Qualla: Memorial and Education Centre Andreasstraße

Memorial and Education Centre Andreasstraße: Introduction

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit NoRud, CC BY-SA 4.0. In 1960 a twenty-year-old called Johannes Huetcher lost his temper at a photograph of Walter Ulbricht hanging in his workplace staffroom. He swore at it and threw a plum jam sandwich. The charge was state-endangering propaganda and agitation, the sentence ten months, and part of it was served in a red-brick building on Andreasstrasse in Erfurt. Between 1952 and 1989 more than five thousand political prisoners passed through those two upper floors, which the Ministry for State Security kept for its own use. It was one of seventeen Stasi remand prisons in East Germany, and the first one that ordinary citizens walked into and took.

Image: NoRud | CC BY-SA 4.0

Memorial and Education Centre Andreasstraße: Numbers Instead of Names

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit User:MatthiasKabel, CC BY-SA 3.0. Prisoners on the Stasi floors were addressed by number rather than by name, and the architecture was arranged so that they never saw one another. A system of lights in the corridors held people back until the way was clear. The cell windows were glass brick, admitting daylight an...

Image: User:MatthiasKabel | CC BY-SA 3.0

Memorial and Education Centre Andreasstraße: Who Was Inside

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Dirk Schmidt (Celsius auf Wikivoyage), CC BY-SA 3.0. Marilene Bornemann and her husband Winfried handed out leaflets during the uprising of June 1953, calling for free elections and a united Germany. He was given ten years, she was given four, and while on remand in Andreasstrasse she realised she was pregnant. Her son was born in ...

Image: Dirk Schmidt (Celsius auf Wikivoyage) | CC BY-SA 3.0

Memorial and Education Centre Andreasstraße: A Building That Served Everyone

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Tilman2007, CC BY-SA 3.0. Erfurt had grown from 16,000 people in 1802 to 100,000, and it needed courts. The prison went up between 1874 and 1878 on parkland below the Petersberg Citadel, three storeys of red-brick neo-gothic, with the courthouse opening round the corner nine months later. It held thieves ...

Image: Tilman2007 | CC BY-SA 3.0

Memorial and Education Centre Andreasstraße: 4 December 1989

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Felixkrater, CC BY-SA 4.0. The initiative came from a group of women in the Erfurt opposition, several of whom had already been inside. Gabriele Stoetzer had served a year in the Hoheneck women's prison for collecting signatures against the expulsion of the songwriter Wolf Biermann - in Erfurt around thirt...

Image: Felixkrater | CC BY-SA 4.0

Memorial and Education Centre Andreasstraße: The Cube on the Roof

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Rudolf H. Boettcher, CC BY-SA 4.0. The prison outlived the state that used it. Federal authorities took it over at reunification and it kept working until 2002. On 4 December 2012, the twenty-third anniversary of the occupation, it reopened as a memorial and education centre, with the permanent exhibition - Impris...

Image: Rudolf H. Boettcher | CC BY-SA 4.0