Sat, Feb 9, 2002
The portrait of the prison in Bautzen is a prime example of the beginning of the century of a modern, humane penal system. But it got in the way of its history as a symbol of injustice and political persecution in the former GDR. In 1956 the "Bautzen II" prison in the Saxon small town as the only special prison of the East German Ministry for State Security opened. Mostly political opponents of the regime were there under disastrous conditions of imprisonment.
Sat, Feb 16, 2002
For years, Stammheim has been a completely normal penal institution, like many others in West Germany. It hit the headlines when the police managed to arrest the strategic heads of the terrorist Red Army faction Ulrike Meinhof, Gudrun Ensslin and Andreas Baader in the 1970s. In order to keep the number one enemy of the state safe, Stammheim was expanded into a high-security prison. This is the start of a tightrope act for the enforcement authorities. Former law enforcement officers, relatives of the terrorists and a second-generation RAF terrorist, Peter-Jürgen Boock, report how the terrorists managed to make the supposed high-security wing appear as a place of isolation torture.