Fantastic museum in Potsdam, I'd highly recommend visiting!
My friend gives tours here so she gave us an abridged tour, where we spent about 30 minutes total and she went through the highlights of the museum. Throughout its use, thousands of victims have passed through this place was used from 1933 until 1989 for both the repressive Nazi and DDR regimes. From the outside, a casual passerby would assume this building to be just another building, nothing about it stands out to indicate it was once a prison.
The prison itself focuses on 3 different periods of time: the Soviet secret police period ('45-'52), the Stasi period ('52-'89) and the Democracy movement ('89/'90).
In this former prison, you are able to see how the people were brought in and interrogated (for hours, even days at a time) at the desk of a Stasi officer with a view of the street outside (freedom so close but unable to go out into a normal life). You hear personal stories of individuals brought in for reasons as simple as applying for visas to leave the DDR and their entire experience from the time they were brought in until after they left and recovered from their time in the prison. You are able to see the actual cells (some still set up as they were years ago) that prisoners lived in. What I find most interesting is that once the wall came down in 1989, those involved in the democracy movement went into the ironically called "Lindenhotel" to preserve the prison as it was in order to keep as many records of what occurred as possible.
Although all information is only in German, tours can be arranged in different languages, depending on availability of tour guides. read more
