1933–1945: Persecution

The »national community« is at the centre of the National Socialist world view. Only »German national comrades« who are subordinate to the Führer principle are supposed to belong to this community. All others are regarded as »community outsiders« or »enemies of the Reich« and therefore a danger. People were also targeted by the regime because of their social background or supposedly deviant behaviour. The National Socialists are convinced that alleged »inferiority« and criminality are hereditary. They victimise poor families, misfit young people and people who, for example, do not turn up for work or turn up late. The »Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring« also enabled »hereditary health courts« to order forced sterilisations. Many people who did not conform to the ideas of the German »national community« were torn from their social environment and placed in workhouses or welfare centres.

In September 1933, the police and SA spent days combing through pubs, night shelters and public places, arresting people without a fixed abode. Although homelessness had already been criminalised for a long time, this raid was on a new scale: It was the first centrally organised mass arrest operation by the National Socialists. The homeless are defencelessly at its mercy. The accompanying press campaign painted a picture of supposedly »professional beggars« who were enriching themselves with alms and were not actually in need. This turned them into »pests« from whom the »national community« had to be freed.

Most of those arrested are released after a few weeks. Others were then deported to workhouses, care homes and concentration camps (some of which were still provisional).

In February 1937, the head of the German police, Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler, laid down guidelines for the arrest of 2,000 »career- and habitual criminals and habitual moral criminals«. On 9 March 1937, the Kripo carried out these mass arrests (»March Action«). Those arrested are deported to concentration camps.

In January 1938, Himmler also authorises the Gestapo to make arrests under the pretext of crime prevention. It can now also use the instrument of »protective custody« against alleged »asocials«. Among those targeted are people who have refused or cancelled job offers. Himmler considered them to be hereditarily burdened »labour shysters« who only ever accepted jobs as a disguise. If they remained on the labour market, they could not be tracked down. To »purge« them, he ordered unannounced mass round-ups and deportation to concentration camps.

In April 1938, the Gestapo arrested 2,000 alleged »work-shy« individuals and deported them to Buchenwald concentration camp. Some were even detained at their workplaces, completely unaware of what was happening. From 13 to 18 June, the arrests continued across the Reich under the name »Aktion Arbeitsscheu Reich« (»Operation Work Shy Reich«). Although each district of the Criminal Police was tasked with detaining 200 individuals, the police far exceeded this target: in total, they arrested more than 10,000 people classified as »asocial«. Among those detained were people living on their own means, homeless individuals, (alleged) prostitutes, as well as numerous Jews and Sinti. In Berlin alone, over 1.000 Jews were arrested on spurious charges and immediately deported to the concentration camps at Buchenwald, Dachau, and Sachsenhausen. For a short period, those arrested in this operation became the largest group of prisoners in the camps, distinguishable by the markings assigned to them, such as the black triangle.

Another site of National Socialist persecution were the »housing estates for asocials« (»Asozialensiedlungen«). These were built by local authorities, usually on the outskirts of large cities, under their own initiative. By the end of the 1930s, the settlements were severely overcrowded. Instead of providing welfare support to families in precarious circumstances, the National Socialists forced them to move into these settlements.

The National Socialists believed in the hereditary nature of alleged »asociality«. The capture, imprisonment, control and »breaking apart« of supposedly »asocial extended families« became a central concern of racial hygienists. They also carried out »screening« for this purpose. In the housing estates, the families are subjected to checks by the welfare office and the police – the supervision extends to monitoring the general peace and nighttime curfews. Anyone who does not comply with the regulations is penalised. The estates were not closed camps, but coercive facilities. Racial hygienists, authorities and the police decide whether the residents are transferred to closed institutions and concentration camps or whether they are offered the prospect of housing in the city.

After the invasion of the Wehrmacht and the incorporation of Austria into the German Reich in March 1938, persecution began here as well. The authorities immediately started deportations and camp admissions. In 1940, the new Reich Governor and Gauleiter of Vienna, Baldur von Schirach, called for a more radical approach. Allegedly in response to football riots in which his car had been damaged, he ordered »the asocial elements of Vienna« to be »identified«. 500 people were to be arrested at short notice.

Shortly afterwards, an Austrian peculiarity was established: in Vienna, the NSDAP, the criminal police, the labour office and central offices of the Vienna municipal administration formed an »Commission on Asocials« (»Asozialenkommission«) from 1941. It expedited committals and decided on individual cases – without ever hearing the person concerned. Initially, the commission focused on institutionalising men until the Gestapo claimed jurisdiction. After that, women were targeted, and the criminal investigation department carried out street raids against them. The commission was always chaired by doctors, all of them representatives of »racial hygiene«. The last person to hold this office was Ernst Illing, who was executed in 1946 for his role in the »euthanasia« of children. In addition to the doctors, welfare officers played an important role: they helped decide which women were considered »asocial«.

In Vienna, 563 men and 651 women were deported to institutions and concentration camps as a result of applications made by the »Commission on Asocials«. The certificates issued by the commission lent an appearance of legality to its actions. For the victims, these committals meant forced labour, physical abuse up to and including torture, and, often, lethal imprisonment in the camps.

From spring 1941 onwards, thousands of concentration camp inmates fell victim to an ongoing mass crime known as the »euthanasia murders«. Members of medical commissions, who had been conducting »selections« on residents of institutions and people with disabilities since early 1940, were now dispatched to concentration camps. In coordination with the respective camp administrations, they selected prisoners to be murdered using carbon monoxide gas in the »euthanasia« killing centres at Bernburg, Sonnenstein, and Hartheim. Prisoners deemed by the National Socialists to be »no longer fit for labour« were targeted for deportation to their deaths. Increasingly, this also included members of prisoner groups particularly despised by the National Socialists, such as Jews and »asocials«.

In 1942, however, the Main Economic and Administrative Office of the SS issued a circular decree that introduced stricter selection criteria. The sole reason for this change was the increased demand for labour in the armaments industry.

This mass murder, which claimed the lives of up to 20,000 people, was given the code name »14f13«.

As the war dragged on, the rising number of Wehrmacht casualties intensified the Nazi leadership’s existing fear of a hereditary weakening of the »national community«. Against this backdrop, Hitler repeatedly and publicly demanded that criminals should not be »preserved«. In August 1942, the newly appointed Reich Minister of Justice, Otto Thierack, reached an agreement with Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler, the head of the German police. According to this agreement, all individuals in preventive detention, »asocial elements«, and other prisoner groups held in penal institutions were to be »handed over to the Reichsführer SS for extermination through labour.« In the months that followed, judicial authorities transferred up to 20.000 prisoners and individuals in preventive detention to concentration camps. There, thousands suffered and died as a result of forced hard labour and inadequate care.

On 1 September 1939, the Wehrmacht attacks Poland. After the defeat of the Polish army, the western part of the country was annexed by the German Reich, while the eastern part was taken over by the Soviet Union. The German occupiers expelled hundreds of thousands of Polish citizens and committed the first mass murders.

On 10 May 1940, police forces under Bruno Streckenbach, commander of the Security Police and SD in Krakow, began a new wave of mass shootings. The occupying forces referred to these murders as the »Extraordinary Pacification Operation« (»Außerordentliche Befriedungsaktion«). According to Streckenbach, the operation targeted the Polish resistance as well as »criminal elements«. At a police meeting in late May 1940, he outlined plans to »liquidate 3,000 career criminals (…)« to free up space in the prisons. Around the same time, the German authorities introduced special legislation targeting the Polish population. From 1941, the supplementary »Polish penal code« (»Polenstrafrechtsverordnung«) drastically expanded the use of severe punishments, including the death penalty and deportation to camps.

From 1942, Polish children and young people were also threatened with imprisonment. In the annexed city of Łódź, the German administration set up one of the three youth concentration camps in the German Reich, the »Litzmannstadt Polish Youth Detention Camp«. The police only needed to accuse the children of unauthorised acquisition of ration cards to commit them. Additionally, children of murdered resistance fighters were also deported here. Many died from malnutrition and disease. Hans Muthesius, a senior official in the Reich Ministry of the Interior and later a key figure in postwar social reforms in West Germany, developed the regulations governing these internments.

The National Socialists regarded the communist Soviet Union as their primary ideological enemy, despite the non-aggression pact signed by the two regimes in 1939. The Nazi leadership’s »anti-Bolshevism« fused extreme anti-communism with virulent antisemitism. In a secret speech in March 1941, Hitler referred to Bolshevism as »asocial criminality«.

Beginning in June 1941, three million German soldiers invaded the Soviet Union, followed by SS and police units. This marked the start of a declared war of extermination. Initially, Communist Party officials and Jewish men were targeted and executed, but entire Jewish communities soon followed. The Einsatzgruppen of the Security Police and SD regularly reported the scope of these murders to Berlin in detail. Their reports often listed »asocials« or »career criminals« among the victims of mass shootings or individual executions. Local collaborators frequently aided the Germans in carrying out these atrocities.

After the Wehrmacht’s victory over France in June 1940, the north of the country fell under German occupation, followed by the south in 1942. The southern French city of Marseille, particularly the historic Old Port neighbourhood, was seen by Hitler and Himmler as a hub of resistance and labeled the »pigsty of France«. In 1943, the SS cleared the neighbourhood and systematically demolished it house by house.

Political, social, and racial motives for persecution intersected in this operation. The majority of the 20.000 evicted residents were sent to a transit camp. Approximately 800 Jews were deported to the Sobibor extermination camp in occupied Poland. Another 800 individuals were sent to the Sachsenhausen and Mauthausen concentration camps, accused by the Nazis of resistance.

In April 1940, the Wehrmacht occupied Denmark. The National Socialists claimed to establish a »model protectorate« there, as they considered the Danish population to be »Germans«. Initially, there was little resistance to the occupation, but dissent grew increasingly open over time.

On 2 October 1943, Danish resistance members thwarted the planned deportation of 7.000 Jews, transporting them to safety in Sweden by boats. Despite protests from the Danish government, the Germans deported 500 Jews to the Theresienstadt concentration camp. In response to acts of sabotage by the underground resistance, the Gestapo and SD escalated their terror tactics, blowing up private homes and imposing curfews. Danish workers retaliated with strikes and street blockades lasting for days.

In 1944, the Gestapo and Kripo conducted targeted raids in Copenhagen’s cafés and pubs, using criminal police records to identify suspects. Several hundred men were arrested and labeled as »asocials« or »habitual criminals«. Some were sent to the Frøslev internment camp near the German-Danish border, while until January 1945 at least 420 men were deported to the Neuengamme concentration camp.