Wednesday, 6. July: Part II: Stasi Prison

We took the city tram 16 to the Stasi Prison. On the way we got lost and asked directions, but we were given seriously wrong directions a couple of times. We later learned that most of the people in this area used to work there as guards and interrogators, so likely they purposely misdirected us. Everywhere else people were very helpful at supplying directions when we weren’t sure or we were double checking.

We were able to join an English speaking tour only a few minutes late. The Stasi Prison is on the east side of Berlin and wasn’t on any map until the fall of communism. It is where political prisoner were taken, over 40,000 people in all. A person would be arrested on the way to work generally. They might have said something against the government—almost everything was bugged. They might have applied for an exit visa. They might have spoken to a Westerner. Someone upset with them might have turned them in for revenge. The first building we toured was an underground bunker with very small individual rooms where people were physically tortured. Here they were given water torture, (head shaved, single drop of water dropped on their head, same size, same pace, makes them go crazy; the second method was to have the prisoner stand in bucket and cold water is poured over, have to sit for days with feet in bucket.) There was no heating or air conditioning, so it was very hot in the summer and extremely cold in the winter. Many people died.

In 1951 Stalin made physical torture illegal, so they moved the prison out of the bunker to a new prison built over the bunker and changed from physical to psychological torture. Special vans were made with 5 very small cells for picking up prisoners generally on their way to work. The vans were disguised to look like local delivery vans such as bakery or meat vans. The person was driven around for several hours in a zigzag pattern so that they would not be able to tell where they were being taken.

The new building contained somewhat over 100 cells, all in isolation, and about the same number of interrogation rooms. The prisoners were required to sit up all day in a certain position, to sleep at night on their backs with arms folded. Guards came along every 5 mins to make sure people were in the exact position and basically to make sure they didn’t sleep. They had buttons outside the room to make it hotter or colder, to turn the lights on or off. The prisoners could communicate with others above or below if the both empied out the toilet bowls and talked through the pipes, so the guards had a switch that they could use to flush the toilet if they thought the prisoner was talking through the pipes. The cells had glass block to allow light but no fresh air or view of the outside.

In the interrogation room the prisoner was required to sit on hands. Sometimes the interrogator pretended to be friendly to force a confession. Othertimes he would yell at the person or lie to them, for example telling them that if the person didn’t sign a confession they would get the wife or the children too, when in reality the rest of the family was probably there also. All of the people confessed, and there were no escapes. The Germans tend to be very thorough.