The Criminal Underworld in Weimar and Nazi Berlin

Bibliographic Data

ID4494258
AuthorsChristian Goeschel (0000-0002-7923-4066, Australian National University, corresponding author)
Year2013
Volume75
Issue1
Pages58-80
Publication date2013-04-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueHistory Workshop Journal (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1363-3554 • E-ISSN: 1477-4569
PublisherOxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1093/hwj/dbs034
OpenAlexW2130646289
LanguageEN
References cited18

(Head of the SS and Chief of the German Police), gave a lecture to Wehrmacht generals. Himmler praised himself and the SS for cleansing Germany of the Jews and insisted that there must never be another 1918 – referring to the German revolution of that year, allegedly brought about by a coalition of Jews, Bolsheviks and criminals.1 This speech came weeks after the Allied landing in Normandy, when a German victory in the war was increasingly unlikely and the Nazi regime had begun to escalate its persecution of racial and social outsiders. Gangs of organized criminals, the so-called Ringvereine, supposedly dominated by Jews and Communists, were said to be subverting German society and undermining the war effort. According to Himmler: When a man was released from the penitentiary, an organization was already available to him, organized by a comrade who had been released from the penitentiary two or three months earlier. They would agree then: we will do a big job because we must make some more money again.2 Himmler’s speech reinforced a powerful Nazi myth about the criminal underworld, that it was part of a Judeo-Bolshevik conspiracy which had crippled Germany under the Weimar Republic until the Nazis destroyed it in 1933.3 Concern with law and order was not exclusive to the Nazis, but to a greater extent than many other modern regimes, perhaps,4 they believed that the repression of crime was central to their gaining and maintaining popular support. Many Germans had been worrying about dramatically rising crime rates since the end of the First World War. Eliminating crime and thereby restoring the state’s authority was a Nazi priority, one of the chief reasons why the Nazis appealed to large sections of German society, as Detlev Peukert has shown. Even fifty years after the end of the Third Reich, according to oral history interviews conducted by Eric Johnson and

Criminology · Nazism · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Weimar Republic · European history and politics · French Historical and Cultural Studies · History · Law · Medical History and Research

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