Stasi Prison in Berlin (Hohenschönhausen Memorial Center)

I wanted to write about a Stasi Prison we visited in Berlin for a few reasons. First, it was a bit of an intense experience that I found very interesting, so maybe other people will too. Primarily, however, I wanted to do a post about it because I think most Americans have little to no knowledge about how the Stasi affected East Germany. As a German minor (possibly major) even I was amazed at how little I knew about it, particularly because of how much influence they had over so many Germans' lives. Most of my information is from what I remember from our tour, supplemented by wikipedia.org.

East German history crash course: 

At the end of World War II, the allied powers divided Germany and its capital city, Berlin, into four parts, one each for the U.K., France, U.S.A. and the Soviet Union in order to keep Germany weak. However, because of diplomatic disagreements, The Soviet Union turned its portions into East Germany (officially the German Democratic Republic, GDR) and exacerbated the Cold War. The city of Berlin was divided down the middle, so west Berlin was a small, capitalist island in the middle of a communist nation. Because it was under Soviet rule, the living conditions in the GDR remained low. West Germany (the Federal Republic of Germany, FRG), however, was in the middle of the Economic Miracle, the result of an impressively effective stimulus plan funded primarily by the U.S.A. Because of this and the oppression from the Stasi, people were fleeing the country into the west, which prompted the building of the wall in 1961.


The Ministerium für Staatssicherheit, which translates to the Ministry for State Security, was founded in the 1950s and is known as one of the most effective and repressive intelligence and secret police agencies in the world. By the time of its dissolution, they had over a quarter million official employees, and there may have been as many as an additional 500,000 unofficial informants. There was at least one official officer at every company and school, and every apartment building had a designated representative who was required to report on their fellow tenants. They also had recording devices in many private residences. Many scholars consider the Stasi even more oppressive than the Gestapo during the Nazi time, because while the Gestapo had 1 secret policeman for every 2,000 people, the Stasi (at their height) had 1 secret policeman for every 6 people.

The Stasi prison was used for people who were considered enemies of the state. You could be considered an enemy of the state by trying to flee, writing/publishing anti-communist or anti-government material, or even telling political jokes, smuggling in west products like Coca-Cola, or watching western television.

Before the death of Stalin, physical torture in prisons was legal. Here is a typical cell, in which as many as fifteen prisoners would be kept. The window was added later, so at the time it was in use there was no window and it was completely underground. Prisoners would be beaten for no reason and were not allowed to speak to each other, or they would be beaten.

This is the courtyard in the center of the prison. After Stalin's death there were regulation changes and physical torture was made illegal. Unfortunately, psychological torture was still entirely legal and the Stasi implemented it to a never-before-seen degree.

This is a typical hallway in the newer prison, as the living conditions had to be better than in the old one.

If a prisoner misbehaved, they were put into a black room like this. It's kept completely dark and is meant to cause intense sense deprivation.

The guards could look in and watch you and give you food or water through these.

This is a picture with flash through the slot in the door.

They had a very sophisticated security/alarm system for the time period. The wire hanging on the wall in the picture below has a current that runs throughout the entire building, and if it is pulled from anywhere, alarms go off. They also could pinpoint where it was pulled through use of sensors.

The red light was an additional security measure as well as an instrument of psychological control. Prisoners never saw each other. The red light would come on while the hallway was "occupied" by a prisoner being escorted somewhere, so there was never a chance of them even passing each other in the halls.

People brought here were not arrested, informed of their rights, put up for bail, or any of the other standards measures taken in most countries today. People were usually taken off of the street in one of these trucks, that were usually disguised as a delivery truck of some sort.

People were forced inside the truck and then were kept blindfolded in these mini-cells inside the back.

Here's another picture of a hallway.

This is a typical cell. The goal of the psychological torture was sense deprivation. Prisoners we forced to stand all day. They could pace if they wanted, but they weren't allowed to sit, and they weren't allowed to speak. They were allowed no reading material or anything to do. While they slept they had to stay in a "sleep position," and if they rolled over in their sleep they were woken up and forced to go back to the "sleep position" on their back.

The guards truly had control over everything. Sometimes the prisoners would siphon the water out of the toilet to try to speak to each other through the pipes, but whenever the guards heard them, they could flush the toilets from outside of the room which refilled the toilet with water and prevent them from speaking again.

The windows were made out of these glass blocks which were meant for further sense deprivation. They made it impossible to distinguish anything outside except the approximate time of day. Prisoners didn't even know where they were.

Here's another picture of the outside of the door.

They could even control whether the light was on or off at night from the outside.

A key thing to know is that no one ever escaped from prisons like these, and no one ever was able to commit suicide. They even had these fences and plastic sheets in the stairwells to prevent prisoners from throwing themselves over.

The picture below is one of the interrogation rooms. This is where other types of psychological torture would take place. The interrogators' goal was to get the prisoner to confess their crimes against the state so they then could legally be put in a standard prison with murderers and thieves and whatnot. They would sometimes play "good cop" and offer the prisoners a drink, keep the curtains open so they could see outside, and promise them their freedom in return for a confession or information about someone else.

Other times they would be "bad cop" and force them to sit there for hours, not saying anything, threaten them and their families, or stress them out by telling them lies about their families, e.g. their children had been given up for adoption, their spouse had divorced them, etc. (they would even create false documents to prove their story).

Notice also how the interrogator would sit at a desk, and the prisoner would have to sit at a smaller, lower table. This was completely intentional, and made the prisoner feel less important and symbolized submission. While they were being interrogated they had to sit on their hands which kept them from attacking the interrogator, but they would also put absorbent material in the chair seat that would soak up their sweat so they had their scent for dogs in case they ever needed it.

The final room we visited was one of the outside cells, which were used as both a punishment and a reward, usually depending on the weather. Sometimes even when it was raining it was incredibly refreshing for the prisoners to be allowed outside, but there would be armed guards circling the perimeter at the top. If it was really hot, cold, or snowing/raining heavily, it would be used as a punishment.

Here is the museum's website if you want more information!

Ich bin ein Berliner!

Last weekend my program went to Berlin. About fifty of us loaded onto a bus and drove for six hours. When we arrived at our hostel, I learned that it was called "The Heart of Gold Hostel" and was loosely based off of The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy (one of my favorite books), so I was pretty excited. It only got better, because the four person room that Lindsey, Jordan, Channing, and I were supposed to be in had flooded, so got a twelve person room all to ourselves.

We were up on the top floor, so this is a view out the window down into the courtyard.

Wednesday night we got some dinner and then decided to go to a club on a map the hostel gave us called "Icon." However, after walking through Berlin for 45 minutes, we discovered that it had closed down over a year ago. We gave up and took a taxi back, and ended up having a lot of fun just hanging out in the hostel bar.

Thursday we all went on a bus tour around Berlin to see a bunch of sights. We were going pretty quickly and only got off the bus at the wall, so I only managed to get a bunch of picture of buildings through the windows, and I don't remember why most of them are important :/

This is the main train station in Berlin

This is a Museum (I think) and the slang name of it is the pregnant oyster.

I'm pretty sure this is where the German President lives (not the Chancellor, they have both).

The gold things are original gold-plated cannons, but I'm not sure from which war.

This is the German Olympic stadium.

This was a building built during the Nazi time. It's pretty easy to tell haha.

Turkish Embassy.

This is a Jewish museum. The architect created the lines by plotting where Jewish people had lived in Berlin, and then connected them.


























Finally we got off the bus and were at the longest remaining portion of the Berlin wall. Notice how tall it is. You really can't see over it unless you're pretty far away.

Here I am next to the famous painting of Erich Honecker and Leonid Brezhnev kissing.

The west side and east side

Here's a gate that was added later (after it fell)

Back on the bus!

That afternoon we went on a tour of a Stasi prison. The Stasi were the secret police of East Germany, and committed horrible acts including surveillance, imprisonment, and torture of thousands of innocent people under the soviet communist government. It was pretty intense and I learned a lot, so I'm going to do an entire post about it next week.

That night we went to a really cool bar. It was called Bierbürse, which translates to beer stock exchange. The prices of beer fluctuated all night based on their demand (how many people were buying them). As my friend Vicky said, it turned something incredibly confusing and destructive into something relatively simple and really fun.

Friday we went on a walking tour to some other sights. Unfortunately, my camera was close to battery death and I had forgotten to bring my charger with me, so I only have a few pictures :/

This is Checkpoint Charlie, so named because it was the third check point (Alpha, Bravo, then Charlie) that Americans used to move between East and West Berlin.

 These were some old East German buildings I liked.

 This picture demonstrates something really cool about Berlin. There are so many different historical sites all over the place, piled on top of each other and mixed in with modern things. Some things date back to when German was still Prussia, but right next to it there are things from WWI, WWII, the Cold War, and brand new buildings. This is a picture of a Jewish prison that was used in the holocaust, but then there is another large section of the Berlin wall right above it. Craziness.

 This building was just really cool. It had all these mini sculptures on the sides.

This is the last picture I managed to get before my camera died. This is the holocaust memorial. I really like it a lot. I think the creator did a really fantastic job of capturing what the memory of the holocaust means to Germans today. It's really just another part of the city, in the same way that in some ways it's just another part of history. Children are even allowed to play on it because it's supposed to be a part of everyday life. Not forgotten, but not to overly dwell on. But then, if you feel like walking through the memorial, (metaphorically, ruminating on the holocaust), you can do so at your leisure. Additionally, you can't tell from the outside, but the inner columns are over twelve feet tall because the ground slopes down in waves in the same way that the height of them does along the top. So when you get into the center, you get very deep and can get very uncomfortable or claustrophobic. I think this does such a great job of showing what the holocaust is to German people.