by means of individual cells, which was implemented during the construction, was also continued in the courtyard : The prison had three circular “walking areas” with a diameter of 40 meters, each divided into 20 small individual courtyards in the form of circular sectors . These were separated from each other by walls, from which the open sky, but otherwise no surroundings and especially no other prisoners, could be seen. The saying “jump in the triangle”, for irrepressible anger or excitement, is attributed to this facility in the Lehrter Strasse cell prison.

See also

literature

Web links

Commons : Lehrter Strasse cell prison  - album with pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ see Straube Plan 1910 in Wikimedia Commons
  2. ↑ Histomap 1939, map section 4238-1936 and 4237-1936
  3. ↑ Carl Eduard Schück: Solitary confinement and its execution in Bruchsal and Moabit. Barth, Leipzig 1862 .
  4. ↑ Ernst Haiger: The last Gestapo prisoners in the cell prison. In: Bernd Hildebrandt, Ernst Haiger: End of the war in Tiergarten. The history of the war grave cemetery on Wilsnacker Straße. Berlin 2009, ISBN 978-3-86541-312-3 , pp. 50-53.
  5. ↑ Johannes Tuchel, p. 35 ff.
  6. Jump up ↑ The jailers were imprisoned but not officially sentenced prison helpers, primarily Jehovah's Witnesses , who had come into conflict with National Socialism because of their conscientious objection to military service. They played an important role for the inmates in the cell prison, for example in the transmission of messages or receipts.
  7. ↑ p. 148. Original source: Memoirs of Paul Hahn in the main state archive in Stuttgart, M 660/156 Bü 43
  8. ^ Sven Felix Kellerhoff : Done by state police . In: Die Welt , April 21, 2010
  9. ↑ Peter Jacobs: For four years after the war, heads were still rolling in Moabit. The guillotine is now in a Swabian museum: Berlin's last guillotine. In: Berliner Zeitung . May 25, 2002 .;
  10. ↑ Bernd Philipsen: The angel of death in a doctor's robe. In: Schleswiger Nachrichten . Schleswig-Holsteinischer Zeitungsverlag , November 22, 2012, accessed on June 5, 2017 .
  11. ^ Association of German Landscape Architects: German Landscape Architecture Prize 2007. ( Memento from November 15, 2010 in the Internet Archive )
  12. ↑ Duden - The phenomenal language answering machine. Berlin 2014, quoted in the Sprachwissen newsletter of July 6th, 2015. In: https://www.duden.de/ . Bibliographisches Institut GmbH, July 6, 2015, accessed on January 3, 2018 .

Coordinates: 52 ° 31 '36 "  N , 13 ° 21' 58"  E