©Sammlung Gedenkstätte Buchenwald
In 1936, the control center of the Secret State Police (Gestapo) moved from the police headquarters in what was then Sophienstraße to the former grand ducal stables. The temporary functional buildings erected in the courtyard of the building were only intended to last until the planned move to the Gauforum.
In addition to the administrative barracks with a double-walled, insulated interrogation room, there
was a makeshift prison with twelve cells in the former coach house of the Marstall, which was converted by concentration camp prisoners from Buchenwald.
Spying, house searches, arrests, torture and coerced testimony were all part of the authorities'
practice. By imposing "protective custody", it was able to have suspects sent to a concentration camp for an indefinite period of time without evidence, charge or judgment. From May 1942, the Gestapo supervised and directed the deportation of all Jewish residents of Weimar to extermination camps, with the Reithalle serving as a collection point before the transfer to the goods station.
After the end of the war, political prisoners of the Soviet occupation authorities and the Weimar district court were also imprisoned in the stables. From July 1951, the rooms were used to store the files of the State Main Archive, now the Thuringia State Archive. When a deep storage facility had to be created for the archive, the two buildings in the inner courtyard were demolished and publicly shredded in 1997 as part of Horst Hoheisel and Andreas Knitz's art project "Zermahlene Geschichte" (Crushed History). Their floor plans are now visible as a walk-in installation. The Gestapo cells in the main building now house a permanent exhibition on the history of the site.