The Gestapo and German Society: Enforcing Racial Policy 1933-1945 (14 page)

Werner Best, not only a leading Gestapo official but in the SD as well, helped compose a decree of i i November 1938 which mentioned that an important duty of the SD was to act in 'support of the Security Police'. He said later that little came of that intention. As Best put it, `in those years there were experiments constantly going on with the SD' and

the chief of both the Security Police and the SD, Heydrich, was interested in having the SD gain an insight into the activity of the offices and agencies of the State. The exact wording of this decree was chosen in order to justify the aim sufficiently. In truth the scope of tasks to be put to the SD whose model was to be the great foreign intelligence service... developed in such a manner that the SD was not to be an auxiliary branch of the Police but rather a purely political information organ of the State leadership, for the latter's own control of its political activities.101

At the Nuremberg trials the historian Gerhard Ritter testified about the activities of the SD at the University of Freiburg, where he was a professor. According to Ritter the organization kept itself informed about the research activities as well as the attitudes of the university population, including criticism of leaders and the public measures they took. However, he was aware of no case where the SD actually turned over someone or even reported a faculty member to the Gestapo. He had felt it necessary to be cautious about what he said in his lectures, and was on one occasion reprimanded by the Gestapo, but this was 'a result of a denunciation' which 'did not originate with the SD'.102

7. POLICE BEYOND THE GESTAPO

Karl Heinz Hoffmann, a senior local Gestapo official who served in Koblenz and Dusseldorf, testified at Nuremberg about the importance of the Gestapo's links to the older state apparatus, the so-called 'inner administration'. Like Best and others, Hoffmann portrayed the Gestapo as a group of higher officials who were not 'everywhere', as contemporaries often feared. 'In towns and districts in which there were no offices of the Stapo, its lower levels were
represented by the district and local police officials, and the gendarmerie. Approximately 8o per cent of all matters came from these police offices
...... Best said that with so few officials actually in the Gestapo it was necessary to call upon district and local police authorities-the chief magistrates of the district, the gendarmerie, and the municipal police-who acted either on the basis of information which came to their desks or on instructions from state police authorities.
104 Best maintained that as far as the volume is concerned the district and local police authorities handled the major part of the individual state police cases as the state police offices only sent out their officials for their own information in special cases, above all, in cases of treason and high treason'.'OS

There was a close relationship between the traditional criminal police, the detectives (Kripo), and the Gestapo, 'at least on paper', as it was put by a man who served in the Kripo, and this derived from the obvious fact that 'to National Socialist Germany it went without saying that the battle against the political enemy of state and against the anti-social criminal should be conducted by one hand'."'fi
The Kripo retained an identity separate from the Gestapo, although in time there was a convergence as the former became more and more like the latter, complete with powers of 'preventive arrest', at least concerning the criminality of groups such as the gypsies, the work-shy, or so-called asocial elements.""

The organizational charts and historical sketches for use inside the police itself made a great deal of the ways in which the Kripo was to be distinguished from the Gestapo. The Kripo was supposedly that 'branch of the police which concerned itself with the surveillance and laying hold of common (nonpolitical)' criminals; its tasks were mainly the 'prevention and investigation of (non-political) culpable actions'. Unlike the Gestapo it could work more openly and had the complete backing of virtually all law-abiding citizens.
1" 8 Institutionally, the Kripo was centralized under Himmler in 1936 so that the leadership of both the Kripo and Gestapo was in his hands. With the creation of Kripo posts across Germany more or less on the Gestapo (and SD) model, the criminal police was centralized for the first time in its history and the country was covered in a 'steel net' through which, supposedly, no criminal could pass.'"
Kripo and Gestapo grew closer when both became part of the new body called the Security Police (Sipo) in June 1936 (under Himmler), and in 1939 both-along with the rest of Germany's police-were centralized in the RSHA, where the Kripo chief was Arthur Nebe in Office V, while the Gestapo was under Muller in Office VI.

But quite apart from such institutional developments, there was bound to be a blurring of the distinctions between the Gestapo and the Kripo in that certain conventional crimes came within the jurisdiction of the former, if they were allegedly committed by Jews or foreign workers; in addition, on occasion Kripo officers were handed 'political' tasks. Criminality was gradually turned into a political and even a racial category, so that increasingly the Kripo came to be involved in 'political' matters. The notion of 'prevention of crime' already contained in the 'law against dangerous repeat offenders and for regulation of their security and improvement' (24 November 1933), was capable of indefinite expansion, and eventually more and more categories of offenders were added to the list of people whose crimes were to be 'prevented' before they could act: beggars, vagabonds, prostitutes, pimps, pushers, blackmarketeers, hard-nosed traffic offenders, the work-shy, gypsies, and others were included.1o
The treatment to be accorded to these and other social outsiders-as embodied, for example in the 1937 decree on 'preventive police measures to combat crime', which consigned 'asocials' to concentration camps-was similar to that meted out to political 'criminals' or to race ,enemies'.I'
I

Pursuit of deviations from the letter and even the spirit of the law was stepped up with the coming of war, and Kripo and Gestapo, directed from the RSHA by their common Senior Chief, Heydrich (himself under Himmler), set about tightening the 'steel net' over the country. Apart from the convergence of goals, there was something of a personnel link as well; local Gestapo officials, particularly at the middle and lower ranks, had previously been members of the criminal police, and in fact a large number of Gestapo members were detailed from the Kripo into the secret police.112
Kripo and Gestapo continued to use traditional kinds of executive authority, such as arrest, interrogation, and confiscation of property. This ability set both apart from the SD, which as a Party organization was not permitted these methods of operation.11'
In spite of these and other shared experiences, there is no question that the Gestapo played by far the greater role in the Nazi system of terror, not least because it expressly concerned itself with the regime's attempts to modify political attitudes and behaviour of all kinds-well beyond dealing with deviations from criminal law.

Notwithstanding its relations to the Gestapo, at the top leadership level
and in its everyday operations the Kripo remained a distinct organization. In a newspaper article of 17 February 1941 Heydrich noted that, in marked contrast to the Gestapo, the public image of the Kripo, which went back well beyond 1933, was as a 'friend and helper' against all kinds of criminality; an 'ethical' dimension had been added to its work, such as the effort to watch prices, protect youth, struggle against dangers to 'positive population development' ('abortion and homosexuality'); where necessary it could use 'preventive' measures. The Kripo could turn up information relevant to the secret police, and vice versa, and the closest co-operation was sought. The aims of the Gestapo, 'only a tiny percentage' of which could be spoken of publicly, according to Heydrich, pertained to work against the enemies of the people and the state, spies, saboteurs, and traitors; it also had the duty to enforce laws and ordinances resulting from war measures, and those stemming from 'handling the Jewish question', such as 'emigration of the Jews'.
114

The regular uniformed police, divided before 1933 into seventeen or so different provincial (land) forces, was centralized at last on 28 March 1940, when it was brought under the federal budget, but even earlier, under Kurt Daluege, the police had been unified to a large extent with the new title of 'order police' or Orpo (Ordungspolizei)."'
That change followed Himmler's appointment as Chief of all German police in June 1936. One of Daluege's tasks after 1933 had been to 'clean out' the police in Prussia, but the extent of the cleaning was limited, at least if the uniformed city police in Prussia, the Schupo (Schutzpolizei), can be taken as a guide. As it was a subsection of the Orpo, the Schupo's 'cleansing' probably reflected the trend in the rest of the Orpo. Of 50,000 or so patrol-men, 2.7 per cent (or a total of 1,370) were dismissed; a higher percentage of officers, who were in the public eye, met this fate-but still, only 294 out of 2,400 were sacked.116
The gradual infiltration of Nazis into the police seems to have begun later, and was a process which was never taken to its full conclusion. Robert Koehl believes that the proportion of SS members in the Kripo and Orpo was smaller than in the Gestapo, and, moreover, that when the numbers of SS in the upper echelons of the former increased, most continued to be drawn, not from the ranks of the SS, but from the police, who were asked to don SS garb; at least some police directors or police presidents who joined the SD did so less out of political or ideological conviction than simply 'in self-defense' to hold their own against ambitious junior officers. Even later, when the sixteen Inspectors
of the Order Police joined the SS, the `long police careers' behind them rendered their `high SS ranks secondary'.'
17

The ordinary police stations (the Polizeirevier of the Schupo) in cities such as Berlin continued to work as before the days of the dictatorship, and to play their part in enforcing even specific Nazi policies, such as those pertaining to racial matters. They received denunciations and complaints of all kinds from the population, and these were dutifully checked, whether or not they amounted to breaches of the traditional criminal code or of specific Nazi measures-such as giving refuge to Jews who went undeground after 1941 to avoid deportation. Some idea of how enforcement operated can be deduced from the remarks of the Schupo man to a group of Jews hiding in Berlinwhich subsequently, thanks to fake documents, managed to elude his grasp. After checking all their identification papers, the policeman remarked:

So, then, I want to explain to you the basis of my coming here. I am happy to say that I have been able to convince myself that everything here is in the best conceivable order. But we received a denunciation that Mr R supposedly regularly hides illegally quartered Jews in his apartment! You're shocked, right? But you have no idea how many denunciations we must cope with at headquarters! And it is our duty to check each and every one of them, even if most turn out to be malicious suspicions or backbiting.'"

Although there were remarkably few Gestapo people on the ground, there were many professional and amateur helpers on whom they could rely.

8. THE NAZI PARTY'S POLICE FUNCTION

After Hitler's appointment, the Nazi Party, which had once been geared for ceaseless electioneering and, through the SA, had fought it out in the streets with political opponents, went through a transformation in its character and operation. As might be expected, it came to play a role in the police network. A detailed study of the Nazi Party's place in policing Germany and the activities of its numerous ancillary organizations, from the German Labour Front (Deutsche Arbeitsfront, DAF) to the local branches of the Hitler Youth, and so on, remains to be written. But it is possible to gain some idea of what such a study might show.

There was a general increase in membership from 849,009 in early 1933 to 2,493,890 in mid-1935; after a short respite, those on the Party roll increased again from May 193 7, and at about the time of the outbreak of the Second World War membership stood at 4,985,400."9
But beyond this
number the many more uniform-wearing citizens in the various Party formations and affiliated organizations created a 'demonstration effect' emphasizing the omnipresence of the 'brown masses', who were difficult to avoid, especially since numerous public displays and parades were called for.'
2" They were also expected to play a role through 'word-of-mouth propaganda' (Mundpropaganda); this technique could amplify the official line or, through rumours, demean opponents or foreign enemies, and so on.'
2'

Those associated with the NSDAP in one way or another were also to reinforce the regime's teachings by noting dissent and opposition and passing the information on directly to the Gestapo or, rather more likely to their own leaders, who would tell the police. Just how important a factor this semiofficial co-operation was in the policing of Nazi Germany is difficult to say, although if Reinhard Mann's figures concerning the causes of initiating cases with the Gestapo were to be taken in isolation, one could simply conclude that the role of the NSDAP in the policing of the country has been wildly exaggerated. Mann found that only 6 per cent of all cases began with a tipoff from one of the many Nazi Party organizations. However, several points need to be made in order to put these figures into perspective.lzz

Systematic surveillance of the population was called for by the Nazi 'block'leaders (Blockleiter), and cell-leaders (Zellenleiter). The numbers in these positions, created in 1933, respectively reached 204,359 and 54,976 in 1934-5; by January 1939 there were 463,048 block- and 89,378 cell- leaders.123
Both before and even after 1933, the vast majority performed tasks which involved considerable expenditure of time, on an unpaid basis.
114 It has been suggested that their everyday activities-which included drawing up a 'household card-index' of all the people in their area, collecting for Nazi charities, and later, in the war, passing out ration-books, and so on-did more for 'the strengthening of the regime than did the Gestapo'.121
These numerous 'little men' were most receptive to neighbourhood or apartment snoopers.
116