It would be hard to find another site in Germany so intricately linked with the 44-year history of political persecution in the Soviet Occupation Zone and the German Democratic Republic (GDR) as the Berlin- Hohenschönhausen Memorial. In June 1945, the Soviet Secret Police took over a former canteen block and food store in the north-east of Berlin and turned it into a detainment and transit camp called 'Special Camp No. 3'. After the camp was closed in October 1946, the cellar was converted into an underground cell section that served as the main Soviet Secret Police prison for detention and interrogation in Germany. In 1951 the East German Ministry of State Security (MfS) took over the prison, added a new prison building and, until 1989, used the site as its main remand centre. Thousands of political prisoners passed through this jail, including nearly all the prominent figures opposing the GDR regime.
The prison was located within a restricted military area hermetically sealed off from the outside world. This area never appeared on any maps of East Berlin.
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