Detail

In October 1992, a memorial was opened in the former police prison in Dortmund’s Steinstraße, in which the extensive exhibition Resistance and Persecution in Dortmund 1933-1945 was given a permanent place. This was mainly thanks to survivors of Nazi persecution and youth organisations who, since the early 1980s, had been campaigning for the buildings of the former police station and police prison at the north entrance to Dortmund’s main railway station to be preserved and converted into a memorial.

This police station had been in existence since the late 19th century, and in 1906 it was given a stately building in the burgeoning city of Dortmund. In the 1920s, it was extended to house a police prison.

Under the Nazis, the police station and prison was a central site of terror and persecution for the whole region and beyond. More than 66,000 people were detained here between 1933 and 1945, many of whom were abused and sent to concentration camps. In the context of Nazi ideology and policy, the police deported political opponents or people stigmatised for antisemitic, (social) racist and homophobic reasons to the Steinwache. The increasing racialisation of crime was also reflected in police persecution practices.

During the Second World War, many forced labourers, mainly from the Soviet Union, were brought to Steinwache by the Gestapo as part of the racist repression. Many of them had attempted to escape from the appalling living and working conditions in Dortmund’s factories and camps. Their imprisonment was marked by arbitrariness and abuse, overcrowding and hunger, as well as the threat of air raids, to which the police left them defenceless. In numerous inscriptions discovered in individual cells in the 1990s, people expressed their suffering in the face of prison conditions, their feelings of insecurity, surprise, fear, hope and much more. Scratched into the walls, they include proverbs, lines of poetry, drawings, calendars, and, time and again, documentation of their names and where they lived, as well as how many days and months they had been imprisoned.

In the last few weeks before liberation, the Gestapo murdered large numbers of people in Dortmund who had been deported to the Ruhr region as forced labourers.

For many decades, hardly anyone in post-war Dortmund was interested in their stories.
The police station and prison continued to exist for many years after the end of the Second World War, largely staffed by the same people. When the prison closed in 1958, the city of Dortmund turned it into a night shelter for homeless people. In 1976, the police station was closed and the building was scheduled for demolition. However, this was prevented.

Today, Dortmund’s central memorial is undergoing major changes. The educational programme is being revised and developed, a new permanent exhibition is being created, and an extension is being built with rooms for events, seminars and exhibitions.