Plötzensee was one of the Berlin's most notorious prisons during the Third Reich. Some 3000 people were executed here, most of them members of the Nazi resistance. The room where the beheadings and hangings took place is now a hauntingly simple memorial: only a steel bar with eight hooks pierces its emptiness. Next door, an exhibit introduces some of the victims and zeroes in on Nazi Germany's judicial and penal system.
You'll learn that the families of the condemned had to pay for the cost of the execution, while executioners received a bonus for each bloody deed. Deaths here were particularly prevalent in 1944 when many of the conspirators of the failed assassination attempt on Hitler, led by Colonel Stauffenberg on 20 July of that year – and their (mostly uninvolved) relatives and friends – were hanged here, a process the Führer allegedly had captured on film.
