In the article the author discusses the features of the establishment of the Ger- man occupation regime on the territory of Kursk region in 1941-1943. Special attention is paid to the place and role of town and district prisons in the imposition of German “new order”. The article is based on the materials of archival and criminal cases of former chiefs of the city, district police, senior investigators, chiefs and employees of prison institutions established by order of the German occupation authorities in the Kursk region, as well as intelligence and intelligence reports and reports received by the Soviet state security bodies during the war. These materi- als were extracted from the funds of the territorial administrations of the Federal Investigation Bureau of Russia in Kursk and Belgorod regions. Until recently these documents were secret, so they were not available to the general scientific community. The analysis of office-work doc- umentation of collaborationist bodies of civil administration (city and district administrations), city and district Russian auxiliary police bodies, gendarmes, and prisons allowed to reveal the number of their employees, peculiarities of their service, lists of Soviet citizens held in these institutions. Archive and criminal cases of former leaders, employees of the Russian auxiliary police of the gendarmerie, the secret field police supplemented the picture of the activities of prison institutions created by German fascist authorities in the Kursk region. It was revealed that the main tasks of the leadership of pro-fascist prisons were isolated detention of Soviet citizens suspected in anti-fascist activities, detained suspicious persons and violators of the established regime in the occupation zone, and maintenance of internal regulations. A spe- cial attention among the functions of pro-fascist prisons leaders was paid to the recruitment of personal informers among persons in prison to identify citizens connected with partisan se- cret movement. It was found that the special prison regime was established in order to make a powerful psychological impact on Soviet citizens, and that the main criteria for the selection of employees of city and district prisons in the territories occupied by German troops were hatred towards Soviet system and also belonging to social groups repressed by the Soviet authorities in the pre-war years. The article is addressed to all those interested in the history of the peni- tentiary system of our country.