Mahn- und Gedenkstätte Steinwache

The Mahn- und Gedenkstätte Steinwache is a memorial museum in Dortmund. It occupies a former police station dating from 1906, with a prison added in 1928. In their first years the cells simply held suspects.

In 1933 the Gestapo took control of the prison and began imprisoning and torturing opponents of the Nazi regime. People soon gave the place a notorious name: 'The Hell of Western Germany'. More than sixty-six thousand prisoners passed through between 1933 and 1945. Early on, the inmates came mostly from the communist and social democratic opposition. During the Second World War the cells filled with foreign forced labourers, above all slave workers from Eastern Europe. Many of them faced severe mistreatment and execution.

In the 1980s efforts began to turn the site into a memorial. Since 1992 it has been the permanent home of the exhibition 'Resistance and Persecution in Dortmund from 1933 to 1945'. The Dortmund City Archives curate the show, which sets numerous photographs and short texts alongside reports from contemporary witnesses. Regular evening lectures and special exhibitions deepen the picture. Unlike much of Dortmund's city centre, the Steinwache came through the war largely undamaged. You therefore stand inside the very building where all of this happened.