Hitlers Kriminalisten: Die deutsche Kriminalpolizei und der Nationalsozialismus (review)

Augmenting his groundbreaking work on the German Criminal Police (Kriminalpolizei—Kripo) detective force,¹ Patrick Wagner studies the detectives themselves in this volume: their frustrations with the constitutional limitations of the Weimar Republic, their satisfaction in reducing crime during the first years of Nazi rule, their application of Nazi racial principles to preventative policing—and their postwar success in distancing themselves and their agency from Nazi crimes. Wagner also focuses attention on perhaps the most "forgotten" victims of the Nazi regime: "asocials" and "habitual criminals."²

During the last years of Weimar, police had to cope with rising crime rates, negotiate their way around constitutional protections of defendants' rights, suffer criticism in a free press, and struggle to police coalescing criminal syndicates. Beleaguered police departments channeled resources into uncovering networks of professional burglars and bank robbers and those who fenced or laundered their ill-gotten gains. Fixated on Berufsverbrecher (career criminals), increasingly theoretical-minded Kripo leaders concluded that permanent incarceration of the "criminal class" might eradicate crime itself from German society. Frustrated with what they considered democratic coddling of criminals, or simply eager to back a winning horse, police officers were attracted by Nazi promises to roll back constraints on police investigations. Wagner identifies Arthur Nebe, chief of the robbery section in the Berlin Criminal Police and later chief of the Reich Kripo Office, as the "prototype of an engaged Nazi criminal police specialist." Because he perceived the nation as a biological and pan-generational phenomenon, "a living being that could sicken or be healed like an individual person," Nebe, like others among "Hitler's Criminal Police Specialists," favored preventative policing because he perceived criminal police work to be "hygienic" (pp. 12 and 54-55).

After 1933 the Nazis gave the Kripo leadership the new tool it craved: "preventative detention" (Vorbeugungshaft) of suspects in concentration camps, without legal limits or judicial review. Though property crime did decline dramatically, Kripo preoccupation with crime prevention did not preclude the shocking crimes of serial killer Adolf Seewald, who murdered eleven young boys over a two-year period after Hitler came to power. Moreover, the durability of prostitution syndicates demonstrated to skeptics that Nazi dynamism might not eliminate crime. Nevertheless, top Kripo officials welcomed the centralization of the Criminal Police in conjunction with Himmler's unification of German police under SS control. Unencumbered by judicial restraint after 1937, the Kripo could fight both traditional crime and new targets such as the "Gypsy plague" or Jewish "sexual predators." Perceiving both "asocial" and traditional criminal behavior as defined by genetic inheritance rather than environment, the Kripo worked with Robert Ritter's Institute for Criminal-Biological Research to identify criminal "types," whose socially non-conformist lifestyles were "breeding grounds" for future criminals. The Kripo—not the Gestapo—introduced the "criminal-biological" concept of crime prevention into German police practice (p. 99).

Realities of human nature punctured the fantasy of a society without crime. Though the concept "asocial" justified dramatic increases in the concentration camp population, the deportation of thousands of Gypsies, and the incarceration of hundreds of thousands of foreign laborers, the Kripo could not contain the crime wave that washed over German cities as daily Allied bombing took its toll. Criminal-biological research and file indexes developed in the 1930s were of little use in identifying juvenile, female, and other first-time offenders responding to environmental rather than biological impulses. While Kripo leaders sought in an "inherent" criminal character the justification for the arrest of 300,000 foreign workers and prisoners of war in the first half of 1944, detectives working the streets simply ceased to investigate burglary complaints, "restricting themselves to maintaining for the victims the illusion that the State would pursue their interests" (p. 128).

After the war, former Kripo officials evaded prosecution and even reassumed positions in the police because the Allied occupation and post-1949 Federal German authorities...