Warsaw Gestapo HQ
At 25 Szucha in Warsaw, Gestapo had its headquarters between 1939 and 1944. Thousands of Poles were brought there to be interrogated or imprisoned in some of the cells in the headquarters basement. Torture and maltreatment were used to force out confessions and concessions. In addition to individual cells, there were also cells called trams. There the prisoners were forced to sit and wait in chairs that were placed like benches in a tram. Several of the prisoners who ended up in headquarters later ended up in Pawiak or were taken about twenty kilometres northwest of Warsaw to the Kampino forest and murdered. The head of Warsaw Gestapo was SS-Standartenführer Josef Albert Meisinger, also called the Warsaw butcher.
Current status: Preserved with museum (2009).
Address: Aleja Jana Chrystiana Szucha 25, 05-077 Warszawa.
Get there: Tram.
Follow up in books: Höhne, Heinz: The Order of the Death’s Head: The story of Hitler’s SS (1969).
The Headquarter, perhaps together with Pawiak, were the most feared prisons in Warsaw, but they were by no means the only prisons. Prisons like Mokotow, Zamenhofa, Gesiowka and others were equally feared for those who ended up there. The museum is not big but interesting and there is an interesting, but unpleasent, running film sequence of a suffering prisoner.