Unruly females were stuffed behind the walls of terrifying, dank, dark Hoheneck castle, an old 13th
century fortress overlooking the town of Stollberg in Thuringia, Saxony. Used as a jail for female
political dissidents until 1989, the castle was a nightmare with features like a pitch-dark, underground
chamber where female prisoners were hung waist-deep in frigid water for days at a time and forced
to sleep on concrete floors between intermittent torture sessions, even those women pregnant from
rape of the guards. Thousands of young women died here or languished in filth, hunger and
overcrowding, plagued by tuberculosis and other illnesses.
For 40 years, the GDR ran Hoheneck Prison, left, for female political prisoners: women and young
girls, who by Soviet and East German military courts received long prison sentences for alleged
espionage, anti-communism or because of "defamation of the socialist state" by attempting to travel.
These women and girls were robbed of their dignity and degraded daily with physical and
psychological punishments. Many children were born here as products of rape during occupation.
They were Germans. They "deserved it".
In the post war Soviet sector, many women were put in prison who had not committed any crime.
More than 123,000 Germans were incarcerated in Soviet "special camps" such as Sachsenhausen,
Buchenwald or Bautzen between 1945 and 1950, and over 42,000 didn't survived the experience.
The 1950 official final Soviet report of the Department of the Special Camps states the death toll as
42,889, a death rate of 36%.
There was no place for children within the East German prison system, and to conceal the fact that
many had been born to mothers already incarcerated in Soviet labor camps or East German prisons,
they were not sent to live with relatives, but were taken away from their mothers and brought to the
city of Leipzig where they were regarded as orphans with no names or date of birth, and only a
number for identification. They were soon separated and farmed out to several children's homes, but
all of their birthplaces said Leipzig
There were babies and children born in these camps. Children of the incarcerated pregnant women
did not receive food, clothing or diapers, and the mothers had to share their own scanty food rations
with them and sew their clothing from scraps. When the Soviet run camps were finally handed to the
GDR, although some captives were deported to the Soviet Union, 1,119 women and about 30
children were handed to GDR authorities to serve the rest of their sentences in East German prisons,
42 children came from the notorious Sachsenhausen camp alone. Most were sent to Hoheneck.
But in Hoheneck, even more babies were born, products of the abusive guards, and these children
were only allowed to live with their mother for a few months before they were separated and sent to
children homes in the GDR. Most of the women at Hoheneck who were condemned by Soviet
military tribunals had been released by 1956, but the place was then filled up again with women who
had been condemned the communist East German "courts", many of them for political reasons, and
political and criminal prisoners often lived together in rooms of 24 women in deplorable conditions.
Here, they would join the female victims of the Stasi secret police in East German who operated
a political persecution ring where they arrested opponents of the ruling communists. Among
punishment offenses were: desire to travel, open criticism of state politics, political association
formation, contacts to western politicians, public demonstrations, escape into the west and/or
assistance with the escape of others. They employed wiretapping, room bugs, informers, letter
interception, long-term observation, threats and entrance to all data from patient documents to
school notes. A special method was  "decomposition," the use of psychological warfare on an
individual basis, including the use of anonymous letters, starting rumors, visiting work places and
intimidating employers, causing controversy within friendships, threatening the family, financial
ruination, harassing citations and destruction of  life on an everyday basis.