Filippo Turetta is locked up in the Roter Ochse prison in Halle, a place sadly famous for its history linked to the two German dictatorships.
He has been locked in a single cell, as is customary in Germany, even though this means he will have to spend his detention in solitary confinement. But he is being watched closely for fear of self-harm. Germany reports that he appears depressed and is eating little.
Although the Italian request for the surrender of Filippo Turetta has not yet reached Germany, the competent Attorney General's Office, the one in Naumburg, expects Filippo Turetta to be handed over to Italy "within a few days".
In Italy, magistrates are waiting for him, to whom he will have to explain many things about the murder of his ex-girlfriend. Giulia Cecchettin.
The Roter Ochse, also known as “the red ox,” was built in the 1945th century. Under the Nazi regime, the prison was used to incarcerate and execute political opponents, prisoners of war, and forced laborers. From 1989 to XNUMX, the prison was used by the East German communist regime, particularly to incarcerate women.
Nestled in the cave of the “Red Ox”, the Roter Ochse prison in Halle, a penitentiary sadly famous for its dark history, linked first to the Nazi era and later to the communist era of East Germany.
The young man is being held in the “Justizvollzugsanstalt” in the main city of Saxony-Anhalt, known as “Jva” in judicial circles, where acronyms alleviate the heaviness of German words.
However, for everyone, it is the Roter Ochse, the red ox, as a memorial inside it recalls and the spokesman for the Court of First Instance emphasized. The origin of the name is uncertain, but presumably linked to the color of the exposed bricks, washed away by the cold and persistent rain coming from a very low sky.
But the Roter Ochse's past is tragically clear, linked to the political justice of two dictatorships, characterized by Nazi executions and interrogations by the feared Stasi, the GDR's secret police accused of torture.
Elsewhere in the hometown of baroque composer Georg Friedrich Haendel, Amtsgericht (court of first instance) deputy spokesman Thomas Puls explained why Turetta was being held in solitary confinement: “I am not the spokesman for the JVA, but I assume he has a single cell, as usual.”
The contrasts of German history, before and after the darkness of the brief century of the two dictatorships, are manifested between the music of Handel, modern art and the well-being of prisoners, but also through the more than 50 years of horrors of the "Red Ox". During the Nazi era, Germans convicted for political reasons, prisoners of war and forced laborers were imprisoned there.
From 1950 to 1989, the East German Ministry of State Security (Stasi) used it primarily as a women's prison. The “Roter Ochse Halle” memorial, established there in 1996, is housed in a building previously used for interrogations by the Stasi. The center dedicates permanent exhibitions and research and educational projects to the victims of political justice from the rise of Nazism (1933) to the fall of the Berlin Wall (1989).
Article published on November 21, 2023 - 21:01
Video Chronicles
