Exploiting vulnerable labor for profit is everything socialist propaganda crusades against. Yet, the exploitation of the inmates at Hoheneck Prison helped keep the financially ailing East Germany from completely imploding.
Of course, in reality there was nothing democratic or republican about the GDR/DDR. Survivors of the abuse and exploitation tell their tales in Alexander Lahl and Volker Schlecht’s black-and-white animated short documentary, “Kaputt/Broken—The Women’s Prison at Hoheneck,” which screened at the 2017 Sundance Film Festival.
Conditions at Hoheneck were simply barbaric.
