Memorial Site Rummelsburg

Gedenkort Rummelsburg

Since January 2015 a memorial and information site remembers the former workhouse Rummelsburg where social outcasts had been detained for more than a hundred years. During National Socialism Rummelsburg was the central site of persecution of so called antisocial elements in Berlin.

History

During the 19th century workhouses were built in many German mayor cities to house members of marginalised groups like beggars, homeless or prostitutes and to exploit them as cheap labour. The Rummelsburg workhouse was built for this purpose 1877-79 outside the Berlin city centre. Many inmates of the Rummelsburg workhouse worked on sewage farms around Berlin. During the time of the Weimar Republic the number of inmates declined considerably thanks to the more liberal social politics.
With the National Socialists' accession to power in 1933 the situation for marginalised groups changed radically and they were massively persecuted as »antisocial elements«. Authorities obtained sweeping powers: Even persons who didn't become an offender could be committed to a workhouse and occasionally kept for an indefinite period. Rummelsburg became the central site of persecution of »asocial elements« in the Berlin area. The number of inmates escalated, in 1939 there were about 2,000. Special units were established, for instance for homosexuals, besides 124 forced sterilisations are recorded. The inmates were employed as forced labourers for communal purposes as well as for private enterprises in the vicinity.
In the course of a »Sonderaktion« (special action) of the NS-»Euthanasia« all 30 Jewish inmates were moved to a hospital in Buch on January 13, 1941. Four days later they were taken to the Bernburg mental hospital by bus where they were killed by gas. At that time Bernburg was a killing centre of the »Action T4« which was aimed at patients and ill people.
In January 1942 a committee appointed in the course of the NS-»Euthanasia« visited Rummelsburg and selected 314 inmates to be killed. This planned mass murder was eventually not carried out.

Berlin-Rummelsburg, 1925, Inmates of the workhouse plucking feathers, akg-images

Berlin-Rummelsburg, 2015, Centre of the historical site, Stiftung Denkmal

Victims

During the time of National Socialism Rummelsburg was a place of suppression of thousands of so called »asocials«. Subsumed under that category were, among others, »work-shy people«, homeless, itinerant labourers and prostitutes. Purposeful murders in Rummelsburg itself are not verifiable. In January 1941 all 30 Jewish inmates were moved via a hospital in Buch to the killing centre in Bernburg where they were subsequently murdered. 124 inmates of Rummelsburg were forcibly sterilized. Most of the documents prior to 1945 are lost so it can not be ascertained how many people died because of the harsh 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

Rummelsburg was converted into a prison during the time of the GDR after it had been used as a workhouse from 1945 for a couple of years. In the GDR being »asocial« was still a reason for persecution. Many of the Rummelsburg inmates were imprisoned because of political reasons, notably after the uprising of 1953, the Building of the Berlin Wall in 1961 and during the weeks of the Peaceful Revolution in 1989. In October 1990 the ramshackle prison was closed down. For years the buildings stood empty, hardly anybody was interested in the site's history. This changed slowly thanks to various civil society initiatives like the work group »Marginalized – Yesterday and Today«. A round table was established. The first memorials near the historical site were erected at the Rummelsburg Bay in December 2012 on the orders of the Lichtenberg borough council.
In 2014 the Senate tendered an art competition to create a worthy memorial and information site at the historical site which had now been transformed into a residential area. The memorial was dedicated in January 2015. The main element of the concept by its designer Helga Lieser and her colleagues Peter Francis Lewis and Jens Henningsen are three steles of five meters each which remember the imperial era (corten steel), National Socialism (steel) and the GDR (grey). 18 information plaques display the biographies of former inmates of the workhouse and the GDR prison Rummelsburg.

Berlin-Rummelsburg, 2015, Short biographies of inmates during NS times, Stiftung Denkmal

Berlin-Rummelsburg, 2015, Rummelsburg memorial site, Stiftung Denkmal

Possibilities

Smartphone-App for memorial site (for Android and iOS)

Open

The site is accessible at all times

Contact

http://gedenkort-rummelsburg.de

info@gedenkort-rummelsburg.de

Hauptstraße 8
10317 Berlin

Berlin-Rummelsburg, 2015, Steles with biographies of former inmates, Stiftung Denkmal

Berlin-Rummelsburg, 2015, Information plaques with individual biographies, Stiftung Denkmal

Berlin-Rummelsburg, 2015, The site was transformed into a residential area, Stiftung Denkmal

Berlin-Rummelsburg, 2015, Inmates' biographies from the time of the GDR, Stiftung Denkmal

Berlin-Rummelsburg, 2015, Memorial plaques at the Rummelsburg Bay erected by the Lichtenberg borough council, Stiftung Denkmal

Berlin-Rummelsburg, 2015, The three steles symbolise the three different eras in the history of Rummelsburg, Stiftung Denkmal

Berlin-Rummelsburg, 2015, Former gate of the Rummelsburg prison, Stiftung Denkmal

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