The museum presents the history of the maximum security prison established there in 1933 and later turned into a concentration camp, and the biographies of notable prisoners, who were mostly held there for their anti-Nazi views. It was a prison for the political elite - members of the opposition parties, ministers, resistance leaders and even the 1935 Nobel Peace Prize laureate, Carl von Ossietzky. On 30 January 1945, as the Soviet army was advancing west, 819 prisoners were executed on the courtyard of the prison. On the burial site of the murdered, a cemetery of the victims of fascism was later created.