Münchner Platz Dresden Memorial

Gedenkstätte Münchner Platz Dresden

Until 1956, political opponents of numerous regimes were put to trial and sentenced at the Dresden Regional Court: under National Socialism, during the Soviet occupation and under the dictatorship of the SED party (Socialist Unity Party of Germany). The people were held in custody at the site and death sentences were performed by hanging in the building's courtyard. The exhibition at the Münchner Platz Dresden Memorial commemorates the fates of the victims.

History

The Royal Saxon Regional Court was established in 1907. Since 1933, the National Socialists used it as a courthouse, a detention centre and an execution site. Saxon Special Courts, the »People's Court« and the Posen (today: Poznań, Poland) Higher Regional Court conducted a part of their trials here. Until about 1937, judgement was mostly passed on communists, social democrats and Jehovah's Witnesses, convicting them to long terms of imprisonment. Between 1937 and the beginning of the Second World War, more and more people were convicted of having breached the National Socialist race laws or of having criticised the regime. The number of death sentences that were carried out at the Dresden Regional Court rose substantially after the beginning of the war. Many of those executed here were political opponents from the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia as well as from the Sudetenland. After sentences had been passed by the Regional and Higher Regional Courts, the verdicts were carried out at the Münchner Platz execution site. Until February 1945, when the building was destroyed in an air raid, over 1,300 convicted men and women were executed by guillotine in the court's inner yard.
After the end of the war, Soviet security agencies used the courthouse as a detention centre, an interrogation site and a transit prison. Soviet military tribunals sentenced members of the NSDAP, people under arbitrary arrest and opponents of Stalinisation to long terms of imprisonment or to death. Others were taken to so called special camps without having been officially sentenced. At the same time, trials under the German judicial system concerning National Socialist crimes and later increasingly of critics and opponents of the SED regime took place in the building. Between 1952 and 1956, it was the central execution site of the German Democratic Republic's judicial system. There is evidence on the execution of 66 people during that period.

Dresden, around 1910, Royal Saxon Regional Court at Münchner Platz, Gedenkstätte Münchner Platz Dresden

Dresden, 2001, View of the exhibition »FREMD« (»ALIEN«), Gedenkstätte Münchner Platz Dresden

Victims

Evidence shows that between January 30, 1933, and February 8, 1945, 1,328 men and women were executed by guillotine in the building at Münchner Platz. Between destruction of the guillotine in February 1945 and the end of the war, an unknown number of people was shot in the execution yard. Around two thirds of the victims were Czech men and women. Among the victims were also German Wehrmacht deserters and anti-war activists who had been sentenced to death. Until July 1, 1943, when Jews were completely deprived of the right to trial by jury, Jews too were executed at Münchner Platz.

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

At the end of the 1950s, the building of the former Regional Court was acquired by the Dresden Technical College. In 1959, a »Memorial to the Antifascist Resistance Struggle« was opened in the part of the building that had once been the execution site. The exhibition only told about victims of the National Socialist regime. In 1992, the Münchner-Platz-Komitee e.V. (Münchner Platz Committee) organisation was founded as the memorial's sponsoring body. Since then, the research and educational work of the memorial also deals with the post-war verdicts and executions which took place at Münchner Platz. Since 1994, the Münchner Platz Dresden Memorial has been under administration of the Saxon Memorial Foundation. In 1996, the exhibition was closed due to the serious historical faults it contained. Since then - in addition to the death cells and the execution yard - the rooms of the memorial have displayed temporary exhibitions. Together with the Technical University of Dresden, the memorial plans to open a comprehensive permanent exhibition on the political judiciary under the National Socialist dictatorship, under Soviet occupation and in the early days of the GDR.

No place given, around 1930, Margarete Blank, a medical doctor who was executed in the Regional Court's inner yard in February 1945, Sächsisches Staatsarchiv Leipzig

Possibilities

Temporary exhibitions on central themes of the historic site, smaller travelling exhibitions in the memorial's event room, guided tours, readings and discussions organised on a regular basis, educational work with school groups, archive and library

Open

Monday to Friday 10.00 a.m. to 4.00 p.m., Saturday and Sunday 10.00 a.m. to 6.00 p.m.

Contact

https://www.stsg.de/cms/dresden/startseite

muenchnerplatz.dresden@stsg.de

+49 (0)351 463 319 90

George-Bähr-Straße 7
01069 Dresden

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