The Gestapo and German Society: Enforcing Racial Policy 1933-1945 (6 page)

THE Gestapo took shape in the context of a complex set of interacting social forces, personalities, and traditions.'
Beginning in early 1933, in one state after another it was decided to tighten the organization of the police. As one telling phrase from a law of 26 April on the Prussian Gestapo stated, it was necessary to assure the effective battle against all endeavours directed at the existence and security of the state'.'
Such aims were pursued vigorously and soon involved ever greater incursions by the police into the lives of citizens. The Gestapo grew unchecked not least because the definition of what constituted security and opposition was inflated and expanded beyond all previous boundaries. Legal and civil rights, which had been protected by the rule of law, were disregarded and often dissolved. Eventually, it came to function as the ultimate 'thought-police' about which rulers in earlier times with ambitions to control their subjects could only have fantasized.;
After gradually working out spheres of influence with other organizations concerned with monitoring and controlling behaviour, the Gestapo became much more than an extension of the traditional state apparatus and enforcer of policy. At times it could become lawgiver, judge, jury, and executioner.

Like most Continental countries, Germany had a long tradition of police surveillance of political affairs. Though there had been no central control before the Nazis took over, local branches across the country had built up considerable expertise and were, by the beginning of 1933, sophisticated and highly professionalized. The hindrances which had for many years stood in the way of establishing a national political police force began to disappear during the phase immediately following Hitler's appointment, known as 'coordination' (Gleichschaltung). Much has been written on the upheaval, termed by one writer a `legal revolution', because while paying lip-service to the constitution and keeping up the appearance of legality, the Nazis introduced
a 'new regime'.'
In a sense they did. However, this break with the past was not simply dictated to the German people by the handful at the top.

There was a remarkable degree of accommodation to the new exigencies. It needs to be remembered that the occupants of the various offices were not simply removed across the board and police headquarters turned over to the Nazis. To the extent that there was a purge of the police, as the next chapter shows, it was aimed more at the upper levels, and even there selectively, at those who failed to make adjustments to the new circumstances-in some cases at high-profile persons whose earlier political views were a clear liability. There was an important infrastructure already in place that supported the creation of a secret police. Martin Broszat, reflecting on the absence of resistance to the Nazi 'revolution', which made it unnecessary to employ massive violence to establish or maintain the 'new order', noted that the transition phase (co-ordination) took place generally so smoothly and speedily that 'often it was more a matter of accommodation than a revolutionary upheaval'.'

I. POLITICAL POLICE IN EUROPE AND GERMANY UP TO 1933

The use of political police in Europe goes back at least to the French Revolution of 1789, and well beyond Germany's borders. It has been argued that policing the 'political' was invented as a result of the conjuncture of 'broad historical processes'-economic, juridico-political, and scientific-which Europe experienced in the period from the late eighteenth to the early nineteenth century.6
For Michel Foucault it is in this period, as crime takes on an increasingly political dimension, that a 'general surveillance of the population' beginsto quote a French account from 1847, a 'silent, mysterious, unperceived vigilance ... it is the eye of the government ceaselessly open and watching without distinction over all citizens, yet without subjecting them to any measure of coercion whatever ... It does not need to be written into the law'.7
Furthermore, 'the disciplining of society' since the eighteenth century should not be understood to suggest that people gradually became 'more and more obedient, nor that they set about assembling in barracks, schools, or prisons; rather that an increasingly better invigilated process of adjustment has been sought after-more and more rational and economic-between productive activities, resources of communication, and the play of power relations'.'

David Bayley's study of the police in Europe shows that their development was not simply the result of the growth of cities, population, industrialization,
or even 'criminality', but has more to do with political transformations, violent resistance to government, and the 'creation of new law and order tasks'.'
The growth of 'political police' is seen as an integral part of the 'statemaking' process in the modern era. Charles Tilly, in his account of France, remarks that in the course of the nineteenth century 'policing and political repression waxed and waned together'; generally revolutions were followed by increasing the number of police and expanding their budgets. 'The final effect was to lay down a uniform net of control over the entire country."'
Still, there were enormous variations between the various European countries, in such matters as the tasks assigned the police, the national structures, nature of control over them, internal organization, role, behaviour, and public image."

The evolution of the police in German lands was constrained by the late unification. However, even before i 8 71 the existence of local police had long been a fixture of life for most Germans, and there was a tradition of police involvement in issues well beyond concerns about public security and narrowly defined crime; as order could be disturbed by a wide variety of incidents, such as those which might arise from `sanitation, foodstuffs, public amusements, economic regulations, information media, perhaps the maintenance of roads', and so forth, the relatively few police that existed, though spread thin, were involved in these as well.'
2

The issue of local-police powers was bound to arise in Germany with changing and conflicting expectations of the social role the police should play. How a newly created nation-state would respond was briefly discussed in the constitutional debates during the German revolution of 1848-9, when the liberal-dominated meetings voted to put control of local-police administration in the hands of the central state. The concern expressed was 'to strengthen state supervision of the villages that were too primitive to run themselves and the cities that were too complex'.'
3 Nevertheless, there were some efforts to unify some aspects of police work before unification in 18 71. For example, for a decade or so from the early 185os the 'Police Association' (Polizeiverein) held regular conferences and eventually weekly exchanges of
information.14
However, the local particularism that survived the revolution continued to hold suspect any scheme to introduce a centralized police power. For the most part such powers remained with local states before and even after unification.

The instructions issued to the mid-century political police forces which sprang up nearly everywhere across the country have a twentieth-century ring to them. For example, in 1848, even before the outbreak of revolution in that year, King Ludwig I in Bavaria ordered Munich's police to put public opinion under surveillance-especially in the public houses. His Ministry of the Interior formalized and generalized that demand in March and instructed the main administrative governors in the monarchy henceforth to insist that the most exact continuous reconnaissance' be kept 'on the general mood and attitude of the people in the larger and smaller cities as well as in the countryside'.'
S By August 1849 local administrators were instructed to fill out a detailed questionnaire on the political behaviour of the people in their district. In twelve separate categories they were to compose monthly reports on political, social, and economic developments; soon more specific political questions were added, for example on attitudes to the person of the king and politics in general, and on the existence of democratic organizations or newspapers.'
h

Special sections in the bigger municipal police forces devoted to 'politics' were gradually created across the country from mid-century. Especially in the major centres they were highly sensitive and active, keeping a close tab on the most innocuous kinds of public activities that might somehow be deemed 'political'. In Bismarck's and Wilhelm's Germany the state was endowed with increased powers and, under special legislation from time to time (such as that aimed at the Social Democratic Party, the SPD), could prosecute 'political' criminality in the name of staving off revolution. While the variously named Politische Polizei (political police) remained largely decentralized, local organizations could act in concert and everywhere pressed their vigilance on the public.

In Imperial Germany surveillance of broadly defined political behaviour, including attitudes, became a responsibility of an increasing number of professionally trained police officials.''
Just how far these officials were prepared to interpret their tasks may be gathered from the kinds of organizations dutifully watched by the Hamburg political police before 19 18. In this liberal and semi-independent 'city-state' of Hamburg, middle-class organizations such as the 'Fighting Community against Department Stores and Consumer Co-operatives' and the 'League for the Introduction of the Eight-o'Clock Closing in Retail Outlets' were routinely watched.

There was surveillance of all political parties and semi-political associations, and separate files were drawn up on their leading personalities. Even obscure and marginal politicians might end up with a very large file which recorded the details of their public lives (for the most part their private affairs were not of concern). The Socialists as the most radical party of the day were subject to particularly close scrutiny, but the Hamburg 'Association for the Fighting of Social Democracy' had files established on it as well.'
8 The SPD continued to be watched even after 1918, when one of its members was President and another the Chancellor of the new Weimar Republic. The files of the Hamburg police run to many thousands of volumes. Similar vigilance by specific political police forces appears to have existed in most German states before 1918, although no national umbrella organization with any authority was in place. Instead, each state continued to guard its independence in police affairs as a kind of residual of German particularism. No doubt the police of the major centres, notably Berlin, played a dominant role because of the superior resources-expertise, money, and information-at its disposal.

The Weimar Republic, founded at the end of the war, did not create a new national police force, one it might have used to fight the many declared enemies, some of whom were on the Right and some on the Left. And even though the new 'insiders' had only recently suffered at the hands of a system of justice which had them as 'outsiders', a decision was taken not to tamper with the 'independence' of judges who had been appointed in the Kaiser's day.'
9

As is well known, the reluctant revolutionaries were loath to interfere with the law. In Berlin itself the Socialists 'officially' got rid of the political police, but, sensing that such an institution was needed to track the enemies of the new regime, they soon established a force under a new name: Department IA (in place of the older Political Department V). Jurisdiction of the new force did not extend beyond Prussia. Given the social, economic, and political instability of the Weimar Republic, it comes as no surprise that the surveillance by the police of political matters was 'vastly extended' after 1918 in Berlin. In most German states a parallel process took place, and for the
same reasons. There were more 'enemies' of the state than ever before and the atmosphere was marked by putsch attempts, strikes, riots, even foreign invasions, not to say by massive economic and social catastrophe.211

But despite this more or less covert reliance on the political police, the Weimar Republic also felt it had to live up to its own self-image as a highly democratic regime. It seemed in keeping with the new spirit that the police be kept under stricter control. There were a number of occasions, such as Hitler's abortive putsch attempt in 1923, when the lack of authority at the centre seemed nearly to herald the breaking up of the German state. In that context the enemies of Weimar could find support for their contention that one of its fundamental weaknesses was the nearly complete absence of any national police authority. There was a Reich Public Prosecutor, to be sure, but he could take action only through the individual prosecutors of the various states and their subsidiary organs."
The tasks of keeping track of the numerous extremist groups also lay to a large extent in the individual component states. While some negotiations reached agreements in the area of criminal law which pertained to the country as a whole, there was no central control and no unification of the police.

Dealing with the political police was complicated because of the marked political differences between the major states. There was, for example, 'red' Prussia, considered radical because of the large Socialist parliamentary representation and because of its 'red' capital, Berlin. At the other end of the political spectrum there was 'blue' Bavaria, conservative, royalist, and Catholic. Most of the states between these two extremes guarded their jurisdictions jealously and viewed suggestions for a central police authority with suspicion. Such a national body could not function without the necessary local infrastructure, and attempts at centralization failed.12