The first definitive written record of Hohenschönhausen is from an official certificate to Conradus de Schonehusen, dated 19 August 1284.

Hohenschönhausen was affected by the Seven Years' War, and was plundered by Austrian and Russian troops after Frederick the Great's defeat at the Battle of Kunersdorf.

After the pogroms of Kristallnacht on 9 November 1938, only some isolated Jews were still allowed to carry out their business, among them was Hohenschönhausen doctor Victor Aronstein, whose waiting room served as a secret meeting place for communists and social democrats until 1939.

[3] In 1938 the district's synagogue was completely destroyed by the Nazis; its location is now the site of a memorial to the persecuted Jews of Hohenschönhausen.

Together with Wartenberg, Falkenberg and Marzahn, Hohenschönhausen was one of the first parts of Greater Berlin to be capitulated by the Red Army in the evening of 21 April 1945.

Like most of Berlin, the immediate problems facing the area included outbreaks of Typhus and Shigellosis, a lack of gas and electricity, and widespread homelessness and orphancy.

At around the same time, the Soviet secret police took over a building in an industrial area formerly occupied by the Nazi welfare organisation, the NSV,[4] and converted into use as a detainment and transit camp for prisoners of war, which continued to be used until the beginning of the fall of the German Democratic Republic in 1989.

Thanks to the secretive nature of the prison in Hohenschönhausen, a large part of the district where the facility was located was left blank on official maps.