Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews, Peter Longerich [essential books to read TXT] 📗

Kripo, who were actually responsible, were still

preparing their own measures against the ‘work-shy’, Himmler ordered an inde-

pendent Gestapo action against this group. The group in question—individuals

capable of gainful employment who had refused jobs offered to them twice

without justification, or had taken on the work but then abandoned it without

any sound reasons—were to report via the labour offices to the Gestapo stations

and be transferred to Buchenwald concentration camp. The operation began on 21

April 1938 and ended officially on 30 April, although it may possibly have

extended beyond that date. As a result of the arrests in the context of this

operation, by the beginning of June 1938 there were almost 2,000 prisoners in

Buchenwald. 7

The Reich-wide Kripo operation against ‘asocials’ (operation ‘Reich Work-

Shy’) began in the same month. The fact that this operation was to include all

Jews with previous convictions (however minor) clearly reveals the complemen-

tary function of racial hygiene and racist anti-Semitism within the National

Socialist project of a racially homogeneous social order. (The operation will be

examined more closely within the context of the depiction of the third wave of

anti-Semitism.)8

While the persecution of the Gypsies had proceeded along more or less

conventional lines in the first years of the NS dictatorship, between 1936 and

1938 the essential foundations were laid for a systematic persecution of this

population group on a racist basis.

After the Reich Ministry of the Interior standardized the stipulations of the laws

regarding Gypsies in the Länder, in autumn 1936 the Prussian State Criminal

Police Office began to centralize the persecution of the Gypsies. In 1937 the office,

by now transformed into a Reich Criminal Police Office, took over the ‘Gypsy

Central Office’ that had existed within Munich Police Headquarters since 1899,

which now acted as ‘Reich Office to Combat the Gypsy Plague’. 9 From the end of 1938 until the middle of 1939, a criminal police apparatus extending all the way

down to local police authorities was set up to combat Gypsies.

Since autumn 1937, the Reich Criminal Police Office had worked closely with

the Racial Hygiene Research Centre within the Reich Health Authority which,

under the direction of Robert Ritter, focused upon the ‘Gypsy question’. Since

1937 the Research Centre had undertaken an anthropometrical and genealogical

investigation of all Sinti and Roma in the Reich. On the basis of these investiga-

tions the Research Centre produced racial hygiene reports in which distinctions

were made between ‘genuine’ Gypsies and ‘half-breed Gypsies’. The Criminal

Police were able to use this material as a database for the persecution of the

Persecution of Non-Jewish Groups by the Police, 1936–7

93

Gypsies. Towards the end of the war, with about 25,000 reports, Ritter’s institute

claimed to have recorded almost the whole Gypsy population of the Old Reich

territory. 10

After Himmler had taken over the whole of the police in summer 1936, the

persecution of homosexuals was also intensified. 11 Even before the end of the year a ‘Reich Central Office for Combatting Homosexuality and Abortion’ was set up

within the Prussian State Criminal Office, which centrally recorded particular

categories of male homosexuals. For a time the Gestapo was able to take over

control of the Reich Central Office, although with the start of the war this came

back within the sphere of responsibility of the Kripo. 12 Himmler indicated the priority given to the suppression of homosexuality with reference to the fact that

he had stated in March 1937, at a meeting of Kripo and Gestapo leaders, that he

would henceforth measure the effectiveness of the Kripo according to its successes

within the sphere of the battle against homosexuality and abortion. Accordingly

the number of those sentenced for offences against paragraph 175 of the Reich

Penal Code suddenly rose: from 766 (1934) to over 4,000 (1936) and over 8,000

(1938). After 1937, homosexuals with more than three relevant convictions behind

them, with sentences each of at least six months’ imprisonment, were sent to

concentration camps once they had served their regular sentences. 13

Finally the police apparatus took systematic action against the so-called

‘Rhineland Bastards’, those young people who were the product of relations

between German women and colonial soldiers from the time of the French

occupation of the Rhineland. As early as 1935 the Specialist Advisory Board for

Population and Race Policy agreed to ‘solve’ this ‘bastard question’ by means of

sterilization, although they were initially unable to reach agreement upon the

procedure. 14 Early in 1937 the decision was redrafted so that Afro-Germans were to be compulsorily sterilized outside the existing legal procedure; a relevant

‘special instruction’ from Hitler seems to have been produced. 15 Accordingly, in the spring of 1937 a special commission was set up which, over the coming

months and with the assistance of three sub-commissions, performed the

sterilization of some 600–800 young people. 16

The practice of German Racial Policy also raised the problem of how the

children of German and non-European foreigners, described in Nazi language

as ‘alien half-breeds’ (artfremde Mischlinge), were to be treated. For this group, the

race legislation was similar. In a document dated February 1937 the Foreign Office

indicated that over the previous two years about fifty cases at most had appeared,

in which ‘the German race legislation was to be applied to non-Jewish alien half-

breeds’. It had turned out that the ‘domestic political interest in an enforcement of

racial legislation was in most cases entirely insignificant, while on the other hand

the fear of foreign political disadvantages was always justified and decisive’.

Generally, then, the emergency regulation intended for such cases had been

applied. The number of those cases in which, because of fundamental ‘racial

94

Racial Persecution, 1933–1939

policy’ considerations, foreign policy concerns had been set aside and it had been

impossible to apply the emergency regulation ‘had numbered about 5 over the past

4 years’. In view of this practice, the Foreign Office suggested that the race

legislation be fundamentally restricted to Jews and that those race laws already

passed be altered, replacing terms such as artfremd (alien) or ‘non-Aryan’ with

‘Jewish’.

On 22 April 1937 the Reich Interior Ministry fundamentally adopted a position

on the relationship between ‘racial policy’ and Jewish policy. The Interior Ministry

established that the ‘final goal of the National Socialist movement . . . was to

eliminate all people of alien blood from the German national body’ (Volkskörper).

Besides, a change in the race laws was inopportune because it would be interpreted

abroad as a