 The main entrance to the prison | |
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| Location | Reinickendorf, Berlin, Germany |
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| Coordinates | 52°34′23″N13°17′36″E / 52.573056°N 13.293333°E |
| Status | Operational |
| Capacity | 1530 (In 2001) |
| Population | 867 (in September 2021) [1] |
| Opened | 1898 |
| Director | Martin Riemer |
Tegel Prison is a closed prison in the borough of Reinickendorf in the north of the German state of Berlin. The prison is one of Germany's largest prisons.
As of 2021 [update] , Tegel Prison is divided into five sub-prisons, including the facility for the execution of preventive detention. Since 30 January 2021, Tegel Prison has had an open detention area for preventive detention. [2] The grounds of the prison cover 131,805 m2, the outer wall is 1,465 m long and it has 13 watchtowers. As of November 2021, the prison had 630 staff. [3]
In January 2021, Tegel had 867 prison places and about 630 staff. The average occupancy rate in 2020 was 704 inmates, of whom about 46% were foreigners. All sentence durations are represented, from short sentences to life sentences and preventive detention. [2]
On 26 July 1896, construction of the prison began and on 1 October 1898, the first inmates were admitted. At that time, the prison was called the Tegel Royal Penitentiary. [4] In 1902, all buildings inside the perimeter wall were completed, and in 1906 the buildings outside were completed as well. In 1916, Custody House I became a military prison; the supervisory staff in this wing was provided by the military. [4] In 1918, the prison was renamed Tegel Penitentiary, and in 1931, Custody III was also converted into a military prison. [4]
On 21 April 1945, the prison was dissolved and all inmates were released. The French occupation forces took over the prison in July 1945 and returned it to the German administration in October, which immediately put it back into operation. [5]
In 1955, the prison was renamed Tegel Penitentiary, and in 1957 five watchtowers were built on the ring-shaped perimeter wall. [6]
On 1 April 1977, the name of the prison was changed to Tegel Prison. [7] In 1979, construction began on Penitentiary V, which was completed in 1982, and in 1984, work began on Penitentiary VI, which was completed in 1988. [7]
In the autumn of 2012, Penitentiary I was emptied except for the drug shield station because the prisoner accommodation was not in conformity with the constitution. [8] In July 2015, it was decided to completely vacate and demolish Substitutional Facility I; the demolition was completed in July 2018. [9]
The German imposter Wilhelm Voigt better known as Captain von Köpenick, was imprisoned in Tegel [10] for almost two years after being convicted of fraud. After being pardoned by Kaiser Wilhelm II, [11] he was able to leave the prison two years into his four sentence, on 16 August 1908. [12]
From 10 May [13] to 22 December 1932, the journalist Carl von Ossietzky, who would later become a Nobel Peace Prize winner, was imprisoned for treason. [13]
The priest, Bernhard Lichtenberg, who was beatified by Pope John Paul II on 23 June 1996, [14] was imprisoned in Tegel from 29 May 1942 to 23 October 1943, for violation of the Pulpit Law and the Treachery Act of 1934. [14]
The theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote moving letters, mostly from Tegel. [15] He had been imprisoned on 5 April 1943 [16] as an opponent of the Nazis in what was then a military prison. The letters and notes were published with the book Resistance and Surrender by Gütersloher Verlagshaus.
Austrian conscientious objector Franz Jägerstätter was incarcerated in the prison for refusing to take the Hitler oath and subject to trial in July 1943 when he was sentenced to death. [17] The founder of the Kreisau Circle, Helmuth James von Moltke, was moved from Ravensbrück concentration camp and imprisoned in the Tegel prison on 29 September 1944, in the Totenhaus wing (house of the dead) where he remained until 23 January 1945, when he was hanged. [18] The letters he wrote to his wife Freya von Moltke, collected in "Abschiedsbriefe Gefängnis Tegel" [19] (Farewell Letters from Tegel Prison) were smuggled out by the Protestant chaplain Harald Poelchau. [20] They contain, among other things, the detailed description of everyday life in prison.
SS commander Erich Bauer, who served part of his life sentence for his participation in The Holocaust at Tegel Prison, from 1971 until his death in 1980.[ citation needed ]
The bohemian Andreas Baader was imprisoned in Tegel Prison [21] during the period from his arrest on 4 April 1970, until his release on 14 May 1970. He served a three-year prison sentence for causing arson at a department store in Frankfurt on 2 April 1968. [22] After he was released, he became a key figure in the Red Army Faction.
In 1999, the left-wing terrorist Dieter Kunzelmann began his ten-month prison sentence in Tegel by knocking on the front door in a media-effective manner. The photo in Der Spiegel bears the caption "I want to come in here." [23] Before that he had disappeared and had himself declared dead in an obituary. Afterwards he wrote a book and celebrated with a big party at the alternative cultural centre Mehringhof, the night before he was to go to prison. [24] [25]
The ex-rapper Denis Cuspert, active as a rapper under the name Deso Dogg, was also imprisoned for some time in Tegel. [26]
The serial killer Thomas Rung was imprisoned in Tegel Prison around 2000 and committed further offences there, [27] so that the prison finally refused to admit him again.
The vocalist of the right-wing rock bands Landser and Die Lunikoff Verschwörung, Michael Regener, also served his remaining sentence there. [28] On 21 October 2006, there was a concert solidarity rally for him in front of the prison, [29] organised by the National Democratic Party of Germany. [30]
The Russian citizen Vadim Sokolov, charged in the Zelimkhan Khangoshvili murder case [31] by the Federal Prosecutor General, was transferred to the Tegel Prison when his life was in danger. [32] The threat was discovered by the Federal Intelligence Service. [32]
The essayist Alfred Döblin placed the beginning of his most famous novel Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929) in his literary treatment in Tegel Penitentiary, where the main character, Franz Biberkopf, was imprisoned for four years for the unintentional manslaughter of his partner. [33] Tegel prison appears as a setting [34] in the 1931 film adaptation Berlin - Alexanderplatz by film director Piel Jutzi [35] and in Rainer Werner Fassbinder's film adaptation [36] of this novel for a television series in December 1980. [37]
Prisoners at Tegel Prison have been producing the prison newspaper since 1968. [38] It is Germany's only uncensored prison newspaper that does not have to be submitted to the prison management before publication and has a circulation of 8,500 copies distributed nationwide. [39] [40] The prison newspaper is supported by the Förderverein der Lichtblick e. V. The editor-in-chief in 2012/2013 was Dieter Wurm, a well-known former squatter and bank robber in the city. [41]
Since 1997, the Berlin theatre project Gefängnistheater aufBruch has been organising theatre performances with the inmates. The aim is to make prison, a place excluded from the public sphere, accessible to the public through the medium of art and to give the prisoners a language, a voice and a face through performing craftsmanship that creates the possibility of an unprejudiced encounter between outside and inside. Another aim is to create living theatre at a high artistic level, which is created in the combination of personality and dramatic text and convinces through authenticity and expressiveness. [36]
Another media project of the Tegel prison inmates, was the internet portal Planet Tegel in 1998. [42] [43]
Berlin is the capital and largest city of Germany, both by area and by population. Its more than 3.85 million inhabitants make it the European Union's most populous city, as measured by population within city limits. The city is also one of the states of Germany, and is the third smallest state in the country in terms of area. Berlin is surrounded by the state of Brandenburg, and Brandenburg's capital Potsdam is nearby. The urban area of Berlin has a population of over 4.5 million and is therefore the most populous urban area in Germany. The Berlin-Brandenburg capital region has around 6.2 million inhabitants and is Germany's second-largest metropolitan region after the Rhine-Ruhr region, and the sixth-biggest metropolitan region by GDP in the European Union.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a German Lutheran pastor, theologian and anti-Nazi dissident who was a key founding member of the Confessing Church. His writings on Christianity's role in the secular world have become widely influential; his 1937 book The Cost of Discipleship is described as a modern classic. Apart from his theological writings, Bonhoeffer was known for his staunch resistance to the Nazi dictatorship, including vocal opposition to Adolf Hitler's euthanasia program and genocidal persecution of the Jews. He was arrested in April 1943 by the Gestapo and imprisoned at Tegel Prison for 1½ years. Later, he was transferred to Flossenbürg concentration camp.
Alfred Friedrich Delp was a German Jesuit priest and philosopher of the German Resistance. A member of the inner Kreisau Circle resistance group, he is considered a significant figure in Catholic resistance to Nazism. Falsely implicated in the failed 1944 July Plot to overthrow Adolf Hitler, Delp was arrested and sentenced to death. He was executed in 1945.
Helmuth James Graf von Moltke was a German jurist who, as a draftee in the German Abwehr, acted to subvert German human-rights abuses of people in territories occupied by Germany during World War II. He was a founding member of the Kreisau Circle opposition group, whose members opposed the government of Adolf Hitler in Nazi Germany, and discussed prospects for a Germany based on moral and democratic principles after Hitler. The Nazis executed him for treason for his participation in these discussions.
Betti Gertrud Käthe Hilda Coppi, known as Hilde Coppi, was a German communist and resistance fighter against the Nazi regime. She was a member of the anti-fascist resistance group that was later called the Red Orchestra by the Abwehr, during the Nazi period.
Berliner Fussball Club Dynamo e. V., commonly abbreviated to BFC Dynamo or BFC, alternatively sometimes called Dynamo Berlin, is a German football club based in the locality of Alt-Hohenschönhausen of the borough of Lichtenberg of Berlin.
Monika Berberich is a convicted West German terrorist and a founding member of the Red Army Faction (RAF). She was involved in the violent freeing of Andreas Baader in 1970, and served a prison sentence between 1970 and 1988 in connection with it.
Sportforum Hohenschönhausen, officially named Sportforum Berlin, is a multi-purpose sports complex in the locality of Alt-Hohenschönhausen of the borough of Lichtenberg in Berlin. The Sportforum was also known as the Dynamo-Sportforum during the East German era.
Bodo Rudwaleit is a German former football goalkeeper who played as goalkeeper for the record champion BFC Dynamo from 1976 to 1989.
Margaretha "Greta" Kuckhoff was a Resistance member in Nazi Germany, who belonged to the Communist Party of Germany and the NKVD spy ring that was dubbed the Red Orchestra by the Abwehr. She was married to Adam Kuckhoff, who was executed by the Third Reich. After the war, she lived in the German Democratic Republic, where she was president of Deutsche Notenbank from 1950 to 1958.
Johann Burianek was a former Wehrmacht soldier and CIA-backed insurgent who planned and committed several attacks against the German Democratic Republic and a member of the anti-communist KGU.
Günter von Drenkmann was a German lawyer. In 1967, he was appointed president of the Berlin district court ("Kammergericht"). The post was one that his grandfather had held between 1890 and 1904. He was killed by "2 June Movement" militants during a kidnapping attempt.
Thomas "Pinocchio" Rung is a German serial killer, who is considered to be the most dangerous of his kind since the end of the Second World War.
Heinrich Scheel was a German left-wing historian and longtime vice president of the East German Academy of Sciences and professor of modern history at Humboldt University of Berlin. Scheel was notable for putting forward a theory of the German radical at the time of the French revolution, in an attempt to determine an alternative tradition in Germany. Scheel was most notable for being a German resistance fighter against the Nazi regime, during World War II. He was a member of a Berlin-based anti-fascist resistance group that was later called the Red Orchestra by the Abwehr, during the Nazi regime.
Maria von Wedemeyer Weller was an American computer scientist, who emigrated from Germany to the US after the Second World War. She was known in the field of computer science for her role in developing emulation capability. She was also notable as having been the fiancée of the German Protestant theologian and Resistance worker Dietrich Bonhoeffer.
Harald Poelchau was a German prison chaplain, religious socialist and member of the resistance against the Nazis. Poelchau grew up in Silesia. During the early 1920's, he studied Protestant theology at the University of Tübingen and the University of Marburg, followed by social work at the College of Political Science of Berlin. Poelchau gained a doctorate under Paul Tillich at Frankfurt University. In 1933, he became a prison chaplain in the Berlin prisons. With the coming of the Nazi regime in 1933, he became an anti-fascist. During the war, Poelchau and his wife Dorothee Poelchau helped victims of the Nazi's, hiding them and helping them escape. At the same time, as a prison chaplain he gave comfort to the many people in prison and those sentenced to death. After the war, he became involved in the reform of prisons in East Germany. In 1971, Yad Vashem named Poelchau and his wife Righteous Among the Nations.
Dorothee Poelchau was a German librarian who together with her husband Harald Poelchau, were resistance fighters against the Nazis. The couple were named Righteous Among the Nations in 1971.
Freiheitsfonds is a German political initiative founded by Arne Semsrott in December 2021. The organisation raises funds in order to free prisoners who have been incarcerated under the substitute imprisonment law, which allows judges to impose custodial sentences for unpaid public transport fares. It also advocates decriminalising the act of riding on public transport without a ticket, which was made an offence by Nazi-ruled Germany in 1935. As of September 2023, Semsrott and Freiheitsfonds had raised more than €800,000 and allowed 850 people to leave prison early. The group estimates that its actions save the German state an average of €150 per day per person released from prison.
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