Brandenburg-Görden Prison Memorial

Gedenkstätte Zuchthaus Brandenburg-Görden

The Brandenburg-Görden Prison Memorial tells the story of the prison during National Socialism and in the time of the German Democratic Republic (GDR).

History

Construction on the Brandenburg-Görden prison began in 1927 to replace the prison in the centre of Brandenburg, which no longer met new hygienic and technical standards. Designed in the Weimar Republic as a modern, humane prison, after 1933 under the Nazi dictatorship the prison quickly became a place of aggravated prison conditions and massive violence. The majority of the detainees were political prisoners, and the prison was always overcrowded. The prisoners were divided according to the National Socialist racial ideology; the Jewish prisoners for example were housed separately. During the war, many prisoners from all over Europe were transferred to the Brandenburg prison. They had to conduct forced labour in arms factories. Since the Nazi judiciary pronounced more and more death sentences, a place of execution was established in the jail in 1940. By the end of the war, 2,032 prisoners who had been sentenced to death mainly for political reasons such as »Wehrzersetzung« (»negatively affecting the fighting forces«) were executed there with the guillotine.
On April 27, 1945 the Red Army liberated the prison’s approximately 3,000 prisoners. Most of them were now able to return home. At first the prison was used as a military hospital. Later, the Soviet occupation authorities set up a camp on the grounds where former Soviet forced labourers and prisoners of war were examined before returning home and where Soviet citizens suspected of collaborating with the Nazis were imprisoned.
In May 1948 the prison was handed over to the East German administration. From 1949 onwards the prison was mainly used for prisoners convicted by East German courts as Nazi perpetrators. From 1950, the Volkspolizei (»People's Police«) took over the prison, in which more and more opponents of the Communist dictatorship were imprisoned. By the end of the GDR, the proportion of political prisoners had decreased again. Prison conditions varied, but overall they were repressive and often arbitrary.

Brandenburg an der Havel, 1937, View of the Brandenburg-Görden prison, Stiftung Brandenburgische Gedenkstätten

Brandenburg an der Havel, 2018, Memorial room in the prison, Stiftung Brandenburgische Gedenkstätten, Cordia Schlegelmilch

Victims

Between 1933 and 1945 about 22,000 men passed through the prison. Many prisoners were not released at the end of their official prison term but taken to concentration camps. Starting in 1942, the judiciary committed more than 1,200 prisoners from Brandenburg-Görden to the SS for »Vernichtung durch Arbeit« (»annihilation through labour«), including almost all prisoners in preventive detention, Jews, Sinti and Roma, Poles, as well as many Germans and Czechs with high prison sentences.
The Nazi judiciary executed 2,032 men in Brandenburg-Görden, all but 300 for political reasons. More than 800 prisoners died during their imprisonment or shortly after their liberation as a result of the devastating prison conditions.

The entry to power of the National Socialists in 1933 heralded the state persecution of opponents of the regime, Jews, Roma – who were classed as »gypsies« -, the sick and many other groups. For the first time, anti-semitism became part of the government policy of a modern state and the persecution of all groups was progressively heightened. The process was characterised by the interplay between state regulation, violence from supporters of the regime and rabble-rousing propaganda from the press. The acts of terror against the Jews in November 1938 (»The Night of the Broken Glass«), culminating in around one hundred deaths, marked the prelude to the complete exclusion and murder of the Jewish minority. With the outbreak of the Second World War in September 1939, large parts of Europe fell under German control. In Eastern Europe in particular a multi-tiered system of camps and extermination sites was established, in which the SS murdered up to six million Jews, among them around 165,000 German Jews. It is estimated that around seven million Germans lost their lives in the war, including almost 3.5 million civilians. Around 28 million residents of the occupied Soviet Union (both soldiers and civilians) and three million non-Jewish Poles met a violent death. These groups are still barely commemorated in Germany. Germany came under Allied occupation in 1945 and 1949 saw the foundation of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) and the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), who had very different cultures of remembrance. The GDR profiled itself as an »antifascist« state. The former concentration camps at Buchenwald, Ravensbrück and Sachsenhausen became »National Memorials« and primarily documented the communist resistance during the war. In the Federal Republic, the dominant memory was initially of the victims of Allied bombing raids and those who had fled or been expelled from their homes in the former territory of the Third Reich. It was left to specific groups to remember Nazi persecution, the Holocaust or the resistance. With the exception of the war crimes trials, there was no public discussion of perpetrators or involvement in crimes. However, the situation was to change in the mid-1960s, when the statute of limitations for murder was lifted following a lengthy debate. Also during this period, memorial sites were established at former concentration camps (1965: Dachau and Neuengamme; 1966: Bergen-Belsen) and the German Resistance Memorial Centre was opened in 1968 in West Berlin. However, it was not until the 1980s that a diverse and often small-scale landscape of memory developed as the result of local initiatives. Following German unification in 1990, a national memorial site concept was developed and there was a major review of German sites of memory. The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin was inaugurated in 2005. The Topography of Terror, a comprehensive documentation of National Socialist crimes and perpetrators, has opened with a new centre in May 2010; the documentation centre »Flight, Expulsion, Reconciliation« followed suit in 2021. In the meantime, central memorials in Berlin have been erected to commemorate further groups of Nazi victims as well: the murdered Sinti and Roma, the patients murdered in the context of the Nazi’s »Euthanasia« killings and the persecuted homosexuals. The German victims of National Socialist terror in the former Eastern territories of the Third Reich were forgotten by both German states after the end of the war. For decades, memory of these victims was only preserved by West German associations for Germans born in these territories and it mainly excluded the period from 1933 to 1945.

Remembrance

In April 1946, one year after their liberation, former political prisoners and relatives of victims held the first commemoration ceremony in Brandenburg-Gören. In 1947 a »Memorial for the anti-fascist resistance fighters executed in the Brandenburg-Görden prison« was inaugurated at the Marienberg cemetery. Since the jail was still a prison and therefore difficult to access, larger commemorative events took place later, above all at this location. In 1949, Walter Hammer, a former prisoner, set up a memorial in the former execution garage, whose most important element to this day is a reconstructed guillotine. Hammer himself left the GDR in 1950 for West Germany.
In April 1975 the memorial site at the former execution site was extended and rebuilt. One possible reason for the extension was that between 1937 and 1945 Erich Honecker, who had been the dominant political figure in East Germany since 1971, was imprisoned in Brandenburg-Görden. The Marienberg memorial site was also expanded for mass rallies during this period.
In 1988 the East German government founded the »Nationale Mahn- und Gedenkstätte Brandenburg« (National Memorial Brandenburg). Due to the collapse of the GDR, the opening of a new permanent exhibition, which would have represented the East German state as the realization of the goals of the antifascist resistance fighters, did not take place any more. The old memorial rooms were preserved even after reunification, as well as the penal institution. In the meantime, steles with victim biographies have been exhibited there.
In 2018, the Stiftung Brandenburgische Gedenkstätten (Brandenburg Memorials Foundation) opened a new permanent exhibition entitled »On the Görden. The Brandenburg Prison under National Socialism (1933-1945) and in the GDR (1949-1990)«.

Brandenburg an der Havel, 2018, Reconstructed guillotine in the memorial rooms of the prison, Stiftung Brandenburgische Gedenkstätten, Hagen Immel

Brandenburg an der Havel, 2018, Memorial site in the former director's house, Stiftung Brandenburgische Gedenkstätten, Cordia Schlegelmilch

Possibilities

Permanent exhibition, archive and collection, educational projects for pupils and young people.

Open

Permanent exhibition at Anton-Saefkow-Allee 38:
Thursdays and Fridays 1 to 5 p.m., Saturdays and Sundays 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.
The memorial rooms are located in the prison. Visits by prior arrangement only.

Contact

https://www.brandenburg-zuchthaus-sbg.de/

brandenburg@stiftung-bg.de

+49(0)3381 793 511 2

Anton-Saefkow-Allee 22
14772 Brandenburg an der Havel

Brandenburg an der Havel, 2018, View into the permanent exhibition of the memorial site, Stiftung Brandenburgische Gedenkstätten, Cordia Schlegelmilch

Brandenburg an der Havel, 1942, Photograph of two prisoners in Brandenburg-Görden, still from a Nazi propaganda film, Stiftung Brandenburgische Gedenkstätten

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