Nearly 3000 people were executed at Plötzensee prison during the Third Reich, about half of them German resistance fighters. The room where the beheadings and hangings took place is now a hauntingly simple memorial. Housed in a plain brick shed, only a steel bar with eight hooks pierces its emptiness. Next door, an exhibit documents the Nazis’ perverted justice system, which gleefully handed out death sentences like candy at a parade. The extent of their cruelty knew no bounds. The families of the condemned even had to pay for the cost of the execution, while executioners received a bonus for each bloody deed. They were particularly busy in 1944 when many of the conspirators of the failed assassination attempt on Hitler on 20 July of that year – and their (mostly uninvolved) relatives and friends – were hanged here, a process the Führer allegedly captured on film. A free English brochure, available at the desk, provides more details than you probably want to know. Sections of the original prison are now a juvenile detention centre.