Between 1933 and 1945, the Gestapo incarcerated, tortured and murdered political opponents, people under racial persecution and thousands of non-German forced labourers in Dortmund's Steinwache police prison. Today, the Steinwache Memorial honours the fates of the victims.
History
In 1906, police headquarters were set up in Dortmund's Steinstraße. In reference to the street name, the locals soon began calling it the »Steinwache«. In the mid-1920s, the Dortmund police built a whole complex around the initial headquarters: a five-storey prison and an administrative building were erected. After the National Socialists had come to power, the Gestapo began using part of the cell block as a prison, and set up several rooms on the ground floor in which people were interrogated and tortured. In the following years, the Steinwache prison became an infamous site of torture. The Gestapo at first mostly arrested political opponents, soon however they increasingly incarcerated people on racial grounds. During the »Kristallnacht« in November 1938, members of the Gestapo arrested about three quarters of all Jewish males of age residing in Dortmund and held them captive in the Steinwache prison. From there, many of the Jewish men were deported to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. During the Second World War, the Gestapo incarcerated thousands of East European forced labourers at the Dortmund police prison. For many of the detainees, the Steinwache was a transit point before being deported to a concentration camp.
Victims
It is estimated that 65,000 people were incarcerated at the Steinwache prison between 1933 and 1945; of those, about half were there for political reasons. Numerous activists of political parties and trade unions, church representatives, Jews, Sinti and Roma as well as non-German forced labourers were interrogated and abused at the prison.
The exact number of those who perished is unknown due to the fact that the Gestapo listed deaths only until 1936. By then, 17 people had died in prison. The Gestapo shot several Soviet and Polish forced labourers after a short period in prison. Shortly before the end of the war, the Gestapo shot most of those who were currently incarcerated at Steinwache prison at various sites in Dortmund.
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
The Steinwache was one of the few important buildings in Dortmund's city centre to not have been badly damaged during air raids. Until 1976, it continued to be used as police headquarters. In 1984, North Rhine-Westphalia handed over the building to the city of Dortmund. A few years later, the city made the establishment of a memorial in the prison block of the historic building possible. In 1992, the Steinwache Memorial was opened. The exhibition on display, »Resistance and Persecution in Dortmund 1933-1945«, was already assembled in the 1980s. It has since been redesigned and modernised by staff members of the municipal archive.
Possibilities
Guided tours, events, readings, meetings with eyewitnesses
