Gedenkstätte Steinwache

The Steinwache Memorial in Dortmund is a historic site that commemorates the crimes of National Socialism and today houses a permanent exhibition run by the city archive. The complex was originally built in 1906 as a police station, and in the late 1920s an administrative building and a jail were added in the New Objectivity style. At the time, this jail was among the most modern of its kind in Germany. When the Nazis seized power in 1933, however, the function of the site changed drastically. The Gestapo used the premises for brutal interrogations and torture, which earned the Steinwache its notorious reputation as the "Hell of Western Germany." Those held here included members of the Communist and Social Democratic opposition, Jewish citizens, and, during World War II, numerous foreign forced laborers, especially from Poland and the Soviet Union. Many of the more than 66,000 prisoners who passed through between 1933 and 1945 were deported from here to concentration camps.

After the war, the building continued to serve police purposes for a long time before it was saved from demolition in the 1980s and converted into a memorial and place of remembrance. The former jail wing now houses the exhibition "Resistance and Persecution in Dortmund 1933–1945," which opened in 1992 at this authentic site. You experience history through photographs, historical exhibits, and eyewitness accounts. The exhibition leads you through the building's different floors and addresses the forced conformity of society, the persecution of political opponents, homosexuals, and Sinti and Roma, as well as the systematic murder of the Jewish population. Reconstructed rooms such as the admissions room, an isolation cell, and a torture cell offer an impressive look at conditions of imprisonment at the time. The top floor also covers the persecution of religious communities and the so-called euthanasia program. The basement concludes by showing local Gestapo crimes, including the mass murders in Rombergpark and in the Bittermark. The building is a protected historic monument and is currently being prepared for extensive modernization and expansion.