Mecklenburg-Vorpommern State Documentation Centre for the Victims of Dictatorships in Germany

Dokumentationszentrum des Landes für die Opfer der Diktaturen in Deutschland

From 1933 on, the National Socialist judiciary in the Schwerin district court on Demmlerplatz tried political opponents of the regime. Soviet tribunals were held at the same site between 1945 and 1953, after which it was used by the GDR Ministry for State Security as a detention centre. In June 2001, the Mecklenburg-Vorpommern State Documentation Centre for the Victims of Dictatorships in Germany was opened.

History

The Schwerin district court, a monumental representative building from 1916, served as the seat of the Mecklenburg Special Court after the National Socialists' rise to power in 1933. Special decrees and emergency regulations made it possible to arrest political opponents of the regime on a large scale, and the newly established special courts enabled their rapid sentencing. During the Second World War, vague suspicions were enough for a special court to sentence someone if the prosecution deemed they had committed deeds »especially dangerous to public order and safety«. The Hereditary Health Court too had its seat in the Schwerin district court. It could order the forced sterilisation of people on the basis of the »Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring«, which had been passed in 1933. People with hereditary illnesses but also representatives of »undesirable« social groups fell victim to these measures.
In April 1945, US troops liberated Schwerin. From July 1945 on, Mecklenburg became a part of the Soviet occupation zone. The court building now served as the seat of the Soviet Military Tribunals. The task of these tribunals was to punish actions which had been directed against the Allies, yet the Soviet judiciary not only prosecuted former National Socialists: suspected and actual opponents of the new regime were also sentenced for »counter-revolutionary crimes«. In 1950, the Ministry for State Security was founded in the GDR - better known as the Stasi, its main task was persecuting political opponents. Between 1954 and 1989, the Schwerin district administration of the Stasi used the court building complex as a detention centre.

Schwerin, 2003, Entrance to the memorial site, Dokumentationszentrum

Schwerin, 2004, View through a window, Dokumentationszentrum

Victims

Between 1933 and 1945, the National Socialists sentenced people at the Special Court and the Hereditary Health Court in Schwerin on political, religious and racial grounds. Schwerin was also the site of trials aimed at the suppression of religious groups such as trials against protestant pastors in 1934 and a series of trials against Jehovah's Witnesses. During the war, the extent of political persecution grew significantly. Elements of offence such as »malice«, »broadcasting crimes« or »favouring the enemy« led to many sentences at the Schwerin Special Court, including the death sentence.
After the war, Soviet military tribunals were held at the court building complex, and many prisoners were arbitrarily incarcerated in the building's prison facilities. The tribunal handed down many draconian sentences.
From 1954 on, the court complex was one of 16 investigative custody centres of the East German Stasi. Measures aimed at intimidating the prisoners, such as complete isolation as well as physical and psychological torture were characteristic of the conditions at the prison ward.

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 1990, following the dissolution of the Stasi, the building was returned to the Schwerin judiciary. In 1993, the State Commissioner for Records of the State Security Service of the former GDR called for creating a memorial site in the building and using it for purposes of civic education. When the government of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern agreed, plans were begun to convert the former cell block into a documentation centre. In 2000, the State Agency for Political Education took over the centre, which was officially opened by the German President on June 6, 2001. The three-part exhibition was completed in 2005. Today, the documentation centre focuses on the history of political persecution in the 20th Century primarily from a regional perspective.

Schwerin, 2003, Exterior view, Dokumentationszentrum

Schwerin, 2004, Interior of the documentation centre, Dokumentationszentrum

Possibilities

Permanent exhibition on the political judiciary from 1933 to 1989, training for teachers, study days, guided tours

Open

Tuesday to Friday 12.30 p.m. to 4 p.m. and by appointment

Contact

http://www.dokumentationszentrum-schwerin.de/

dokuzentrum-schwerin@lpb.mv-regierung.de

+49 (0)385 745 299 11

Obotritenring 106
19055 Schwerin

Schwerin, 2004, Cell block, Dokumentationszentrum

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