Dungeon at Wewelsburg Castle where Witches and Jews were imprisoned

When you enter the dungeon in the sub-basement of the West tower, you are in a room shaped like a half circle. The circular tower was divided into three sections as shown on the floor plan below. There are two more rooms shaped like a quarter circle; these rooms have a tiny opening to the outside, as you can see in the diagram below. This is possible because the Wewelsburg castle is on the top of a hill and the sub-basement of the West tower overlooks the hillside.

The floor plan in the photo above shows the stairs going down to the interrogation room which has a door into the dungeon in the West tower.

The photo below shows the air hole to the outside in the rear of one of the quarter circle rooms.

Notice the church steeple on the extreme left in the photo above. Heinrich Himmler, the leader of the elite SS army, blamed the Catholic Church for the persecution of women as witches. He wanted Germany to go back to the old pagan religion.

On the night of November 9th and 10th in 1938, there were 30,000 Jewish men in Germany rounded up by the Nazis and sent to the concentration camps at Sachsenhausen, Dachau and Buchenwald. In the village of Salzkotten, a few miles from Wewelsburg, there were 17 Jewish men arrested and taken to the dungeon at Wewelsburg where they were kept for a few days before being transferred to Buchenwald.

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This page was created on July 17, 2008