Youth House Dessau
Why did East Germany create prisons for children?
About two and a half years ago, on my way to the Canary Islands, I met Ralf. I was on a flight to Tenerife, had a middle seat and was kind of upset about that. But the moment I sat down I started talking to the guy right next to me, who had the aisle seat, which I thought really belonged to me. When I asked him where he was going he told me full of pride that he wasn’t going to stay on Tenerife, he was going to El Hierro. El Hierro is a much smaller island, actually the smallest island on the Canary Islands. Only about 10000 people live there. It is also the least touristic of them all and was also my final destination.
Ralf and I became friends instantly. We took the ferry together from Tenerife to El Hierro and had lots of adventures on the island in the weeks that followed. You can see some of them on my YouTube channel.
After some time Ralf told me that he was so happy to have met somebody who is good with photo and video work since one of his dreams is that one day someone will make a documentary about his time at the Youth House Dessau
“What Youth House Dessau?”, I asked him, since I’d never heard about it.
He told me that in 1953 the East German government changed its laws concerning juveniles. Starting at age 14 they were punished as adults in the East German court system but not imprisoned in ordinary prisons. They were taken to so called Youth Houses. There they were held under the same harsh conditions as adults, stripped of all rights, except the right to work hard.
Dessau was considered to be the toughest of all the Youth Houses. Inmates had to sleep in small rooms with up to 36 people in tripple bunk beds. The bathroom situation was grim. In the cells a bucket was used as a toilet at night that was emptied in the morning. Three toilets were available for more than 100 prisoners and looked and smelled accordingly. Toilet paper did not exist and for scraps of newspapers which were used instead, one had to fight for. There was very little to eat and almost no fruits or vegetables were part of the diet what was especially tough for juveniles.
Harassment was running the military stile show. The prison guards had organized things in a hierarchical way to make sure that the inmates would guard and control each other. Group punishment was their biggest weapon. If you made the slightest mistake like not making your bed the right way in the morning or not cleaning your toothbrush cup not only you were punished but the entire group while not knowing what they were punished for. At the end of each punishment they were told why they had to go through that and who caused it. That led the group to make sure that the person who had initiated it would not make the same mistake twice.
One way was pulling a bed sheet over the inmate in the evening, after the lights were turned off and then the entire group was hitting whatever they could hit under the cover.
Punishment by the guards was for example roller coaster. Inmates were forced to squad down, walk up three flights of stairs, then down a long hallway, down three flights, down a long hallway and then they had to repeat that while squatting the entire time. This was done while they were occasionally hit by rubber bats until some of them collapsed from exhaustion.
This created an environment of constant fear and stress only topped by the daily piece work. Child labour was forbidden in the GDR but apparently that did not apply these kids. Under enormous pressure children were making all kinds of products. Special care was taken to produce things for export to the hated class enemy, West Germany.
Ralf was in Dessau from April 1982 to July 1983, starting at the tender age of 16, an experience that he will never forget. He told me that his main problem since then is that he is stressed all the time, that his system is running at 100% 24/7. To this day he has health problems. He relates his gout to missing vitamins during that time and still has nightmares about it. He lost part of his youth behind these walls and still regrets that. He has been telling me about the constant abuse of the guards, not so much physically but emotionally. That he could not sleep at night since a tea kettle puncher was making tea kettles in the building next to his sleeping quarters all day and all night long. How he was building gas ovens for West German clients and that they were pushed hard to fulfill 120% of the expected numbers what led to many inmates getting injured because of the fast work pace. He also has been telling me about the sexual abuse by guards and inmates which didn’t affect him personally but many of the other prisoners.
As I mentioned, I had never heard about Youth Houses and so did anybody else I asked about them as well. This theme is still quite suppressed and a very dark chapter in the recent German history.
There were a multitude of reasons why one could end up in a Youth House. Petty crimes, burglaries, sexual crimes and homicides. But also political prisoners. Ralf had tried to escape the GDR and was caught trying to get to West Germany. His crime was his attempt to find freedom.
After hearing about all of that I told him that I think it is a very interesting story and that I’d love to make a documentary about this.
After the Fall of the Wall in 1989 the Youth House Dessau was turned in a normal prison and that was closed a couple of years ago. We contacted the now responsible government agency and were allowed onto the premises in the fall of last year.
It was an intense but also healing experience for Ralf who had to confront himself with all these horrendous experiences of his past but he also finally realized that it is over, that nothing is happening in the Youth House Dessu any more.
He walked me through the entire building. We looked at the sleeping quarters, the parade ground, the solitude confinement cells and the prison walls. It was a haunting experience, a lost place where one can only imagine what the real experience must have been.
At the moment we are working on getting funding to do a full length documentary about Dessau and other Youth Houses to show what has happened there. To find out more about why they were created and by doing so to prevent something like this from happening again.
Please stay tuned for more updates about the project.
