page_title: Plötzensee Prison
section_title: Plötzensee Memorial
hierarchical_section_title: Plötzensee Prison / Plötzensee Memorial
caption_attribution_description: English: Exterior sign at Plotzensee Memorial, 1984 Other information Photo by George Garrigues
context_page_description: Plötzensee Prison is a men's prison in the Charlottenburg-Nord locality of Berlin with a capacity for 577 prisoners, operated by the State of Berlin judicial administration. The detention centre established in 1868 has a long history; it became notorious during the Nazi era as one of the main sites of capital punishment, where about 3,000 inmates were executed. Famous inmates include East Germany's last communist leader Egon Krenz.
context_section_description: During Imperial and Weimar Republic eras until 1933 there were 36 executions carried out in Plötzensee, all for murder and all by beheading with an axe according to the old German Strafgesetzbuch penal code. After the Nazi Machtergreifung, the prison housed both regular criminals and political prisoners. Plötzensee was one of eleven selected central execution sites established in 1936 throughout Germany by the order of Adolf Hitler and Reich Minister of Justice Franz Gürtner. Each was operated by a full-time executioner carrying out the rising numbers of death sentences, especially after the penal law was again tightened in World War II. By a 1943 agreement with the OKW they became also responsible for the execution of Wehrmacht members according to German military law. The convicts were beheaded by a stationary guillotine (Fallbeil), from 1942 also by hanging.
  During the Nazi regime, an official record of 2,891 people convicted by the Berlin Kammergericht, the notorious "People's Court" under Roland Freisler and several Sondergerichte, were executed in Plötzensee, initially with an axe in the prison's courtyard. From 1937 the convicts were beheaded with a guillotine brought from Bruchsal Prison and installed in a backyard work shed, a ground-level brick building near the prison walls, to where the victims had to walk from a nearby cell block. In 1942, a beam was assembled in the same room, serving as gallows for up to eight victims at one time. The bereaved were obliged to pay a fee of 1.5 Reichsmarks for each day the detainee had spent in prison plus an extra execution charge of 300 Reichsmarks.
caption: Exterior sign at Plötzensee Memorial, 1984
exif: {"Image XResolution": "360", "Image YResolution": "360", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image ExifOffset": "78", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "2048", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "1536"}