Terezin Fortress

About one kilometer from Terezin (german Theresienstadt) there is a fortress that in late 1800s became a prison. During the First World War it served as a camp for prisoners of war and political prisoners. The most famous prisoner is the Bosnian nationalist, Gavrilo Princip. At the age of 19, he murdered the heir to the Austrian-Hungarian Empire, Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie in Sarajevo, June 28, 1914, when they travelled in an open cortege. The shots in Sarajevo, as they have come to be called, became the triggering factor of the First World War. Princip was imprisoned and incarcerated in Terezin, where he died of tuberculosis in 1918. In June 1940, Gestapo took control of part of the small fortress and turned it into a prison.

The small fortress became the largest Nazi prison in Bohemia. It was never given official status as a concentration camp and administrated by Prague Gestapo. In total, about 90,000 people went through the prison during its existence. For several of the prisoners, the prison was a staging point. About 2,600 people were murdered in prison between 1940 and 1945. The prison was liberated at the same time as the nearby ghetto. By then a typhoid epidemic had erupted and many prisoners died after the liberation. Although the small fortress was not an official concentration camp, the conditions were the same. Gestapo set up special punishment cells and the prisoners were subjected to both torture and ill-treatment.