The police under Nazi rule

June 27, 2017 6:14 PM

Were German police departments overthrown by the Nazis, like most other institutions? Or did they meld easily into the new order?

I've heard/seen in several places something like this:
"The Weimar police were one of the few institutions in Nazi Germany that were not uprooted by 'Nazification' (complete housecleaning and reorientation to the Reich) because they already tended toward the fascist order. Likewise the Weimar courts."
Anybody? Any good leads to pursue?

posted by LonnieK to Law & Government (10 answers total)

At the risk of suggesting the obvious, Wikipedia's entry on the Gestapo has a good chunk of information that addresses this point (especially under the "Membership" section), as well as citations with some promising further reading.
posted by phoenixy at 6:21 PM on June 27, 2017

Response by poster: Thx and I won't threadsit, but the Wikipedia entry is about a different entity, i.e. the Gestapo. That organization made no transition from the pre-Nazi era, when it didn't exist. Nor did it arise from the ordinary municipal police departments (although it did absorb some of their political operations). It was truly a Nazi innovation.
My Q is more about the municipal police departments, whose leaders were more vested in them than in the Gestapo vision.
posted by LonnieK at 6:44 PM on June 27, 2017 [1 favorite]

Here are some good jumping-off points:

Landespolizei (State police) is the term used to refer to all police of any one of the states of Germany. [...] In Nazi Germany, all state and city forces were absorbed into the Ordnungspolizei which existed from 1936 to 1945.

[...]

The Ordnungspolizei (Order Police), abbreviated Orpo, were the uniformed police force in Nazi Germany between 1936 and 1945. The Orpo organization was absorbed into the Nazi monopoly on power after regional police jurisdiction was removed in favor of the central Nazi government (Verreichlichung of the police). The Orpo was under the administration of the Interior Ministry but headed by members of the SS until the end of World War II. Owing to their green uniforms, Orpo were also referred to as Grüne Polizei (green police). The force was first established as a centralized organisation uniting the municipal, city, and rural uniformed police that had been organised on a state-by-state basis.

The Ordnungspolizei encompassed virtually all of Nazi Germany's law-enforcement and emergency response organizations, including fire brigades, coast guard, civil defense, and even night watchmen. Deployed along with the German Army (Wehrmacht) in the invasion of Poland in 1939, it had the task of policing the civilian population of the conquered and colonized countries beginning in spring 1940.

posted by Rhaomi at 6:51 PM on June 27, 2017

It's complicated. Here is a brief account of what happened with the Kriminalpolitzei . They were eventually fully assimilated under Nazi control, but it took a long time.
posted by thelonius at 6:57 PM on June 27, 2017

Not overthrown, melded in to the New Order. From The History of the SS, a 1979 book by G.S.Graber I just read:

"The task of the SS," Hitler's order of November 7, 1930, proclaimed, "is primarily to carry out police duties within the Party."

This policy leads eventually to all police falling under Himmler's control.
posted by Rash at 11:08 PM on June 27, 2017

Philip Kerr has written a series of novels based around a character called Bernie Gunther, a Kripo policeman in Berlin in the 1930s and 40s.

It's fiction but it certainly addresses the "Nazification" of the police service and the pressures the detectives would have faced post-1933.
posted by jontyjago at 3:59 AM on June 28, 2017

Was just about to suggest the Bernie Gunther novels; Kerr did his homework.
posted by aspersioncast at 5:30 AM on June 28, 2017

Richard L. Evans' "The Third Reich In Power" probably has a long chapter about exactly this.
posted by thelonius at 6:22 AM on June 28, 2017

Response by poster: Excellent answers! Thanks all for the leads.
posted by LonnieK at 7:04 AM on June 28, 2017

One I just came across today -- The Nuremberg Interviews by Leon Goldensohn, check out the chapter on Kaltenbrunner. There's an extensive interview where he sketches out the structure of the police in Nazi Germany and discusses the Nazi influence on various segments. (Maybe take it with a grain of salt because you know, Kaltenbrunner, but I suspect most of it is accurate.)
posted by phoenixy at 1:59 PM on July 9, 2017 [1 favorite]