Criminal justice in the Soviet occupation zone and German Democratic Republic (1945-1956)

The Soviet secret police used the building as a transit jail and pretrial confinement facility. Soviet military tribunals convened at this site and in several buildings on Bautzner Strasse in Dresden, which the Soviet intelligence service also used as a courthouse and jail. In expedited proceedings based on extorted confessions, the tribunals sentenced inmates to long prison terms, years of incarceration in camps or death by firing squad. Many of the prisoners were never sentenced at all. They were simply deported to the Soviet Union or sent to one of the Soviet special camps in the Soviet occupation zone, often Bautzen or Mühlberg.

Beginning in 1946, the German judicial authorities at the Dresden Regional Court (which in 1952 became Dresden District Court) tried persons who had been involved in National Socialist killings for 'crimes against humanity'. Proceedings warranting special mention include the trial of senior staff members of the Sonnenstein sanatorium in Pirna, who were charged with thousands of medical murders. Judges and prosecutors of the Dresden State Supreme Court, members of the SA and guards of the Hohnstein 'protective custody camp' were also put on trial.

With the increasing Stalinisation of the legal system, less emphasis was placed on the criminal prosecution of National Socialist crimes, which until then had been conducted more or less in accordance with the rule of law. Priority was now given to prosecuting critics and opponents of the socialist transformation, reducing the judiciary once again to an instrument for the preservation of state power.

Until the states were dissolved in the summer of 1952, only death sentences handed down by Saxon courts were carried out in Dresden. After that, Münchner Platz served as the central execution site for the entire East German judiciary until late 1956. With Stalinism and the Cold War at their height, more death sentences were handed down than at any other time in the history of the German Democratic Republic.