It was called “Special Type Detention Center” by its bloodthirsty head Reinhard Heydrich, the “blonde monster”, the “executioner” as the SS themselves called him
At January 30, 1933 Adolf Hitler becomes chancellor, in April the Secret State Police is founded, the infamous Gestapo (Geheime Staatspolizei), and in the summer of the same year a prison is built in the basement of its headquarters in the center of Berlin. “Special Type Detention Center” she had been named by her bloodthirsty chief Reinhard Heydrich, the “blonde monster”, the “executioner” as he was called by the SS themselves, of which he was deputy leader. The so-called “Slaughterer of Prague”, who also pioneered the implementation of the “Final Solution” for the Jews, was assassinated in 1942 by Czechoslovak resistance fighters.
The exhibition titled “Internal prison at the Gestapo headquarters in Berlin” is dedicated to the history of the prisoners. Terror and resistance 1933-1945″. It is held in the center of documentation and memory of the brutality of the Nazi regime “Topography of Terror”, located right where the Gestapo headquarters were. Today there are only its foundations and some uncovered underground cells. According to exhibition curator Andreas Zander: “The main purpose of the exhibition is to record history and keep alive the memory of the people who suffered here.”
The report proves that the Gestapo building was not exclusively the administrative headquarters of the pan-European network of the SS and the Gestapo, a place where the recalled “moral office workers” were housed. but also a place of horrible martyrdom. After decades of thorough research, the biography of the prisoners is presented with a total of 500 photographs, documents and texts. Between 1933 and 1945 approximately 15,000 dissidents, all men, suffered there for various periods of time. The Gestapo headquarters became synonymous with terror for those few who were against the Nazi regime and tried to defend their principles. Tortured by Inquisition methods, which were euphemistically called “enhanced interrogation”, some committed suicide, others ended up in concentration camps and were executed shortly before the collapse of the Third Reich, while some survived. When the Gestapo interrogations were finished and there was no incriminating evidence, a “release order” was issued, which usually did not result in actual release, but in a mock trial. Even if the accused was acquitted, however, which happened in rare cases, the Gestapo ordered the case to be referred again with a simultaneous re-incarceration this time to another concentration camp prison.
Until 1939 most of the prisoners belonged to the banned, meanwhile parties, and later – during the war – to various groups which tried to organize some resistance against the Nazi regime. For most this prison was the first stop on a long journey to other prisons or concentration camps such as Dachau. Among them were prominent Christian Democrats, Social Democrats (such as the head of the SPD’s KO), Communists (such as the General Secretary of the German Communist Party Ernst Thelmann and the – then young – Erich Honecker), liberal politicians and militant Protestant theologians and well-known trade unionists . Later they “hosted” the members of the group who participated in the failed coup attempt against Hitler (20 July 1944), such as Johann-Georg Elzer. The long list also included foreign opponents of the National Socialist regime who were in Germany at the time, such as Giorgi Dimotrov, the leader of post-war Bulgaria, or were later captured in combat, like Stalin’s eldest son. In the meantime, the picture has been completed, since more information has become known about high-ranking officials, such as the director of the prison Wilhelm Gogalla, on whom he was found in April 1945, when he was leaving Berlin heading for Bavaria, the order execution of Elzer.
The exhibition presents various aspects of the activities of well-known and unknown prisoners. With their biographies, the practices of the persecutions are illuminated and the picture of the action of the SS and the Nazi Police against their opponents is completed. It concludes, in 1945, with reference to those of the surviving politicians who contributed to the building of the two Germanys, such as the Christian Democrat former mayor of Cologne and first post-war chancellor Konrad Adenauer.
The report is based on intensive archival searches after 1980 which proved particularly difficult, since the Gestapo managed until the end of the war to destroy almost all documents related to the arrests. Details are contained in Court documents such as e.g. protocols of the interrogations which were not burned. After 1989 there were also 39 interviews with ex-prisoners which form an important supplement to the archival documents. In addition, it was possible to find and trace the details of 3,000 prisoners.
In 1823 the poet Heinrich Heine had written prophetically “Where books burn, eventually people will burn” something that was confirmed after the burning of books by the Nazis on May 10, 1933. The operation of the first Gestapo hellhouse was, in turn, the foreshock of the Nazi atrocities. Ninety years later the building of human brutality remains relevant, since his creation of the “blonde executioner” was the beginning of the atrocities that would soon spread throughout Europe.
Source :Skai
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