A Tour of Berlin’s Stasi Prison Memorial

Few places evoke oppression and isolation as strongly as the former Stasi prison in Berlin Hohenschönhausen. For over 35 years, thousands of individuals were detained here as part of an authoritarian regime.
Now functioning as a museum, this former Stasi prison is open to the public.

CREDITS:
Report: Meggin Leigh
Camera: Florian Mettke
Editor: Marcel Epple
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15 Comments

  1. Nice to know that it has been preserved. Still ready for Putin, Netanyahu, Trump and the like. Hopefully some of the old guards will still be around to dispense their expertise.

  2. Thank you to DW for approaching this topic sensitively.
    To anyone that views the DDR with nostalgia, watch this segment first and think again. There is no justification for this kind of treatment.

  3. My anti-Communist political views have not changed since 1968. This video has only reinforced what I have believed about Communism.

    However, American prisons are almost as bad as the East German ones. I have watched many videos about how bad state and federal prisons are.

  4. Thank you so much for posting such an important video about such a sadly overlooked topic. This was the second historical memorial I visited during my first trip to Berlin (the first being the Wall). During the tour our volunteer guide (I remember his name Peter) was so incredibly humble as much as throughly knowledgeable and frank about the history of this place and his own experiences. To the extent that I stayed behind at the end after our group dispersed because I felt a bond with what he had endured because of a segment of my own family’s history, on my mother’s side which had suffered during her native country’s civil war which owing to Marxist factions resulted in the tragic deaths of several family members to the extent my mother emigrated to escape the reminder of the tragedy but was lamentably never able to fully recover or to erase the memories or the trauma of the past even when she was degenerating to paranoia and later dementia in her last years. There must have been a commonality between her tragedy & the root of the experience of Peter because it was he who expressed his sadness at what my mother had gone through before I even got the chance to tell him the same. I will however note that the term dictatorship seems to me to be somewhat of an ambiguous whitewash for communism & I think that distinction has to be reinforced more precisely. With certain exceptions, one can leave a fascist state. One could not freely exercise the right to travel under communism.

  5. The most enduring burden of guilt a man has to bear is his own conscience – I hope this man’s captors can’t sleep at night 🫡

  6. Oh yes, I will definitely visit if I ever go to Berlin. I have visited the Gestapo prison in Krakow, Poland, I would imagine this place being pretty similar.
    A good mini documentary.

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