Police in Nazi Germany Research Paper

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Dictatorial regimes, not only in Europe but in many other countries outside Europe as well, have used and still use today the police for terrorizing and for controlling political opponents and for maintaining the power of the regime. The Nazi movement went far beyond this when getting hold of the police after their seizure of power.

While the Nazi regime particularly at its beginning drew on traditional police forces and started from authoritarian goals and strategies of police work, it rapidly generated a radical new kind of police organization, with a specific corps of officers, committed to Nazi ideology, and a radical concept of policing, focused on racial categories and the goal of systematically cleansing society of all groups labeled as deviant.

During the Nazi years, the maintenance of “law and order” and crime control and the persecution of political opponents became increasingly intertwined with policies of racial, often total, exclusion. A police force evolved not only supporting but promoting politics of genocide.

Police In Nazi Germany: Institutional Contexts

Since the beginnings of modern policing in Germany during the nineteenth century, and due to federalism as a core characteristic of the German political system, the police had always been under the command of the federal states. There has never been, except for the Nazi period, a large-scale and centralized national police. “Police” meant, and still means primarily, the polices of the L€ander, federal states (i.e., before 1933 Prussia, Bavaria, Saxonia, etc.). This institutional context remained unchanged until the end of the Weimar Republic. Although demands were put forward during the 1920s for more centralization, in particular for fighting crime more effectively, a centralized police apparatus did not emerge before 1933.

In July 1932, the conservative German Reichsregierung, the national government, had the middle-left Prussian government on the basis of an emergency decree dismissed, constituting a kind of prelude to the institutional changes, which took place after the Nazi seizure of power. In 1932, a presumed incapacity for maintaining law and order was given as a reason for the replacement of the Prussian government (senior police officers included) by commissioners, installed by the national government.

After the Nazi seizure of power at the end of January 1933, a leading and prominent figure of the Nazi party, Hermann Go¨ ring, was commissioned to direct the Prussian Ministry of the Interior. This position served as a basis for getting hold of the Prussian uniformed police and the Kriminalpolizei (Kripo, Criminal Police) as power instruments for consolidating the Nazi regime. Two emergency decrees, issued in the weeks after the Nazi seizure of power, suspended the basic constitutional rights of the citizens, thus providing the Nazi regime with the capacities for prosecuting ruthlessly its political opponents. These two emergency decrees issued in February 1933 served until the end of the Nazi regime as a pseudo-legal basis for the unlimited police power of the regime.

Another leading and prominent figure of the Nazi party, Heinrich Himmler, became head of the Bavarian Political Police soon after the Nazi seizure of power. Thereafter, until the first months of 1934, Heinrich Himmler gained the command of most of the political police departments of the L€ander and finally the command of the Prussian Political Police as well, which had been labeled since the end of November 1933 as “Geheime Staatspolizei.” In November 1934, all political polices, existing by that time in Germany, were collected under the directorship of Himmler. In a parallel process, the command over the polices was transferred from the L€ander to the national government. This development toward a centralized national police came to a central point, when Himmler was given in June 1936 the title of “Reichsfuhrer SS and Chef der Deutschen Polizei,” indicating his dual directorship as head of the SS and the German police. In the aftermath of this entitlement, the centralization and the “Vereichlichung” (nationalization) of the different police branches were further enhanced; under Himmler, a national police apparatus had been established, which had not existed before.

But the centralization of the police was only one aspect on the police agenda of the Nazi regime. A further, very important development was the merging of the police apparatus with the SS, in order to create a novel kind of security force effectively and vigorously serving the ideological ends of the Nazi regime. This meant a growing detachment of the police from its traditional institutional context, while it was more and more interleaved with the organizations of the Nazi movement. Under the organizational roof of the “Reichssicherheitshauptamt,” a sort of holding for the different security forces of the Nazi regime, which was established in 1939 after the beginning of the war, this merging of the police with the SS apparatus did find its institutional imprint (Topographie des Terrors 2010; Wildt 2009).

Police In Nazi Germany II: From Dictatorial State Police To Ideological Security Force

After the Nazi movement got hold of the police in 1933, it took them only a few years to establish a new approach of policing, clearly exceeding the politics of persecution and suppression known from other dictatorships and authoritarian regimes being in power in Europe at that time.

Under the Nazis, the police’s functions were no longer focused on “traditional” target groups only, such as criminal perpetrators and political opponents. The police became instead increasingly, and in a growing proactive manner, focused on specific categories of people, who, based on racial (Jews, Roma, and Sinti) and to a significant extent on criminal-biological criteria (social outsiders, habitual criminals), were labeled as enemies of the racially defined ethnic community of Germans, the “Volksgemeinschaft” (Herbert 2011).

Policing was conceptualized as a policy of social cleansing, meant to rid the “Volksgemeinschaft” of political and criminal “enemies of the people” (“Volksfeinde”) and of all “community aliens” (“Gemeinschaftsfremde”), not fitting into or not willing or capable to adapt to the racial and biological scheme of the Nazi regime. This conceptualization was expressed in the image of the police as a “doctor” cutting out all symptoms of sickness out of the “social body.” Racism, concepts of “racial hygiene,” and criminal biology, increasingly popular since the 1920s, now penetrated nearly all layers of police work. The identification and persecution of members of “foreign races” and the stigmatization and exclusion of “hereditary” or habitual criminals and of other categories of people labeled as deviant became a core component of a police-driven, for those concerned increasingly deadly social engineering. The new police concept constituted the basis for an active participation of the police forces in the murderous and genocidal politics of the Nazi regime.

Policing during the Nazi regime rested upon a familiar yet specifically radicalized division of labor: While the State Police (Geheime Staatspolizei, Gestapo) organized the repression of political opponents and took part in the elimination of “racial aliens,” such as Jews, Poles, or Russians, the Criminal Police (Kriminalpolizei, Kripo) became responsible for the prosecution and the elimination of criminals, social outcasts, and the group of Roma and Sinti. The uniformed police (since 1936 under the label Ordnungspolizei, Orpo), responsible for the overall maintenance of law and order in Nazi society, was involved in the surveillance of everyday life and played an important role in ensuring the populace’s conformity and identifying deviants. It thus provided essential assistance to the Security Police making a significant contribution to the Nazi regime’s political persecution and social exclusion.

Phases Of Development

The historical research on the police during the Nazi regime has identified five phases for summarizing the growing involvement of the police in the Nazi regime. During the first phase, primarily during the months after the Nazi seizure of power, the efforts of the Nazi regime were much focused on getting hold of the police as a power instrument, indispensible for suppressing political opponents and for maintaining the Nazi regime during its first months of being in power. The second phase, consisting more or less of the years 1934 to 1936, could be described as the phase when foundations for a merging of the police and the SS apparatus of the Nazi movement were laid. This merging was started by putting Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS apparatus, and other SS leaders at the head of the German police; by linking the Kriminalpolizei and the Gestapo under the label of a national socialist Security Police (Sicherheitspolizei); and by placing the Security Police and the Security Service of the SS, the Sicherheitsdienst (SD), under a joint institutional roof. The third phase, that is, the years from 1936 to 1939, was very much marked by specific forms of radicalizations of police practices. During these years, the Kripo and the Gestapo began to implement the racialbiological ideologies of the Nazi regime into police work and started to select systematically those groups labeled as enemies of the “community” for special police measures, for new forms of confinement, and eventually for deportation into the expanding concentration camp system. With the beginning of the war in September 1939 and the establishment of the “Reichssicherheitshauptamt” in that year until late 1944, the police in its fourth phase of its involvement in the Nazi regime turned into the most important instrument for the completion of the Nazi racial ideologies: By its participation in the killing units of the “Einsatzgruppen,” the police engaged as main actor in the mass murder of the European Jews in Europe. So did the units of the uniformed police, especially after the war against the Soviet Union had begun (1941). And back home within Germany, it was the police which summoned the German-Jewish population of the cities and the countryside for the deportation into the concentration camps and which accompanied as guards the trains and transported the victims to the death camps. By the same time, the Kripo again radicalized its practices by sending in more and more people into concentration camps, thus occupying next to the Gestapo a central position in the overall strategy for the cleansing of the “community” from its enemies. When carrying out this, the Gestapo and the Kripo were not only instruments used by the Nazi regime but engaged in it beyond obeying orders by putting forward own initiatives for improving the efficiency of the cleansing of the “Volksgemeinschaft,” that is, of mass murder. During the fifth and final phase, which lasted from 1944 to the end of the war and the end of the Nazi regime in 1945, the radicalization of police practices intensified once again. During this final phase, the Security Police focused its control efforts on the foreign workers, who lived by that time in enormous number in Germany and had mostly been forced to work for the “Third Reich.” Moreover, indicators on increasing discontent and disloyalty among the Germans within the “Reich” turned into a major concern for the Security Police. Starting in the last months of the war and the regime and continuing in its final days, the Security Police tried to cope with the decreasing power of the regime and the increasing disloyalty of the population with a dramatically growing brutalization, resulting in the mass murders of foreign workers and political opponents and selected killings of ordinary Germans no longer loyal to the regime during the final days of the war.

The Security Police And Its Personnel

In order to turn the Security Police into the police of the “Volksgemeinschaft,” it became organizationally realigned, centralized, and provided with new hierarchical structures, guidelines, and standards. The transformation and renewal of the staff played a key role as well. While the personnel of the Kripo with about 13,000 employees was mainly transformed with the normal turnover of staff, the Gestapo was established fundamentally new. On the basis of the political police of the Weimar Republic, with its approximately 1,000 officers, the Gestapo grew to an apparatus with over 30,000 employees until the end of World War II.

Senior positions within the Gestapo and the Criminal Police were held since 1933 by men who openly showed their loyalty to the Nazi regime or had even been active in the Nazi movement for a long time already. The few police officers, who had declared themselves against the Nazis and had represented a decidedly republican, democratic police during the Weimar years, were dismissed or demoted. New police recruits had to indicate, at least through membership in the Nazi party, that they were supporting the regime permanently. The police training combined political-ideological indoctrination and professional police instruction. Finally, with the inclusion of police officers in the SS, and with joint spheres of action and social contacts between the Security Police and the SS Security Service (SD), close relations between police and the Nazi apparatus emerged (Banach 1998; Browder 1996).

In this way, the Sipo established the model of a new type of police officer, combining expert knowledge and professional ambition with ideological radicalism and the commitment of a “political soldier.” This new type of police officer became a dominating pattern inside the head office of the Gestapo and the Criminal Police in Berlin, as well as among the senior officers of the regional headquarters of the Sipo branches. This leadership group consisted mainly of younger cadres with middle-class background, well-educated, academically trained, often active in extreme right-wing organizations before 1933 and striving for implementing the societal models of the Nazi regime (Wildt 2009). Another form of “Nazification” took place among the lower ranks of the Security Police, particularly within the Gestapo, which, due to its growing staff requirements, recruited members of Nazi organizations with low-level formal education only and without specific police skills. These activists played an important part in the implementation of the Nazi movement’s political and racial stereotypes and its violence into police practice.

Despite these fundamental changes, patterns of regular, traditional police work remained present in the Sipo (Dams and Stolle 2012; Roth 2010). Established procedures and routines of criminal investigation and administration were not abolished but pursued for the purposes of Nazi regime. In addition, older senior detectives, who had entered the police service during the German Empire or after World War I, played a significant role even after 1933. Although the Nazi leadership had promised to purge the police of politically “unreliable” officers after the seizure of power, the rate of dismissals in 1933/1934 was relatively low (<5 %), partially due to the lack of candidates for replacing the officers to be dismissed. Thus, detectives, who were professionally trained and socialized in the Weimar Republic, had a significant impact on the apparatus of the Sipo, in particular during the early years of the Nazi regime. In the middle and lower ranks of the Sipo, the local posts, and particularly inside the Kripo, they remained an influential and supporting element until the end of the regime. With their experience and technical knowledge, they contributed significantly to the functioning and effectiveness of the Security Police.

Reasons For Support And Initiative

The support that the Nazi regime gained from various groups of police officers was due to political indoctrination, opportunism, and careerism; instead, shared values and professional expectations were key factors in that respect as well. Nationalism, antiliberalism and anticommunism, radically stereotyped views on political outsiders or marginalized groups, authoritarian conceptions of state intervention, and social order (“law and order”) had been part of the mainstream police philosophy during the 1920s. The rejection of parliamentary democracy and of the rule of law, demands for extensive and harsh control of political opponents, social outcasts and criminals, and the expansion, unification, and centralization of the police forces came upon a broad consensus within the police apparatus. The Nazis reacted positively on the demands and expectations circulating inside the police by suspending or abolishing existing legal restrictions and by giving the police the means for realizing their ideas of radical social control and social cleansing. In the “fight against criminality,” against “enemies of the Volksgemeinschaft” or against “antisocial elements,” the police and Nazi movement, senior detectives, and the new leadership of the Sipo shared the goals to pursue (Paul and Mallmann 1996; Wagner 1996).

As far as the cultural integration of the police in the Nazi state was concerned, celebrations or public events played a role, too. Of particular importance was that the Sipo was given a new image, which was perceived positively by most police officers. While public criticism of the police nearly disappeared after the suppression of the free press, the Nazi regime and senior Sipo officers developed an image of the police, which depicted the detectives as modern, scientifically trained, effective investigators and provided the Gestapo with the myth of an omnipresent and omnipotent power apparatus.

For the participation of Kripo and Gestapo officers in the terror of the Nazi regime, other factors and processes were important as well: increasing routine and familiarity with practices of exclusion and violence, the dehumanization of the victims through propaganda and bureaucratic procedures, and division of labor and responsibilities and social distance to those persecuted, but also the emergence of a specific Nazi ‘cop culture’ that was based on harshness and soldierly masculinity, camaraderie, and group pressure.

The Security Police: Methods And Instruments Of Power

The alignment of the Sipo with the overall policies of the Nazi regime and the emergence of a concept of “racial policing” was accompanied by an expansion of instruments of power and a radicalization of police methods. Limitations of police work by legal bonds and external controls were abolished, and fundamental civil and human rights were suspended. Those affected were exposed to nearly unrestricted police arbitrariness.

While the Gestapo and Kripo detectives continued to work as a part of the law enforcement process and as an investigative administration for the public prosecutor, an independent police penal justice steadily expanded since 1933.

Its base was the introduction of an independent police custody, the so-called protective custody (Schutzhaft) used by the Gestapo and the “preventive custody” in the case of the Kripo. Both instruments allowed for detention without formal criminal justice proceedings and judicial review and resulted in permanent confinements of regime opponents and offenders in prisons or concentration camps. Those affected by these forms of confinement could be exposed to permanent drill, exhausting labor, hunger and disease, corporal punishments, and mortal danger. “Protective” and “preventive custody” enabled the police to punish, even on the ground of mere suspicion and poor evidence. Both forms of custody were used to “correct” court decisions and became instruments used massively for the intimidation and elimination of political opponents and people labeled as deviant. By applying this police custody, Gestapo and Kripo developed a policy of social exclusion that, until 1945, took several hundred thousand people into the concentration camps.The radicalization of police methods went even further within the Gestapo. While the use of physical violence against suspects by the Criminal Police was rather the exception, the Gestapo had the right to use violence for extorting statements. Against the backdrop of World War II, the Gestapo implemented its own prison camps, the so-called corrective labor camps (Arbeitserziehungslager), where prisoners were usually held for several weeks. In the 1940s, groups such as Jews, Poles, or Russians were completely removed from the realm of the judiciary and brought completely under the control of the Gestapo. Toward the end of the war, local and regional Gestapo offices were finally empowered to execute prisoners.

Arbitrary arrests and deportations, penetrations of the private sphere, extensive surveillance measures, and the use of informers (V-M€anner) were the main features of the work of the Security Police, but routine police methods of investigation, detection, and forensic collection were continued as well, being the basis for the deployment of police terror. Despite the image of being omnipresent and omnipotent, the police force was dependent on the support of other institutions of the Nazi state. When heading for a comprehensive control of the “Volksgemeinschaft,” the Sipo’s own resources and personnel were insufficient (Gellately 1990; Paul and Mallmann 1996). But the Security Police could count on the cooperation of other instances of social control: Together with subunits of the Nazi party, the uniformed police, government and municipal administrations, health and employment services, the tax administration, postal and railroad services, as well as the customs authorities and large parts of the economic sector, a cooperative network for enhancing and enforcing the policies and the terror of the Nazi regime was created. Significant support came also from the public. For controlling and suppressing core political opposition groups such as communists, or for controlling so-called criminals, the Gestapo and the Kripo could fall back on their own investigative work, but for the discovery of small individual deviances and minor violations, for the observation of everyday life, for the penetration into the privacy of suspected people, and for the pervasion of so-called closed milieus, the Sipo had to rely on denouncers and informers. For the discovery of a spontaneous protest, for the exclusion of the Jews from the “German” society, and for the close observation of minorities, input from the population and party organizations was essential. The power of Gestapo and Kripo derived not only from the results of its own investigations but from a network of individual and institutional supporters.

Key Aspects Of Gestapo Work

Central to the work of the Sipo were permanent dynamics of radicalization (Dams and Stolle 2012; Mallmann and Paul 2000). When heading for an overall cleansing of the “Volksgemeinschaft” by eliminating political opponents’ “racial enemies” and all sorts of deviance within the population, new enemy groups and accordingly new security requirements were continuously constructed. Initially the most important activity of the Secret State Police was the suppression of the left-wing workers’ movement, in which the regime saw the main potential for opposition and unrest. The Gestapo’s attack was directed primarily against communists, moreover against socialists, social democrats, and representatives of the Free Trade Unions. By 1933, tens of thousands of opponents have been arrested, mistreated and tortured, handled by criminal courts, or transferred to – by that time – early forms of concentration camps. Other measures were repeated raids, searches, and the confiscation of literature, printing machines, and illegal publications; the ban of organizations and newspapers; and the closure of the workers’ movement’s associations. Although the left opposition was constantly trying to reorganize illegal groups, the Gestapo managed to dismantle their resistance until 1936/1937.

Additionally, the Gestapo also developed a supporting role in the control of the Christian churches and religious groups. The aim was to stem criticism from the churches, to promote the adaptation of the believers to the Nazi ideology, to force the churches out of the public, and to reduce their impact on the population. Here, the repressive approach of the Gestapo was clearly more differentiated than toward communist resistance and was aimed mainly at integration into the “Volksgemeinschaft.” While in Protestant-dominated areas, the Gestapo only monitored a critical minority within the church; in Catholic areas, where the Gestapo suspected a widespread reluctance to Nazism, the State Police developed a wide range of measures: It reached from the observation of meetings and church services and larger propaganda campaigns against the church to the ban on Christian associations and the punishment of individual representatives of political Catholicism and dissident clerics.

Another important field of Gestapo work was the control of public opinion. In addition to the suppression of critical statements from the labor movement and the churches, the communication of “ordinary” citizens should be regulated. Based on new decrees and laws putting the criticism of the representatives and actions of the government and the Nazi party under punishment as “treachery” (Heimtucke), the Gestapo initiated tens of thousands of investigations. Since the beginning of the war, expressing doubts about the Nazi propaganda or pessimistic statements about the war were persecuted more intensely and partly criminalized as “undermining of the military strength” (Wehrkraftzersetzung). The same was true of the media consumption of the population, as listening to foreign radio stations and distributing demoralizing information could be persecuted since 1939 under the label “radio crime” (Rundfunkverbrechen).

Since the mid-1930s, the State Police exerted increased pressure on nonconformist juveniles who rejected national socialist cultural hegemony by insisting on their particular subcultures and by turning against the Nazi youth organization. In addition, the Gestapo initiated wide-ranging prosecution actions against homosexuals, whose behavior was considered a threat to Nazi population policy. It punished violations of economic policy and labor discipline as well and was responsible for criminal proceedings against deviant members of the Nazi movement. On all these fields, the Gestapo sometimes acted in competition but usually in close consultation with the Kripo.

In several of these fields of action and against occasional violations of the norms of the community the Security Police, especially during the prewar years, acted selectively (Gellately 2001; Roth 2010). So it not only applied hard, negative sanctions but used warnings and lighter penalties to intimidate and discipline violators, in order to make them get in line with the “Volksgemeinschaft.”

As far as the German-Jewish population was concerned, the police aimed at a radical marginalization and exclusion. While the political, social, and economic exclusion of Jews had been enhanced during the first years after the Nazi seizure of power very much by Nazi party subunits, the Gestapo thereafter took more and more the initiative. Since legislations in 1935, which turned German Jews into second-class citizens, the Gestapo went into organizing the discrimination, isolation, and exclusion of this population group. The police conducted the registration of German Jews, restricted their freedom of movement, were continuously involved in the criminalization of relations between Jews and non-Jews, and also contributed to the economic expropriation of Jewish citizens.

As of November 1938, the Gestapo began with the systematic exclusion from German society. During and after the November 1938 pogroms, the Gestapo throughout Germany arrested more than 30,000 German-Jewish men and deported them into concentration camps, where the victims were released only when they had agreed upon abandoning their properties and upon leaving Germany. Just a few weeks earlier, in a nationwide campaign, the Gestapo had arrested about 17,000 Polish Jews and deported them over the German-Polish border – a test run for the mass deportations of the 1940s.

From the spring of 1941, the Gestapo organized the final spatial segregation of the remaining Jews within Germany. In the cities Jews were evicted from “Aryan” houses and sent to special “ghetto houses” or local camps. People of Jewish origin, who were kept in asylums, prisons, and other institutions, were separated from other inmates and handed over to the Gestapo. From autumn 1941, the State Police organized the deportations from the “Reich” to the ghettos and death camps in occupied Eastern Europe. By 1943 some 150,000 people were deported from Germany, while only a few were able to survive as “Mischlinge” (crossbreeds), partners in so-called mixed marriages or in hiding.

The Work Of The Kripo

Unlike the Gestapo, the Criminal Police was initially focused more on traditional police activities such as criminal investigation and crime detection. During the 1930s, however, its practice was more and more determined by the methods and goals of a police of the “Volksgemeinschaft” (Browder 1996; Wagner 1996). In late 1933, the senior ranks of the Kripo opened a new field of activity under the label of “preventive fighting against crime” (vorbeugende Verbrechensbek€ampfung). Under the pretext of reducing crime, the Kripo rendered recidivists into “preventive detention” by deporting them for an indefinite time into concentration camps, even in the absence of a specific offense or criminal court proceedings. Since 1934, the policemen were also enabled to subject known criminals to a “systematic observation” (“planm€aßige U€ berwachung”) and rigid rules of conduct.

At the beginning, the policy of preventive fighting against crime targeted at a relative small group of a few thousand criminals, which should be kept from further criminal activity by deterrence and confinement. With the vision of a “Volksgemeinschaft” without crime in mind, the Kripo constantly enlarged its net. According to a nationwide campaign of arrests against 2,000 so-called professional and habitual criminals (“Berufs-” and “Gewohnheitsverbrecher”) in March 1937, the local Kripo offices started systematically detecting recidivists and sending them in very large numbers to concentration camps. The criminal deportations soon were directed not only against professional burglars and violent or sexual offenders but met more often petty criminals. At the same time, the persecution of homosexuals now shifted from the Gestapo to the Kripo. Even when acting against other social outcasts, the Kripo officers acted with increasing harshness. By doing so, the Criminal Police took up and radicalized the strategies and practices, pursued already by labor, social, and health administrations. As early as 1933, the Kripo had initiated numerous raids against prostitutes, beggars, and vagrants, demonstrating that social “disorder” and public “indecency” should no longer be openly tolerated. The next step came when the practice of “crime prevention” in December 1937 was extended to marginalized groups, and the Kripo was empowered to apply indefinite confinement on all individuals “endangering the general public by asocial behavior.” Thereupon the concentration camp became a common measure against outsiders, while the Kripo turned into the dominant actor of social exclusion (Ayaß 1995; Gellately and Stoltzfus 2001).

In 1938, the police leadership prompted two nationwide sweeps against so-called work shy, in the course of which the Criminal Police arrested more than 9,000 people (the Gestapo about 1,500). Since then the local Kripo posts consistently put more and more “asocials” into “preventive detention” – next to prostitutes, homeless and vagrants welfare recipients, alcoholics, men neglecting their family duties, women labeled as promiscuous and women with venereal diseases, dealers, peddlers, etc. Even biographically, “crime prevention” radicalized: Since the early 1940s, 1,000 “criminal and antisocial youths” were interned, terrorized, and biologically examined in special camps. Especially involved was the female unit of the Kripo (Weibliche Kriminalpolizei), which not only served as kind of welfare police for (female) adolescents but was responsible for the elimination of “criminal offspring.” Until the end of the Nazi era, the Kripo under the label of “crime prevention” delivered about 80,000 offenders to the terror of the concentration camps (Wagner 1996).

In addition, there was the fight against “alien races.” The Criminal Police assisted the Gestapo in its anti-Jewish policy, for example, by sending Jews with criminal records to camps or persecuting relationships between “Aryans” and “nonAryans” as “race defilement” (“Rassenschande”).

To core projects of the Kripo belonged the exclusion of the Roma and Sinti, who, as “gypsies,” had been particularly discriminated against and placed under special surveillance long before 1933 (Zimmermann 1996). Since the mid-1930s, they were deprived of civil rights,prohibited further mobility, separately registrated, examined by racial experts, and marked as “racial aliens.” After May 1940 the Kripo started several deportations, taking thousands of German and Austrian Roma and Sinti to the annexed and occupied Poland, where most of them lost their lives. From March 1943, about 23,000 “gypsies” from the “Reich” and occupied Europe were transported to the extermination camp at Auschwitz. As the practice of Gestapo, the work of the Kripo since the 1940s was closely associated with national socialist mass murder.

Gestapo And Kripo During World War II

The beginning of World War II provided additional rationalizations for the radicalization of policing and increased the willingness of policemen to act harshly and murderously against political, social, and racial “enemies.” With the expansion of the Nazi regime into large parts of Europe, new spaces of social control and eliminatory rule were created, while millions of people who were defined as dangerous by the Nazi regime fell in the hands of the Gestapo and the Criminal Police (Mallmann and Paul 2000; Topographie des Terrors 2010).

The further radicalization of the Sipo occurred in the occupied territories, where the Sipo exercised unprecedented and unbound physical violence. Since September 1939, more and more Gestapo and Kripo detectives had to leave their offices within Germany and put themselves at the service of Nazi occupation and warfare. Some of them participated in the “Einsatzgruppen,” who entered the occupied territories behind the Wehrmacht to “cleanse” the conquered areas of indigenous elites, oppositional groups, Jews, and minorities like gypsies and the disabled. The “Einsatzgruppen,” already established as mobile killing units in the Polish campaign 1939 and considerably extended since the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, have been responsible for the direct killing of hundreds of thousands of people especially in Eastern Europe (Klein 1997). In these units, and the offices established in the occupied territory, the institutional merging of police and SS was further promoted.

Members of the Security Police were involved at all levels in Nazi crimes: in the invention of killing techniques for the gas vans and death camps and the “administrative execution” of genocide; in the surveillance of ghettos and economic plundering of the occupied countries; in reprisals against political opponents, mass executions of Jews, political officials, prisoners of war, or “partisans”; and in the killing of “criminals,” “asocials,” or “gypsies.” In the violent environment of the East, it could be practiced without restraint and directly, what the police in the “Reich” before the war could achieve only indirectly through deportation and imprisonment into concentration camps: the annihilation of those categories of people defined as enemies of the “Volksgemeinschaft.” When doing this, the Security Police was not only supported by the Germany army or the civil administrations of the occupied countries. An important element of German police power in Europe was the collaboration of local police forces, radical nationalist organizations, and auxiliaries, which contributed significantly to the execution of mass murder.

The Security Police On The “Home Front”

In the course of World War II also inside Germany, the Sipo radicalized its scenarios of crucial enemies and possible dangers (Mallmann and Paul 2000). Political opposition and social deviance were now seen as a threat to the Nazi war effort and the stability of the “home front.” But while this resulted in a further tightening of sanctions, gaps in the system of police control were widening, as many officers were withdrawn from the “internal front,” the police functions were continually extended, and the prolonged war and ongoing air raids, especially in big cities, lead to a decline of law-abidance and loyalty to the regime. The impending loss of control in the war did not lead the Security Police to a strategy of deescalation but was answered with a further intensification of terror. To this added, that police officers who had returned from the occupied territories brought their experiences of violence and concepts of “enemy combat” with them to the “internal front.” Due to the expansion of control requirements and the social distractions of war society, the Kripo focused more and more on the disciplining of those refusing to work for the war community, on surveilling the conduct of young people and single women, on halting the spread of sexually transmitted diseases among prostitutes and soldiers, or on the persecution of the black market, “looting” and other war-related crimes (Roth 2010; Wagner 1996). These control efforts also met conservative and bourgeois opponents of the regime – as the mass arrests after the attempt to assassinate Hitler in 1944 illustrate.

However, on the “home front” within Germany, racial politics stood at the center of the State Police’s activity. In addition to the exclusion of the Jewish population, the control of “foreign workers” became a main task of the Gestapo – especially since the intensification of the use of foreign workers in the German Economy (Ausl€andereinsatz) and the massive recruitment of forced laborers from the occupied Soviet Union since 1942. The Gestapo not only had to monitor the work discipline of foreign workers and to ensure the functioning of the war economy, it also was to suppress resistance and sabotage and punish forbidden relations between Germans and foreigners. That was mainly applied to workers from Poland and Soviet Russia: They were classified as “racial aliens” and placed at the bottom of the racial hierarchy of the Nazi system, were regarded as a special threat to the order of the “internal front,” and were almost entirely subject to the power and violence of the State Police. Since the middle of the war, the measures of the Gestapo even included the killing of East European laborers. Numerous Polish, Ukrainian, or Russian civilian workers, who have had intimate relations with locals, were publicly executed due to transgression of “racial barriers” (Gellately 2001). This indicates what State Police practice characterized in the last months of the war: A policy of open terror, which brought mass murder to the “home front.” In the final phase of the war, the Gestapo inside the “Reich” increasingly followed the models and methods of occupation. Hierarchies, bureaucratic procedures, and the formal allocation of responsibilities became less important, as much of the work of the State Police was taken by Sonderkommandos (special task forces) operating with high mobility and flexibility. They worked increasingly independent to the central offices in Berlin, with almost unlimited instruments of terror. In the last months of the war, executions, initially dependent upon authorization from Berlin, could be imposed by regional commanders of the Security Police and eventually the local offices themselves. Before the collapse of the Nazi system, the work of the Gestapo in the “Reich” was marked by mass arrests, targeted killings, and “combat missions.” They were directed primarily against “foreign workers,” young people, deserters, and criminals who were in hiding in the ruins of the big cities.

Since the Gestapo with its flexible organizational structures and unlimited powers assumed nearly all of the Security Police’s competencies, the officers of the Criminal Police lost importance and influence in the last months of the Nazi regime. However, at least some of the Kripo officers participated in arbitrary killings and supported the “final battle” of the Gestapo.

The Uniformed Police: Everyday Practices And Participation In The Holocaust

During the Weimar Republic Period, the uniformed police tried to change the image it had in the public. While an image, deriving from the police before World War I, lingered on, which portrayed the police very much as authoritarian, militaristic, and emphasizing the social distance between the uniformed police and the general public, senior police officers tried to change this image for a portrait, which displayed a police much closer to the public, a police, which was no longer primarily a protector of the state but a protector of the “people” as well. After the Nazi seizure of power, the leadership of the police attempted to give this portrait even more contours by popularizing a label, which showed “The police, your friend and helper.” The uniformed police organized during the 1930s and even during the first years of the war a number of “Tage der Polizei” (days of the police), which, as a public relations action, were to propagandize the label. Other activities, inaugurated by the police during the 1930s, focused on improving the traffic circulation in the cities and on preventing the growing risk of traffic accidents, by training the general public, in particular children, how to behave adequately on the roads of the city. All this was intended to make the slogan “The police, your friend and helper” popular, but this label covered only partially the reality of the uniformed police during the Nazi regime. The uniformed police was “friend and helper” only to those, who were members of the “Volksgemeinschaft.” Jews, for example, were not members of this community, which comprised only Germans along very narrowly defined social, racial, and biological criteria. Some of those, who were opponents of the new regime, or were not members of the “Volksgemeinschaft,” experienced immediately, others very soon a new repressive side of the uniformed police and a new specific, selective approach to law and order, influenced by the political strategies of the Nazi regime. The uniformed police did not intervene, when political opponents of the Nazi regime were arrested, maltreated, or even killed but conceded instead to a partition of labor with the police doing the work, which looked professional and members of the paramilitary groups of the Nazi movement, often in the position of auxiliary police personnel, doing the “dirty” work, such as torture and killings of political opponents. And in 1933, soon after the Nazi movement had come into power, the police did not intervene, when the Nazi movement staged a boycott against German-Jewish shopowners and merchants, thus indicating law and order might not pertain to German Jews any longer. These attitudes became increasingly enhanced, when a growing loading of police training with patterns of Nazi ideology and anti-Semitic contents occurred (Matth€aus 2003; Westermann 2005).

Institutionally and organizationally, the uniformed police experienced a drawback, when in 1936, after a organizational reconstruction, which had started very early after the Nazi seizure of power already, the units of the uniformed police were transferred to the German army to increase the army’s numerical strength. This weakened the organizational resources of the uniformed police and reduced the number of its personnel to about fifty percent of its original strength. Until the end of the 1930s, the uniformed police gradually managed to increase again the number of its officers and to reestablish police units. The personnel of these newly established units, later named as police battalions (Polizeibataillone), was comprised to large extents of police reserve recruits without any professional police background instead of professional police officers. These police units were used alongside the military, when the Nazi regime annexed Austria (1938) and Czechoslovakia (1938/1939). These participations of units of the uniformed police still ran under the heading of securing the occupied territories, but with the start of the war against Poland in 1939, the uniformed police turned into an instrument executing the racial and genocidal ideologies of the Nazi regime. The uniformed police finally became a murderous key institution in the Holocaust. Already during the starting phase of the war against Poland, the units of the uniformed police, following the advancing German army, committed atrocities among the Polish population, Jewish and non-Jewish, thus becoming part of the racial strategies the Nazi regime started pursuing already during the first phase of the war. Especially the violent transfer of populations, the settlement of “ethnic Germans” in the occupied parts of Western Poland and the brutal eviction of Polish and Polish-Jewish inhabitants of these parts of the country into the occupied central Poland (the “Generalgouvernement”) became one of the first elements of the participation of the uniformed police in the geostrategical and racial policies of the Nazi regime.

With the beginning of the war against the Soviet Union in June 1941, the involvement of the units of the uniformed police gained unprecedented genocidal dimensions. The socalled Einsatzgruppen, operating in the hinterland of the advancing German army within the Soviet Union, killed more than 500,000 victims until the end of 1941, most of them Jews. These mobile killings units not only were composed of members of the Security Police and the Security Service of the SS (SD) but could rely to large parts on military SS-formations (Waffen-SS) and members of the uniformed police. These mobile killing units advanced within the Soviet Union as far as the German army, that is, into the territory of the former Baltic states, and from there close to Leningrad, they covered Belorussia and moved forward into the vicinity of Moscow, covered the whole of Ukraine and proceeded as far as the northern fringe of the Caucasus. Most of the direct killing actions and massacres on the Eastern Front, as the killing of about 33,000 Jews from Kiew in Babi Jar, were carried out by the “Einsatzgruppen” and supporting units.

While the overall number of members of the “Einsatzgruppen” remained relatively small (there were up to 3,000 men in the “Einsatzgruppen” following the advancing German army in the war against the Soviet Union), the overall figures for the members of the units of the uniformed police participating in war, occupation and genocide were much higher: In occupied Poland and in the occupied parts of the Soviet Union, approximately 50,000 men served in different units of the uniformed police, the number of these units amounting to 90. This high figure of men serving in mobile units of the uniformed police was due to the fact that the Order Police was not limited to its participation in the murderous actions of the “Einsatzgruppen.” The units of the uniformed police carried out a great number of executions of their own, quite often when the Ghettos in the cities of Eastern Europe, where the Jewish population was forced to live in, were dissolved and its inhabitants being sent into the death camps. But the radius of action of the uniformed police was not limited to Eastern Europe. In most of the countries occupied by Nazi Germany, units of the uniformed police held a significant position in the occupation apparatus, often charged with a more general maintenance of the security in the occupied countries. In the later phases of the war, units of the uniformed police became heavily involved in fighting guerrilla activities against the German occupation (“Partisanen-” or “Bandenbek€ampfung,” terms often used for masking executions of Jewish men, women, and children; the elimination of resistance groups; and the brutal suppression of the local population). During the final phases of the war, units of the uniformed police took part in the indiscriminate mass killings of hostages all over Europe, leading to the extinction of whole village populations (Oradour-sur-Glane).

The overall death toll, for which the uniformed police of the Nazi regime could be held responsible, is difficult to calculate precisely. But calculations in different publications, older ones (Gutman 1990) and more recent ones (Curilla 2011), count approximately 1,200,000 victims, who were either murdered by the units of the uniformed police or by members of this police as participating in mass executions as members of other units (“Einsatzgruppen”).

After 1945: Research And Institutional Reflections

Elaborated research about the role and the functions of the police as part of the Nazi regime did set in late in Germany. The few studies available until the 1980s either gave limited descriptions of the police’s institutional settings and the development of this settings during the years from the Nazi seizure of power until the end of the war, or they focused on the Gestapo, emphasizing a picture of the Gestapo as omnipresent and omnipotent, terrorizing political opponents and the so-called racial enemies of the German people and, since the beginning of the war, covering the whole of Nazi-occupied Europe with its murderous activities. This early research concentrated very much on a top-down perspective, by looking primarily at the main goals, leadership, and institutional context of the Gestapo’s activities without analyzing the whole personnel involved and without detailing the Gestapo’s impact and societal background. This changed for a bottom-up perspective, when the social his- tory turn within historiography touched upon the writing about the Gestapo as well. This meant primarily to find out in detail what the Gestapo had meant for its victims. But next to the attempts of giving answers to this question, another feature turned up during the 1970s and 1980s: A new social history of the Gestapo revealed how important input from other institutions and the population had been for the work of the police during the Nazi regime, in particular input in the form of denunciations and input deriving from all sorts of informers. This led some historians to postulate, that Germany under the Nazis had been a self-policing society (Gellately 1990; Paul and Mallmann 1996). More recent research after the year 2000 however has refocused the attention on the terror exercised by the Gestapo and emphasized the initiative and specific politicalideological radicalization of the Gestapo corps. At the same time earlier, descriptions of the Gestapo focusing mainly on Himmler and Heydrich or paradigmatic figures like Eichmann were replaced by more complex and differentiated analyses of the personnel, emphasizing factors like generational background, collective values, organizational culture, and institutional dynamics (Mallmann and Paul 2004; Paul 2002; Wildt 2009).

If the research about the Gestapo did set in relatively late already, critical studies of the other polices, that is, about the criminal and the uniformed police, did set in even later. The longlasting silence surrounding the Kripo’s crimes during the Nazi period had much to do with the fact that those victims affected by national socialist “crime fighting” were continuously marginalized after 1945, mostly remained objects of repressive policing and were not seen as “legitimate” victims of the “Third Reich.” This changed during the 1970s as critical social scientists and “grassroots historians” developed a more comprehensive approach toward the exclusionary politics of the Nazi regime and claimed recognition for the formerly “forgotten victims” (Ayaß 1995; Wagner 2002). The research on the Kripo, which was clearly expanding since the 1990s, has given its attention on the politics of the “fight against criminality” and the Kripo’s growing inclusion into the biological and racial strategies of the Nazi regime. While it elaborated the characteristics of crime fighting in the “racial state” of the “Third Reich,” this research yet also made clear in what extent police work during the Nazi regime adapted values, images, policies, and techniques from pre-Nazi times – and what continuities of policing can be identified between the German Empire and the Weimar Republic – the Nazi regime, and the postwar years.

The interest, research has taken into the history of the uniformed police, has grown significantly in recent years. In particular its involvement in the mass executions of the Jewish population in Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe has been analyzed in great detail. Due to this focus, research on ordinary policing of the uniformed police in German cities is only gradually emerging. A core issue of the research about the uniformed police is asking for the factors, which turned policemen from members of the police force, loyal to the Nazi regime, into murderous perpetrators. There is currently a consensus among researchers that a whole spectrum of factors has to be taken into account for explaining this shift, ranging from the effects of political indoctrination to the habituation to murderous violence, from psychological factors such as group pressure to situational timeand location-based factors (Browning 1992; Welzer 2005).

In 1945, when Nazi Germany was defeated, the victorious allied forces declared the Gestapo, together with a number of Nazi organizations, a criminal organization, while the Kripo and the uniformed police were left out from being accused of a specific affinity to the Nazi regime. In those parts of Germany, occupied by the Americans, the British, and the French, purges of the police took place, but the overall continuity remained relatively high. Very many of the detectives and the officers of the uniformed police continued to work in the police service (F€urmetz et al. 2001). As the public – at least during the first decades of (Western) postwar Germany – was reluctant to a detailed and critical examination of the Nazi regime, its leading actors, and supporters and as strong political, institutional, and legal barriers were impeding systematic investigations against Nazi perpetrators, only few of the former members of the Gestapo, Kripo, and Orpo were accused and sentenced for their participation in racial politics and genocide (Mallmann and Andrej 2009; Ullrich 2011).

It has taken the German police considerable time to deal with the legacies of its Nazi past. First projects did set in during the early 1980s already. These projects, which quite often had the form of joint teams of police officers and academic historians, were much driven by so-called “critical” members of the police force, who saw police history as being part of a police reform strategy. This strategy aimed at a more civil, service-orientated, and self-reflecting police. But as this reform turned into a contested field, which did not find undivided acceptance among members of the police force, some of these early police history enterprises came under the critic from the police, especially as not everyone among senior ranks of the police was already “open” for critical views on the history of the police during the Nazi period. More or less a decade later, during the 1990s, a second wave of police history activities, involving big city police forces, did set in. The – in many aspects – most prominent among these big city police force histories was carried out under the auspices of the Cologne police (Buhlan and Jung 2000). A major result of this project on the Cologne police had been to show how deeply and intensively everyday policing had been involved in pursuing the exclusionary, racial policies of the Nazi regime. Further projects on the police of major German cities during the Nazi period confirmed these findings. In 2007, the Bundeskriminalamt (BKA) initiated a history project, which was to deal with the history of the BKA during the 1950s and 1960s, thereby focussing on the question to what extent continuities existed within the BKA: “Continuities” either meant asking for the members of the Bundeskriminalamt, who had served already in the security forces of the Nazi regime, or it meant trying to find out what impact (if at all) these characteristics of the BKA-personnel had on the practical work, the practices of the Bundeskriminalamt (Baumann et al. 2011). Since very recently (2011), projects dealing with the Nazi legacies within the Bundesnachrichtendienst (Federal External Secret Service) and the Bundesamt fur Verfassungsschutz (Federal Internal Secret Service) are on the way as well. The initiatives for these projects are very much driven by the following logics: Firstly, dealing with the Nazi legacies of an institution such as the police, even if highly problematic aspects might emerge, is increasingly seen as important for a reflective police culture. Secondly, the German public generally recognizes positively efforts to deal with the Nazi past. And thirdly, and last but not least, within many institutions in the Federal Republic, a self-understanding has evolved, which sees the development of the institutional infrastructure of the Federal Republic as part of a democratic success story – which is the more successful, as this success had evolved on the background of a terrible past. That is why many of the research questions put forward in this context are not only directed on scandalizing continuities (personnel, practices) beyond the 1945 line within these institutions but to show how successful the respective institutions had moved toward democracy and “Rechtsstaat,” the rule of law, despite the burdens of the Nazi past.

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