Qualla: Berlin-Hohenschönhausen Memorial

Berlin-Hohenschönhausen Memorial: Introduction

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Achim Raschka (talk), CC BY-SA 4.0. The journey in was designed to tell you nothing. Prisoners arrived at Hohenschönhausen in the back of a Barkas B1000, a small East German delivery van painted up as a bread or produce round, with windowless steel compartments welded into the load space — one person to a compartment, no light, no sound but the engine. The driver took a long looping route through the city. The van pulled into an enclosed garage before anyone opened the doors. A man arrested that morning in his own neighbourhood could climb out an hour later with no idea which part of Berlin he was standing in, or whether he was still in Berlin at all. Disorientation was not a side effect of the arrest. It was the first thing the Ministry for State Security took from him.

Image: Achim Raschka (talk) | CC BY-SA 4.0

Berlin-Hohenschönhausen Memorial: Special Camp No. 3

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Hynek Moravec, CC BY 2.5. The oldest building on the site was never meant for this. A red-brick factory finished in 1939, it produced supplies for the soup kitchens of the Nazi welfare organisation until the war ended. In June 1945 the Soviet NKVD took over the compound and made it a detention and transit...

Image: Hynek Moravec | CC BY 2.5

Berlin-Hohenschönhausen Memorial: The U-Boat

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Nstannik, CC BY-SA 3.0. In the cellar the Soviets built a row of cells that prisoners named das U-Boot — the submarine. They were damp, windowless and cold, lit when they were lit at all by a single bulb, and a prisoner put in one could lose the distinction between day and night within a week. When the ...

Image: Nstannik | CC BY-SA 3.0

Berlin-Hohenschönhausen Memorial: When the Method Changed

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Dr. Karl-Heinz Hochhaus, CC BY 3.0. From the 1960s onward the Stasi grew more careful. Visible injuries created problems abroad and martyrs at home, so the pressure moved inward. Prisoners were kept in near-total isolation, sometimes for months, forbidden to speak to anyone but their interrogator and unable to lear...

Image: Dr. Karl-Heinz Hochhaus | CC BY 3.0

Berlin-Hohenschönhausen Memorial: An Address That Was Not on the Map

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Nstannik, CC BY-SA 3.0. None of this was secret from the people it happened to. It was secret from everyone else. The prison sat inside a large restricted zone in Lichtenberg, ringed by a settlement built for Stasi staff and their families, and for most of its working life it was simply omitted from cit...

Image: Nstannik | CC BY-SA 3.0

Berlin-Hohenschönhausen Memorial: The Prisoners Who Made It a Museum

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Dr. Hubertus Knabe, CC BY-SA 4.0. Former inmates founded the memorial themselves in the early 1990s, pushed the site onto the historic register in 1992, and opened it to visitors in 1994. It is funded in equal parts by the German federal government and the state of Berlin, and it is run today by the historian Hel...

Image: Dr. Hubertus Knabe | CC BY-SA 4.0