The East German Stasi’s (Ministry for State Security) secret prison in the Berlin district of Hohenschönhausen locked up and interrogated some 11,000 enemies of the state for crimes as terrible as criticizing government policy, listening to Western music, and simply wanting to emigrate.
Originally a makeshift basement prison run by the DDR’s Soviet overlords, the Stasi took it over in 1951, and ran it until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 brought East Germany to an end.
Everyone knew the massive Stasi Headquarters complex near Frankfurter Tor, but the prison at Hohenschönhausen didn’t officially exist. Hidden in the centre of a large restricted area bordered by a big military town, it wasn’t marked on maps. Only the people who worked there knew what went on inside.
Physical violence was common during interrogations in the 1950s, but this was replaced with psychological torture from the 1960s. The prison was also enlarged in the late 1950s, with a new building built by prison labour that included some 200 cells and even more interrogation rooms.
Hohenschönhausen’s interrogators were graduates of the ‘operative psychology’ course at the Stasi college in Potsdam. These highly trained psychologists used sleep deprivation and total isolation to disorient prisoners and convey the feeling of being at the mercy of an all-powerful state. Prisoners had no idea where they were, the size or layout of the facility, who or how many others might be imprisoned with them, and what was happening in the outside world. That world ceased to exist.
Interrogations could go on for months, and often culminated in a prisoner being coerced into signing a blank sheet of paper. The Stasi would fill in the confession later.
Unlike the enormous Stasi Headquarters, Hohenschönhausen prison wasn’t stormed by demonstrators after the Berlin Wall fell. This brief respite gave the prison authorities an opportunity to destroy evidence of their crimes. Most of what we know about this place comes from the accounts of former prisoners.
The thing that struck me most during my visit was the carefully orchestrated isolation that each prisoner endured from the moment he or she was pulled off the street. Enemies of the state were handcuffed inside a prison van, locked in an individual cube with armed guards sitting outside. They would have no idea where they were taken, especially if the driver followed a roundabout route to further conceal the destination.
A prisoner would never glimpse the prison from outside, or even the courtyard. The van was driven straight into a garage lit with harsh fluorescent lights. The prisoner would be hauled out and dragged into the first room for a strip search, and then taken to an individual cell. The transfer was conducted in silence, and a system of red and green lights in the corridors ensured that only one prisoner would be moved through the hallways at a time. The same procedure was followed when bringing a prisoner to and from interrogation. They would never see another prisoner in the hallway, and guards were ordered not to communicate with them apart from barking orders. Their only conversation during months of incarceration would be with the interrogator.
Should a prisoner need medical treatment, he or she wouldn’t be walked or wheeled across the courtyard to the prison hospital wing. They would be taken to the garage, loaded into the same prison van in an individual windowless cell, and driven around the compound at random so they would be unable to map the layout of the facility.
Total isolation was compounded by sleep deprivation. Cell lights blazed all night. Prisoners were made to lie on a wooden bunk on their backs, with hands visible outside the thin blanket. If they moved, a guard would clang the lock to wake them — that is, if they got any sleep with the sound of peephole checks every fifteen minutes. Hallways were carpeted so they could never hear the guards approach, only the sound of the metal peephole sliding open.
Sleeping during the day was forbidden. Prisoners were required to sit upright in their cell with both hands on the table, visible to guards looking through the cell’s peephole. Anyone who fell asleep would be immediately woken up.
The most inhumane tactics at Hohenschönhausen matched some of the punishments I saw at Auschwitz, including standing cells (suffocating cells just big enough to stand in) and water cells where water would be poured over a naked prisoner until they were standing in it ankle-deep. The communists who freed East Germans from the Nazis quickly went on to use the very same inhumane tactics against their own people. The far left is no different from the far right when it comes to viciousness.
No one was trusted, not even the spies. East German border guards never knew where they’d be stationed on any particular day, or who they would be paired up with. If a tower guard left his post and went outside without informing the others first, his colleagues were instructed to shoot at him. This was to prevent border guards from fleeing the DDR, or taking bribes to let someone else escape the worker’s paradise.
A similar level of paranoia existed amongst the Stasi interrogators at Hohenschönhausen. Each had a tape machine on his desk that he could switch off, but there was another mic in the walls that he couldn’t control. The watchers were also watched.
Paranoia was even more extreme at the highest levels. I revisited the Stasi Headquarters this month when a friend was in town, where I saw a red suitcase that was found in the office of Stasi head Erich Mielke. It was filled with compromising documents about East German leader Erich Honecker, just in case the State ever turned on him.
The greatest crime in the eyes of the Stasi — at least, the one that resulted in the largest number of people held at Hohenschönhausen — was simply wanting to leave.
