Moabit Historical Prison Park, Berlin — Visitor Guide & Things to Do Nearby

The Moabit Historical Prison Park is a memorial park built on the site of a 19th-century prison that holds some of the darkest chapters in Berlin's history. What was once a place of imprisonment is now a place of reflection.

The Zellengefangnis Moabit (Moabit Cell Prison) was built between 1842 and 1849, designed by Carl Ferdinand Busse, a student of Karl Friedrich Schinkel. It was modelled on London's Pentonville Prison, with a central hub and four radiating cell wings, a design intended to facilitate surveillance. The prison held around 520 individual cells.

During the Nazi regime, the prison became a Gestapo dungeon. Of 306 registered prisoners held under the Nazis, only 35 survived. After the July 20, 1944, assassination attempt against Hitler, resistance fighters were imprisoned here before their trials and executions.

The writer Wolfgang Borchert, author of "The Man Outside," was imprisoned here for nine months in 1944 for anti-war statements.

The prison closed in 1955, and the complex was demolished in 1958. In 2006, the site was transformed into a memorial park. The layout of the original prison wings is traced in the landscape, and remaining five-metre brick walls define the space. Ground-level reliefs show the former cell block positions.

If you're on a Questo quest through Moabit, the park is a stop where the outlines of cells and the height of the walls remind you that resistance has always had a cost.