Hohenasperg

Hohenasperg, located in the federal state of Baden-Württemberg near Stuttgart, Germany, of which it is administratively part, is an ancient fortress and prison overlooking the town of Asperg.

The first time Asperg was referred to was in the year 819, as the Shire Gozberg granted local suzerainty to Weissenburg Abbey in the Alsace.

In 1519, forces of the Swabian League under George von Frundsberg laid siege to Hohenasperg where Duke Ulrich of Württemberg was holding out.

Between 1634 and 1635, during the Thirty Years War, the castle was defended against imperial troops by a garrison of Protestants from Württemberg, reinforced by Swedish forces.

The use of the fortress as a prison is responsible for the fact that Hohenasperg is jokingly referred to as "Württemberg's highest mountain" as they say "it takes only five minutes to come to the top, but years to come back down again."

In 1737, Joseph Süß Oppenheimer, a Jew and the financial adviser to the Duke of Württemberg, was arrested and held at Hohenasperg for seven months before being executed in Stuttgart.

During the rule of King Frederick of Württemberg, deserters, military prisoners, and separatists from the Radical Pietist group from the circle of Rottenacker were kept at Fort Hohenasperg.

Further inmates in Fort Hohenasperg included the writer Berthold Auerbach, who was kept here between 1837 and 1838; Friedrich Kammerer (1833); the doctor and poet Theobald Kerner (1850–1851); the theologian Karl Hase; the satirist Johannes Nefflen; the poet Leo von Seckendorff, the writer Theodor Griesinger; and many more, mostly political dissidents, who in general were held prisoner because of their anti-monarchistic views.

At least 101 prisoners died in Hohenasperg under its hard penal system, and 20 of their names have been identified by the Ludwigsburg VVN, an antifascist organization.

[2] In May 1940, the prison was used as a way station during the first centrally planned deportation of Sinti out of southwest Germany, west of the Rhine River (Mainz, Ingelheim, Worms).