The Stasi prison hospital

The Ministry for State Security (MfS) central prison hospital was also located on the grounds of the remand centre until 1990.

The initially single-storey building originally housed the laundry and the garages for the canteen kitchen during the Nazi dictatorship and the Second World War. From 1947, the administration of the central Soviet remand prison was housed here. After the entire detention centre was taken over by the MfS, the building was converted into a prison hospital at the end of the 1950s.

From 1959, prisoners from the three Berlin remand prisons and from the detention centres for the MfS district administrations were treated here as inpatients or outpatients. Infirmary cells with 28 beds were available for this purpose. By 1989, over 2,600 people had been admitted, including refugees who had been shot, seriously ill prisoners and prisoners who had gone on hunger strikes. However, medical care was not necessarily aimed at helping the prisoners to recover. The primary task of the prison hospital was to make sick prisoners fit for trial again.

The nursing staff and doctors were MfS employees who worked closely with the other departments of the State Security Service. There was no medical confidentiality.