How the Nazis turned police into murderers

Is it possible to serve in it and retain your integrity? This is the central question in my series of detective novels, which follows the cases of Inspector Horst Schenke during the course of world war two.

Schenke works for KRIPO, aka the Kriminalpolizei. This was a real department, the Criminal Investigation Police, suborned by the Nazis after they came to power in 1933 as they forged the dispersed police forces of Germany into a single security apparatus. They put it at the heart of their programme of oppression and genocide.

Membership of the criminal investigation branch of any police force creates a certain culture among its ranks and, at the same time, sets it apart from other officers. In recent years, my youngest son has been a detective in a British police force. As with KRIPO, recruits to CID (Criminal Investigation Department) undergo specialist training, followed by a probationary period before becoming accredited.

CID detectives are not required to wear uniform and, in common with similar specialists across the world, they see themselves – and are seen by other police officers – as an elite group. They can earn epithets such as the “Gucci Squad”.

Criminal investigation officers are the experts who are called in to deal with serious crimes such as rape, murder, fraud, child abuse and organised crime. They painstakingly safeguard crime scenes, interview suspects and try to build water-tight cases leading to prosecution, frequently having to rectify or mitigate mistakes made by standard police officers.

This is who the KRIPO were, how they operated, how they saw themselves and how they were regarded by others – particularly the Nazi Party, who from the outset sought to blend the police into the wider party apparatus. The end game was to corrupt the KRIPO and turn them into mass murderers who were complicit in the crimes against humanity perpetrated by Hitler’s regime. 

To trace this descent into the darkest pit of depravity, it is important to understand the nature of policing in Germany and the shifts in its structure and duties across the years. Before the Nazis came to power, the individual states of Germany were responsible for their own police forces, often organised at a local level when it came to rural locations and small towns. Larger states, like Prussia, had the manpower and more importantly the resources to experiment with innovations. 

What later became the KRIPO began life as a separate branch of the uniformed (Schutzpolizei) of Berlin, dedicated to investigating all criminal activity. Such was the success of this branch that very soon other states set up their own agencies to carry out similar duties. 

By the turn of the 20th century, every other state had followed suit. Training, procedure and forensics were refined until they could match the best other countries had to offer. An esprit de corps evolved through his success, and KRIPO officers came to regard themselves as the elite arm of policing in Germany. 

In the aftermath of the first world war, the defeat of Germany drove it into chaos. With the abdication of the Kaiser and the discrediting of the politicians blamed for defeat, radical political movements of the right and left proliferated. Many army and navy units mutinied and there were attempts to use force to take control of major cities across the country resulting in a number of brief but very violent small-scale civil wars which cost the lives of thousands.

The police forces had to turn to paramilitary groups – the Freikorps – to bolster their numbers as they put down one uprising after another. Many of these paramilitaries went on to join the police, and their nationalist and reactionary views were to heavily influence the nature of German policing throughout the Weimar years, where they and the judiciary demonstrated a pronounced leniency towards violent Nazi activists while cracking down hard on those of the left. 

When the Nazi Party seized power in 1933 they moved at pace to co-ordinate every possible aspect of German society to ensure that Nazi ideology became accepted fact and the movement’s power over the nation could not be challenged. Key to this strategy was the centralisation of police forces and their integration with the intelligence and secret police functions of the party. 

In February, members of the party and related organisations were given priority in police recruitment. At the same time, an 8-10 week training programme of ideological indoctrination was developed existing and newly appointed officers. Later, all police officers would be subject to the party’s political training with regular monthly lectures and periodic courses. 

In order to more closely bind every branch of the police, with the regime, the men and officers of the ORPO (uniformed police) and KRIPO were encouraged to join the Nazi Party and to apply for membership of its paramilitary unit, the SS (Schutzstaffel). Those policemen who had once been members of Freikorps units were most likely to subscribe to the policy.

Others, however, were not. Particularly those in the KRIPO who saw themselves as professionals and resented the arrivistes of the SS in policing matters. 

At the same time, the regime was swiftly moving towards centralising the police forces of Germany, an agenda pushed by Wilhelm Frick, the Reich interior minister who wanted them under his control. In order to seal the deal and put an end to his rivalry with Prussian police chief and Gestapo founder Hermann Göring, Frick joined forces with Heinrich Himmler, then Bavaria’s police chief and head of the SS, to rapidly assume control of the police forces of Germany until only Göring’s Prussian police force lay outside their power. 

By 1936 Himmler was head of all German police agencies and had centralised them into administrative structure divided into two main components. The ORPO, now under Kurt Daluege, and the SIPO (Security Police or Sicherheitspolizei) under Reinhard Heydrich which consisted of both the KRIPO, under Arthur Nebe and the Gestapo under Heinrich Müller.

Nebe had joined the party at the start of the decade and applied pressure on his subordinates to do likewise – and preferably to accept SS rank while they were at it. Many refused to do either. But this reluctance was down to professional pride rather than any broad disagreement with the party’s ideology or its polices. Far from it, as we shall see. 

As the war began, the final stage of the KRIPO’s co-option into the apparatus of the Nazi state occurred when Himmler carried out a restructuring of the state police and political intelligence agencies. SIPO was abolished and all agencies now fell under the control of the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA – Reichssicherheitshauptamt). 

KRIPO, now named Department 5, continued to have responsibility for investigating serious crimes. However, since such crimes now embraced many aspects of racial identity, political opposition and suppression of free speech there was little to differentiate the activities of KRIPO, ORPO and the Gestapo. All three worked to the same ends and shared responsibility for the commission of crimes against humanity. 

The tradition of the KRIPO had been corrupted and its officers became an agency of the party rather than police functionaries. Himmler instructed RSHA to “exterminate criminality”. The overtones of the phrase were not lost on those predisposed to see the party’s enemies as anyone who was not a member of the master race (Herrenvolk) which targeted not just Jews, but the Roma and Sinti, homosexuals, communists and socialists, race-traitors (those who had sexual relations with non-Aryans) and the disabled. 

It was Nebe who was tasked with using KRIPO’s technical institute to come up with gas chambers. He and volunteers from KRIPO who served in Einsatzgruppe B were guilty of the mass murder of Poles, Jews and Slavs on Germany’s eastern front. It was KRIPO officers who became instrumental in hunting down Jews and opponents of the regime who had gone into hiding. 

By the time the war was over the KRIPO, as an agency, had changed beyond all recognition. The once-proud and professional criminal investigation service had become just another arm of a genocidal state apparatus. Where they had once brought criminals to justice, they were now only servants of a criminal dictatorship. 

The story of how dedicated investigators might struggle to find ways to maintain their integrity in such a political context is the story of criminal inspector Schenke. His daily struggle to maintain his professional values while obeying the orders of gangster politicians is as relevant today for law enforcement officers in, say, the United States as it was for the police officers of the KRIPO under the Nazi regime.  

A Death in Berlin by Simon Scarrow is published by Headline. For more information and to book tickets to Simon’s book tour visit geni.us/uDNx