(PART TWO) THE BAUTZNER STRASSE STASI MEMORIAL PRISON, DRESDEN, GERMANY

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Published Nov 20, 2023

To see part one of this video click the link: https://youtu.be/SvL9xQg9vaE

We visited the Bautzner Strasse Memorial in Dresden, Germany with guest investigator Katy.

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In the early years after WWII when East Germany was a Soviet occupied zone, the NKVD, the predecessor organization of the better known KGB, first had a prison here. Not only actual Nazi war criminals were incarcerated here, also political prisoners as well as many a young victim who, after first being taken to Bautzner Straße prison, was then sentenced to hard labour in some gulag on often ludicrous charges (typically of being part of the Werwolf post-Nazi resistance group – which scarcely existed). See also the "Speziallager" (special camps) that the former concentration camps of Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen were turned into in the immediate post-war period.

When the Soviets moved out of the prison in the early 1950s, the site became home of the newly founded Stasi. New buildings were erected, including the present main cell block, and additional offices.

It is ironic that the name of the street that this prison is named after also has in it the place name of the most feared proper Stasi prison for political prisoners: Bautzen. It would not have been unusual for a political prisoner first to have been sent here for interrogation and then, after a formal court ruling, to be transferred from Bautzner Straße to Bautzen proper.

But the road of the Stasi repression also ended eventually. When in 1989 the peaceful revolution in the GDR had finally led to the opening of the Berlin Wall and the implosion of the whole political and societal system of the GDR, protesters turned to the various seats of the Stasi where the old guard had already started destroying evidence of their decades of civil rights violations. To put a stop to such activities, demonstrators stormed and occupied the Bautzner Straße Stasi seat too on 5 December 1989 (as had also happened e.g. at the equivalent Stasi offices at the "Runde Ecke" in Leipzig). They stored the Stasi files in the now vacated prison cells to keep them safe. What an irony: first the prisoners themselves were locked up in these cells, then the Stasi paperwork that documented their cases had to be kept safe in the very same space.

The Stasi files were later transferred to the relevant bodies set up to formally investigate this aspect of the GDR's past – it's still an ongoing process (see e.g. the Berlin Stasi Museum). The prison building was preserved in almost exactly its original state. Since the late 1990s it has gradually been opened up to the public. Since 1996 it has been designated a listed building and the city council designated it an official memorial site in the year 2000.

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