When an air raid damaged the guillotine, the Reich hanged 186 prisoners at Plötzensee in a single night

01Strafgefängnis Plötzensee

Almost one in four of the executions ordered by German courts took place here

Plötzensee prison, opened in 1879 on the edge of Charlottenburg, was an ordinary jail for short sentences. Under the Nazis it became the execution place for the courts of Berlin. German courts sentenced at least 16,560 people to death between 1933 and the end of the war; 11,881 were executed by the end of 1944, and almost one quarter of those executions took place here.

Until early 1937 the condemned were beheaded with a hand axe in a prison yard. On 14 October 1936 Hitler decided, on the proposal of his justice minister Franz Gürtner, that death sentences would be carried out by guillotine. In 1937 a work barrack in the prison yard was fitted with one, brought from the prison at Bruchsal in Baden. The barrack is two brick rooms under a low gable roof; the killings took place in the northern room.

02Year by year

In 1943 alone the memorial counts more executions than in the ten years before it

The Gedenkstätte publishes its count in seven periods, from 1933 to the end of 1943: 2,224 executions in all. In 1943 there were 1,158; in the ten years from 1933 to 1942, 1,066. For 1944 and 1945 it publishes no yearly figure, and none is drawn here.

04From twenty nations

Communists and conspirators, a caretaker and a seventeen-year-old

Many of those killed here had resisted the regime: Communists, the Rote Kapelle network, the Kreisau Circle, the officers and civilians of 20 July 1944. Many others were condemned by special courts for petty offences, and many were foreigners from the occupied countries. More than 50 members of the Rote Kapelle alone were hanged or beheaded at Plötzensee.

05How many

“More than 2,800”: the memorial counts its dead as a floor, not a sum

The Gedenkstätte’s own figure has grown as the records were worked through: over 2,500 in its guide of 2002, more than 2,800 in its calculation of April 2019. A precise 2,891 circulates widely; the memorial itself does not publish it. The years it does date add up to 2,224, to the end of 1943.

06Hüttigpfad, since 1952

The shed was never torn down. Since 1952 it has been a memorial

West Berlin dedicated the Gedenkstätte Plötzensee on 14 September 1952. The stone wall in front of the shed carries the words “Den Opfern der Hitlerdiktatur der Jahre 1933 - 1945”, to the victims of Hitler’s dictatorship. The senator who opened it spoke of more than 2,000 victims executed on this spot. An urn in the courtyard holds earth from the concentration camps: “In honor and remembrance of the victims of the concentration camps”.

The execution room is a memorial room today; the iron beam still crosses it. The Gedenkstätte Deutscher Widerstand runs the site, and with the Landesarchiv Berlin keeps an online book of the dead. The prison around it is still in use.