Qualla: Bautzen II

Bautzen II: Introduction

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Stephencdickson, CC BY-SA 4.0. On 1 April 1955, a West Berlin journalist named Karl Wilhelm Fricke accepted a drink from a man he knew as Kurt Maurer. The brandy was drugged. Fricke came round on the far side of the sector boundary, and a secret trial the following year sentenced him to fifteen years for "agitating for wars and boycotts" - the East German state's phrase for a man who wrote about East German repression. The sentence was cut to four. He served them mostly alone, and largely without daylight, first at Brandenburg-Görden and then in a plain building on a side street in the Saxon town of Bautzen. Nothing outside identified it. Everyone in town knew what it was. Bautzen II was the only prison in the German Democratic Republic under the direct control of the Ministry for State Security, and what it mainly held was people who had said the wrong thing.

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Image: Stephencdickson | CC BY-SA 4.0

Bautzen II: One Hundred and Fifty-Seven Cells

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Fiver, der Hellseher, CC BY-SA 4.0. The building went up between 1904 and 1906 and was, for its moment, advanced - electric light throughout, steam heating, 157 cells with room for 203 prisoners. It was built as a court prison, for people awaiting trial or serving short sentences, and it sits inside a working legal...

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Image: Fiver, der Hellseher | CC BY-SA 4.0

Bautzen II: Four Regimes, One Address

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Fiver, der Hellseher, CC BY-SA 4.0. The same corridors served four different states, and each one used them for its enemies. Under the Kaiser and then the Weimar Republic it was an ordinary court prison, at its most lenient between 1923 and 1933. After 1933 the cells filled with political prisoners, communists abov...

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Image: Fiver, der Hellseher | CC BY-SA 4.0

Bautzen II: The People in the Cells

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Stephencdickson, CC BY-SA 4.0. Georg Dertinger had been the GDR's first foreign minister; he was held here from 1956 to 1964. The philosopher Wolfgang Harich, who had argued that East German socialism needed reforming, arrived in 1959 and left in 1963. The novelist Erich Loest, convicted in 1957 of "counter-re...

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Image: Stephencdickson | CC BY-SA 4.0

Bautzen II: Nine Days

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Fiver, der Hellseher, CC BY-SA 4.0. In thirty-three years of Stasi control, one person got out without permission. Dieter Hötger escaped in 1967 and was free for nine days before he was recaptured. The number sounds like a footnote until you consider what produced it: constant observation, cells that isolated, sent...

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Image: Fiver, der Hellseher | CC BY-SA 4.0

Bautzen II: The Doors Left Open

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Stephencdickson, CC BY-SA 4.0. The last political prisoners walked out by 22 December 1989, six weeks after the Berlin Wall opened and ten months before the two Germanys became one. A handful of ordinary convicts, never more than twenty-three, stayed until the prison shut completely in January 1992. Then came ...

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Image: Stephencdickson | CC BY-SA 4.0