Only a few hundred meters from the town hall people were tortured, abused and killed:the Hamburg town hall between Neuer Wall and Stadthausbrücke was the headquarters of the Hamburg police during the Nazi regime and at the same time a center of terror. New research shows that the Nazi crimes controlled from there were not only committed by the Secret State Police (Gestapo), but that other departments of the Hamburg police also played a significant role in the atrocities.
"The role of the Hamburg criminal police and the involvement of the uniformed police in the tyranny was largely unknown until now," says historian Herbert Diercks from the Hamburg-Neuengamme concentration camp memorial. The 58-year-old has compiled current research results on the Nazi involvement of the police officers.
Accordingly, the criminal police was involved in the National Socialist crimes at various levels. From 1933 onwards, their duties included monitoring and prosecuting "career criminals", "anti-socials" and homosexuals, and sending them to concentration camps. Sinti and Roma were also persecuted and eventually deported to extermination camps. Equipped with the power to "prevent crime" police officers could commit the so-called preventive prisoners to the concentration camp without there being any criminal proceedings.
Raids against beggars, Jews and Sinti and Roma
This is how the Hamburg police distinguished themselves in a Germany-wide raid against "those who were dangerous to the public and asocial":The officials in the Hanseatic city arrested at least 700 people and took them to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp near Berlin - including 60 to 80 men from the night shelter "Pik Ace", many Jews with a criminal record as well as Sinti and Roma. As early as autumn 1933, the Hamburg criminal police, which had just been brought into line, had taken 1,400 beggars into "protective custody" and sent 108 of them permanently to the Farmsen labor camp.
During the Second World War, the Hamburg criminal police also helped to pick up escaped concentration camp prisoners and forced laborers. Detectives were also recruited for foreign assignments and were sometimes involved in mass killings of civilians in the Soviet Union and Poland.
The historians also came across harrowing, previously unknown individual fates, such as that of the Altona locksmith Erich de Giske, who was exempt from military service because of his work in an armaments factory. Because he did not return in time from a holiday in France because of a love affair, he was arrested by the police in July 1944 and executed a short time later in Neuengamme concentration camp.
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- Part 1:Raids against beggars, Jews and Sinti and Roma
- Part 2:concentration camp guards instead of friends and helpers