The Steinwache is a memorial museum in Dortmund,

Germany Germany,, officially the Federal Republic of Germany, is a country in Central Europe. It is the second most populous country in Europe after Russia, and the most populous member state of the European Union. Germany is situated betwe ...

. The police station Steinwache was established in 1906. Since 1928 a prison next to the station was in use for detention of suspects. In 1933 the

Gestapo The (), abbreviated Gestapo (; ), was the official secret police of Nazi Germany and in German-occupied Europe. The force was created by Hermann Göring in 1933 by combining the various political police agencies of Prussia into one orga ...

took over the prison and imprisoned and tortured many opponents of the Nazi regime. It soon had a reputation as ''Die Hölle von Westdeutschland'' ("The hell of western Germany"). Between 1933 and 1945 more than 66,000 people were imprisoned in the Steinwache prison. In the early years of the regime the inmates were primarily members of the communist and social democratic opposition. During

World War II World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposing ...

foreign forced labourers made up the largest group of prisoners. Especially slave workers from eastern Europe were often badly treated and many of them were executed. In contrast to most of Dortmund's city center, the Steinwache wasn't heavily damaged during the war. The conversion of the former prison into a memorial site began in the 1980s. Since 1992 it is the permanent location of the exhibition ''Widerstand und Verfolgung in Dortmund 1933–1945'' ("Resistance and Persecution in Dortmund 1933-1945"), which demonstrates the persecution under National Socialism with many photographs, short texts and sometimes with reports from contemporary witnesses.

External links

Website of the memorial, City of Dortmund {{coord, 51.5196, N, 7.4606, E, source:wikidata-and-enwiki-cat-tree_region:DE, display=title Monuments and memorials to the victims of Nazism Dortmund Gestapo