KGB Leistikowstrasse Prison (Potsdam)

The building in Leistikowstraße 1 Potsdam was belonging to the Protestant church organisation EKH. After the Potsdam Conference the rectory was seized by the Soviet Military Administration (SMAD) along with more than 100 other buildings of the Nauener Vorstadt, and turned into a restricted area, “Militärstädtchen No. 7”.

The Soviet Counterintelligence SMERSH reconstructed the building into the central remand prison. All together 36 cells were constructed, located in the basement, on the first floor and the second floor. Gangways and windows were bricked up, to only leave narrow slits. The few windows left were barred with massive iron. Blinds made it impossible to get in contact with the outside world.

The prisoners were often interrogated for months, often abused, and sentenced to long imprisonment or death. Numerous inscriptions in German and Russian show the degree of isolation, psychological pressure, and deprivation to which the detainees were subjected. The Soviet intelligence sent the prisoners after their sentence either directly to one of the notorious Gulag penal camps in the Soviet Union or to one of ten Soviet special camps like Torgau or Sachsenhausen in the Soviet zone of occupation.

The building of the former remand prison was used as a storehouse for materials since the mid-1980s. After the withdrawal of the last Russian troops and intelligence services in 1994, the EKH regained the building at the Leistikowstraße 1 and with the help of committed citizens made it accessible for the public. In 1997, a first exhibition informed visitors about the history of the building. 

More infos: gedenkstaette-leistikowstrasse.de

Map: google maps

This reportage is part of the We Will Forget Soon Project, developed together with Stefano Corso. Like it and support the Facebook Page

All images are under CC Creative Commons (Attribution, Noncommercial, No Derivative Works), please refer to " darioj laganà | www.norte.it "

 

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KGB Residency and German-Russian Museum (Karlshorst)

On 8 May 1945 here the surrender of the German Armed Forces (Wehrmacht) signed the "Unconditional surrender" pact.

The Karlshorst building was erected between 1936 and 1938 as an officers’ mess for the German Armed Forces’ Pioneer School 1. In the Battle of Berlin at the end of April 1945, the 5th Soviet Shock Army under Colonel General Nikolai Bersarin set up its headquarters there.

After the surrender was first signed on 7 May in Rheims at the headquarters of the Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Forces, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, it was ratified in Karlshorst in the evening of 8 to 9 May by Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, General Admiral Hans-Georg von Friedeburg and Colonel General Hans-Jürgen Stumpff. Their signatures under the unconditional surrender were accepted by Marshal Georgy Zhukov, Soviet Supreme Commander, and for the Western Headquarters Sir Arthur Tedder, British Air Marshal and Eisenhower’s deputy, with U.S. General Carl Spaatz and French General Jean de Lattre de Tassigny as witnesses. These signatures ended the war in Europe and at the same time marked the boundary between two epochs of 20th century European history.

From 1945 to 1949 the building was the main office of the Soviet Military Administration. At that location on 10 October 1949 General Vasily Chuikov granted legal state authority to the first government of the German Democratic Republic (GDR). Between 1967 and 1994 a museum of the Soviet Armed Forces (“Museum of the Unconditional Surrender of Fascist Germany in the Great Patriotic War 1941-1945”) was established there in remembrance of the Battle of Berlin and the German surrender.

The KGB residency in East Berlin-Karlshorst was the largest in the world; it produced as much intelligence as an entire directorate back in Moscow thanks to East German efforts. But none of this was known in the West until after the Berlin Wall had fell.

The buildings on the side of the Museum had been left for a long time abandoned, now the process of renovation has started and as usual in Berlin, the former KGB buildings are now appartments.

More infos: http://www.museum-karlshorst.de/en.html

Map: http://goo.gl/maps/0n5lA

All images are under CC Creative Commons (Attribution, Noncommercial, No Derivative Works), please refer to " darioj laganà | www.norte.it "

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