‘Detention of a special kind’

No 8 Prinz Albrecht Strasse was the Reich’s most infamous address

It was a former art school used for Himmler's "detention of a special kind". Gestapo headquarters at No 8 Prinz Albrecht Strasse became notorious among Berliners for being on "a particular street you simply didn’t go through.”

The building was first occupied by the infamous Nazi secret police in 1933 and continued to operate as a "house prison" for torture until badly bomb damaged in 1945.

Those transported there were either marched through the front door or driven through a courtyard to a side entrance in the H-shaped structure.

They were held in cells in the basement of the south wing - max size 6.5ft x 6.5ft - while awaiting "enhanced interrogation" on the top floors.

A floor plan of the basement cells

Among those kept there were key July 20th plotter Fabian von Schlabrendorff, Stalin's son Yakov Dzhugashvili, who was captured on the Eastern Front, and the carpenter who came closest to killing Hitler, Georg Elser.

Schlabrendorff, who miraculously survived the war, later told of undergoing a four-stage torture process. He said: "The first involved having my hands tied behind my back. Then a device was slid over both hands, enclosing each of my ten fingers individually.

"Iron spikes were attached to the inside of this device, pressing against the bases of my fingers. A screw was used to compress the entire mechanism, causing the spikes to bore into my fingers."

A typical cell at No 8 Prinz Albrecht Strasse

When that failed to work, Schlabrendorff was strapped facedown on a bed frame and had a similar pipe-type object with spikes on screws clamped over his legs from thigh to ankle.

The third stage of torture saw the bedstead convert into a medieval torture stretching rack and the fourth involved Schlabrendorff tied in a bent over position and being clubbed in the kidneys until he fell forward onto his unprotected face.

Schlabrendorff, who was 37 at the time, suffered a heart attack under torture, but never gave his captors the confession of treason they sought. As detailed in a previous post, the trained lawyer subsequently used his mistreatment to argue his way to an acquittal of treason charges in 1945.

Stalin's son Yakov Dzhugashvili was held there before being transferred to Sachsenhausen in 1943

No 8 Prinz Albrecht Strasse was demolished in 1956 as part of a clearing of ruins in Berlin and the street was renamed by the Soviets in honour of the communist resistance figure Käthe Niederkirchner.

The Topography of Terror museum now stands on the former Gestapo HQ site and many of its worst excesses are documented there.