Department BE 5 (GDR provision) in the Federal Archives receives a large number of requests asking for evidence of prison terms, court and prison files as well as work and health records relating to prison terms in the former GDR. Initial information is obtained from the Central Prisoner Card File of the GDR Ministry of the Interior (MdI); further documents are often not available here.
This card file does, however, contain information on the prisons where the prisoners served their time. This is where the prisoners’ personal files were also kept. The card file was usually updated upon re-imprisonment and can be found in the last prison where a prisoner was held.
This overview on this page, which can also be downloaded, was created to provide information on the location of these documents. It also contains information on the prison files of the former remand prisons and the detention centres of the district administrations of the Ministry for State Security (MfS) that are now in the Stasi Records Archive in the Federal Archives, which includes the regional offices.
The overview does not claim to be exhaustive. We only make updates when changes are reported to us. It is meant to make it easier to find the documents in the prisons.