page_title: Berlin Homeless Shelter Association
section_title: The Wiesenburg
hierarchical_section_title: Berlin Homeless Shelter Association / The Wiesenburg
caption_attribution_description: English: Clothes lockers sign. Smoking STRICTLY forbidden
context_page_description: The Berlin Homeless Shelter Association is a charity for the homeless based in Berlin, Germany.
context_section_description: In 1896, a new building in Wiesenstraße in Gesundbrunnen between the Panke canal and the Berlin Ringbahn (circle line) was ready to accommodate 700 men in the 12,000 m² complex. A large donation from Dr Moritz Gerson, amongst others, funded the construction; 400 workers completed the shelter in one year. The site had been carefully chosen: previous experiences with the neighbours of the Friedrichshain house, who felt harassed by the sight of miserable people and claimed that their children were endangered by the homeless, led the association to look for a site as shielded from the neighbourhood as possible. The shelter had a 50 m ‘private street’, to clear 700 men from the Wiesenstraße as quickly as possible, a small, attractive garden lay at the front, the circle line protected it to the north and the Panke canal to the west.
  The shelter, called Die Wiesenburg in popular parlance, was designed by the architects, Georg Toebelmann and Otto Schnock. The house, still standing and in use today, provided conference rooms for the association and living accommodation for the shelter's employees. Paul Singer was the shelter's administrator, Georg Toebelmann and Rudolf Virchow took charge of hygiene. The shelter was fitted out to the most advanced standards of the day, produced its own electricity, had its own water supply, central heating and air conditioning. It provided dormitories and dining hall, showers and baths with warm water, a library and the possibility to have one's clothes disinfected and washed. Almost every room had electric lighting and running water, and the terrazzo floor was easy to clean. 
  Compared to other shelters run by the church or the government, the homeless here were not forced to work nor required to attend religious services. They could remain anonymous. The police were not allowed to enter the premises. Until 1914, overnight guests were provided with soup and bread in the evenings and coffee and a bread roll in the mornings. This humane treatment of the homeless stood in stark contrast to, e.g., ‘Die Palme’, a government-run shelter in Fröbelstraße, Prenzlauerberg, where homeless persons attempting to stay longer than five nights were sent to a workhouse in Rummelsberg to build irrigation fields outside the city. Or the ‘Arbeiterkolonie’ in Reinickendorferstraße, Wedding, run on lines dictated by Pastor von Bodelschwingh, who insisted on religious services and required the men to chop wood or break stones for their overnight stay.
  In 1906, the shelter was extended to provide 882 places for men and 400 for women. The whole shelter was used not only by the homeless but also migrant workers, seasonal harvest workers and domestic workers. At this time, the shelter was providing far more than 300,000 overnight stays per year.
  At the beginning of the 1st World War, a firm producing canned goods for the army moved into the women's shelter. By its end, the donation-dependent association was in financial difficulties, and its activities came to a halt for the time being. After the war, the men's shelter was used by commercial firms and some rooms were used as accommodation for Jewish immigrants from the East. In 1924, the SUM-Vergaser-Gesellschaft produced carburettors for motorbikes and aeroplanes on the site(later Berlin Vergaser Fabrik ), eventually taking over the whole of the women's shelter. The association was able to reorganise itself in 1926, and the men's shelter reopened, but only with financial help from the state, who insisted on applying the rules of state-run shelters, thus ending the anonymity of its visitors and the independence of the association. State funding ceased in 1931 due to the world financial crisis and the shelter closed forever.
  In 1933, the ‘National Socialist People's Welfare’ (NSV) requisitioned the association's assets. Further industrial tenants moved in, among them a dye firm who produced the party flags for the 1936 Olympic Games (the concrete dyeing vats still stand in the ruin of the former bath and shower room). With the Third Reich's armament policy, SUM became a muc
caption: Clothes lockers sign. Smoking STRICTLY forbidden.
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