Gedenkstätte Plötzensee

The Plötzensee Memorial Center commemorates the victims of Nazi justice at the former Berlin-Plötzensee Prison. It sits on the edge of today's correctional facility in the Charlottenburg-Nord district of Berlin and was dedicated by the State of Berlin in 1952. The prison itself was built between 1868 and 1879 on land that had previously belonged to the royal forestry treasury. During the Nazi era, the complex served not only to carry out prison sentences but also as the central execution site for Enforcement District IV. Well over 2,800 death sentences were carried out here, including those of members of the Red Orchestra, participants in the failed assassination attempt of July 20, 1944, and members of the Kreisau Circle. Numerous foreign forced laborers and more than 300 women who had been transferred from the Barnimstraße women's prison also met their deaths here.

Today, visitors can see the remains of the execution site, parts of which were torn down after the war. A rubble-stone wall stands where part of the building once was, while the execution beam with its five meat hooks is still in place. The screed floor beneath the beam slopes slightly toward the center of the room, where a floor drain is located; the bodily fluids of the victims in their death throes were flushed into it. The executions were initially carried out with a hand axe, from 1937 with the guillotine, and from the end of 1942 additionally by hanging, for which an iron rail was installed that could accommodate eight victims at once. The memorial is run by the German Resistance Memorial Center Foundation, which is also responsible for documenting the victims and placing the site in its historical context.

In the immediate vicinity there are other places of remembrance that, together with the memorial, form the Path of Remembrance, completed in 2018. These include the Roman Catholic Maria Regina Martyrum Church and the Plötzensee Protestant Community Center, where you can see Alfred Hrdlicka's Plötzensee Dance of Death. The Protestant Church of Christ's Atonement (Sühne-Christi-Kirche) also contributes to the remembrance with its memorial wall. The streets in the residential areas rebuilt after the war are also named after many executed resistance fighters, making this a central place of historical reflection and remembrance in Berlin.