This trip has been filled with amazing moments, but none more sobering than a tour of a former prison operated at various times by the Soviets and the East German secret police, known as the Stasi.
We saw the Soviet-era cells in the "submarine" underneath a former kitchen building, where the Russians held many German teenagers from Hitler's brownshirted Nazi youth, some as young as 14 and pressed into combat in the desperate final days of the war.
Despite the Geneva Convention, those imprisoned here didn't last long. Inmates froze to death in "cold cells" or were crammed into "warm" cells with a single bucket for a latrine.
Certain cells were devoted to water torture and an especially insidious torment was a space in which a prisoner could not stand up, turn around or sit down. The whole idea was to force people to "confess" without leaving any physical evidence of torture.
The prison expanded when the Soviets left post-War Berlin and the Stasi took over. Our guide, Vera, dispassionately explained how guards would dehumanize the prisoners, transporting them in a van with isolation cells, and then not allowing them to speak or even see other inmates, and even requiring them to sleep in a certain position. The tour took a strange turn when she matter-of-factly announced that she had once been an inmate of this horrifyng place!
She was part of an East German resistance movement that met secretly in the sanctuaries of Lutheran churches and she dared to attend a government-sanctioned demonstration with a sign showing a phrase from the East German constitution about the people's right to free speech.
When pressed for details, she related how she was put through a sham trial and forced to confess to a lesser charge that resulted in her deportation to the west after about a month in the prison. She was a young mom with three kids at the time and is now a member of Parliament.
The interrogation rooms here would look familiar to anyone who has seen the Oscar-Winning German film "The Lives of Others," which was filmed here. I highly recommend this film to anyone who wants to understand the terrible price East Germans continue to pay for a society in which everyone was spied upon by their neighbors and even family members. Thousands of Germans have now had a chance to see their own Stasi files, which are kept in a creepy archive that I toured on my last trip. These meticulously typed files contain such notations as "Is he an alcoholic?" if someone had a few glasses of wine. Doctors shared intimate details about their patients in exchange for priveleges such as attending foreign conferences.
Our prison tour guide told us that the former guards and interrogators still live in the middle-class houses they were given on the other side of the prison wall. You can see the roofs in the above picture, right next to the former guard tower. Far from being bitter about the free housing given to her former tormentors, Vera is glad they will not be moving in next door to her anytime soon! The Wall may be gone, but two decades later the walls of the mind are still very much a part of the former East Germany.
This trip has been filled with amazing moments, but none more sobering than a tour of a former prison operated at various times by the Soviets and the East German secret police, known as the Stasi. 
We saw the Soviet-era cells in the "submarine" underneath a former kitchen building, where the Russians held many German teenagers from Hitler's brownshirted Nazi youth, some as young as 14 and pressed into combat in the desperate final days of the war. 
Despite the Geneva Convention, those imprisoned here didn't last long. Inmates froze to death in "cold cells" or were crammed into "warm" cells with a single bucket for a latrine.
Certain cells were devoted to water torture and an especially insidious torment was a space in which a prisoner could not stand up, turn around or sit down. The whole idea was to force people to "confess" without leaving any physical evidence of torture. 
The prison expanded when the Soviets left post-War Berlin and the Stasi took over. Our guide, Vera, dispassionately explained how guards would dehumanize the prisoners, transporting them in a van with isolation cells, and then not allowing them to speak or even see other inmates, and even requiring them to sleep in a certain position. The tour took a strange turn when she matter-of-factly announced that she had once been an inmate of this horrifyng place! 
She was part of an East German resistance movement that met secretly in the sanctuaries of Lutheran churches and she dared to attend a government-sanctioned demonstration with a sign showing a phrase from the East German constitution about the people's right to free speech.
When pressed for details, she related how she was put through a sham trial and forced to confess to a lesser charge that resulted in her deportation to the west after about a month in the prison. She was a young mom with three kids at the time and is now a member of Parliament. 
The interrogation rooms here would look familiar to anyone who has seen the Oscar-Winning German film "The Lives of Others," which was filmed here. I highly recommend this film to anyone who wants to understand the terrible price East Germans continue to pay for a society in which everyone was spied upon by their neighbors and even family members. Thousands of Germans have now had a chance to see their own Stasi files, which are kept in a creepy archive that I toured on my last trip. These meticulously typed files contain such notations as "Is he an alcoholic?" if someone had a few glasses of wine. Doctors shared intimate details about their patients in exchange for priveleges such as attending foreign conferences. 
Our prison tour guide told us that the former guards and interrogators still live in the middle-class houses they were given on the other side of the prison wall. You can see the roofs in the above picture, right next to the former guard tower. Far from being bitter about the free housing given to her former tormentors, Vera is glad they will not be moving in next door to her anytime soon! The Wall may be gone, but two decades later the walls of the mind are still very much a part of the former East Germany.
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