Dipl. Pol. Julia Hörath
Fondation pour la Mémoire de la Shoah
Séminaire des Boursiers
Présentation de la Thèse de Doctorat
Décembre 2011
‘Asocials’ and ‘Professional Criminals’ in the Nazi Concentration Camps,
1933 – 1937/38
The following presentation of my PhD project on the imprisonment of so-called
‘asocials’ and ‘professional criminals’ in the pre-war Nazi concentration camps will be
divided into three parts: First, I will briefly address the question of who belonged to
the two groups of camp inmates labelled as ‘asocials’ and ‘professional criminals’ by
the SS. Secondly, I will outline the main arguments of my dissertation. And thirdly, I
will explain the legal framework on which the camp admissions of ‘asocials’ and
‘professional criminals’ were based during the years 1933 until 1937/38.
1) The Prisoner Groups of the ‘Asocials’ and the ‘Professional Criminals’:
Long before Hitler came to power, both groups had been subjected to repressive
measures by the police, the judicial system, and by welfare services and health
centres. The term ‘asocial’ was applied to a huge variety of behaviours which violated
the norms of bourgeois society: vagrancy and begging, abusive drinking and neglect
of family and children, prostitution as well as other forms of sexual deviance.
The expression ‘professional criminal’ had been coined in a book of the same title
that was published in 1926 by Robert Heindl, a Weimar criminologist. According to
Heindl, the vast majority of crimes were committed by a clearly definable group of
multiple recidivists: the ‘professional criminals’. Thus, following Heindl’s hypothesis,
the police simply had to arrest and intern this limited number of delinquents in order
to eliminate criminality from society.
It was precisely this utopia of a community freed of such social problems as deviance
and delinquency that motivated the early twentieth century’s concepts of ‘social
engineering’ (Thomas Etzemüller) and paved the ground for the admission of
‘asocials’ and ‘professional criminals’ to the concentration camps.
Every historical account of the fate of individuals who were persecuted as ‘asocials’
or ‘professional criminals’ by the authorities should bear in mind that even today the
two terms are still heavily loaded with social prejudices. To mark them clearly as
historical terms deriving from the perpetrators’ language they will in the following
always be placed in inverted commas.
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Dipl. Pol. Julia Hörath
Fondation pour la Mémoire de la Shoah
Séminaire des Boursiers
Présentation de la Thèse de Doctorat
Décembre 2011
2) The Main Arguments of my Dissertation:
Hitherto, historical research into the persecution of ‘asocials’ and ‘criminals’ under
National Socialism has focused primarily on the concept of ‘racial general prevention’
(Ulrich Herbert), which seeks to explain why and when the concentration camps were
turned into instruments to combat all manner of racial and social outsiders. This is,
moreover, a key aspect of the interpretation of the concentration camps’ overall
development in the pre-war period. In this view the camps would have lost their
purpose when the Nazi regime was consolidated in early 1934, had the category of
its enemies not been extended from political opponents to all those deemed
‘community aliens’ by the National Socialists. This guiding idea of ‘racial general
prevention’, Herbert argues, was developed during the mid-1930s in the newlyestablished Reich Criminal Police Headquarters and in the upper echelon of the
SS/Gestapo complex. It was put into practice in 1937/38 in a series of mass raids
against ‘asocials’ and ‘professional criminals’. This broadening of the concentration
camps’ function turned them into what historians such as Ulrich Herbert, Karin Orth,
and Johannes Tuchel term the ‘original Nazi concentration camp’, in contrast to the
so-called ‘early camps’ set up in the years 1933/34.
However, my PhD thesis shows that shifting the lens to the first half of the 1930s
reveals the contribution of local initiatives to the process of forging the concentration
camps into a tool for combating social deviance and delinquency. As Wolf Gruner
has already demonstrated in the context of the persecution of Jews, local authorities
often acted on their own steam by anticipating and preceding central orders from
above.
I argue firstly that the concept of ‘racial general prevention’ was developed from 1933
onwards in a heterogeneous process ‘from below’ rather than in centralised decisionmaking. On the basis of my research, the top-down mechanism of the mid-1930s
described by Ulrich Herbert turns out to be rather the centralisation and
systematisation of various extant, localised practices of persecution.
Secondly, this leads me to a new interpretation of the ‘early concentration camps’ of
the years 1933/34. There is no doubt that the ‘road to Auschwitz’ was ‘twisted’ (Karl
A. Schleunes), nor that the ‘early concentration camps’ differed greatly from the
camps of the wartime years in terms of organisational structure, life conditions and
death rates. Nevertheless, the continuities seem stronger than historians have
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Dipl. Pol. Julia Hörath
Fondation pour la Mémoire de la Shoah
Séminaire des Boursiers
Présentation de la Thèse de Doctorat
Décembre 2011
assumed so far. My PhD thesis on the early persecution of ‘asocials’ and
‘professional criminals’ reveals the camps’ eugenic function even at this point. It does
not, as such, regard the ‘early concentration camps’ as a phenomenon wholly distinct
from the sites of terror established from 1930 onwards and used systematically for
‘racial general prevention’. I propose instead to integrate the early camps better into
our understanding of the Nazi regime in general and of the history of the Shoah in
particular. Only by studying that, which ‘preceded the unprecedented’ (Jane Caplan)
can we begin to understand how the singular horrors of the wartime concentration
camps became possible.
3) The Legal Basis for the Imprisonment of ‘Asocials’ and ‘Professional Criminals’ in
the Camps:
Immediately after Hitler came to power the persecution of social outsiders and
alleged ‘criminals’ intensified. Between May and October 1933 the Berlin criminal
police carried out a series of raids against ‘professional criminals’. And from summer
1933 onwards the Reich Ministry of Propaganda prepared for a campaign against
beggars and vagrants that was eventually carried out in all states of the Reich in just
one week in September. The concentration camps served alongside prisons and
workhouses as sites of internment for those rounded up during the raid. For the legal
basis the authorities drew on either § 361 or § 362 of the Reich Penal Code
stipulating ‘correctional post detention’ in workhouses. In the late summer of the
following year, the Prussian Ministry of Interior encouraged the governments of the
other German states to carry out similar raids, but left the decision to their respective
Ministries of Interior. Attendant local ‘beggar’ campaigns are documented for Bavaria,
Baden, Württemberg and Thuringia.
Beyond such campaigns, the legal basis for committing ‘asocials’ and ‘professional
criminals’ to the concentration camps remained for now subject to the policies of the
German states, and evinced as such a rather heterogeneous structure.
The concentration camp confinement of ‘asocials’ was based on a veritable
conglomerate of pseudo-legal constructs. The Bavarian authorities, for example,
imposed ‘protective custody’ not exclusively on members of the political opposition,
but also on individuals who had supposedly violated social norms. And despite all the
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Dipl. Pol. Julia Hörath
Fondation pour la Mémoire de la Shoah
Séminaire des Boursiers
Présentation de la Thèse de Doctorat
Décembre 2011
efforts of the Prussian Ministry of Interior to restrict ‘protective custody’, we find
similar cases for the Prussian concentration camp in Oranienburg. Still more
important was § 20 of the Reich Welfare Code, issued as early as 1924. This
enabled the welfare services to detain clients in an asylum or workhouse whose
indigence was allegedly caused by their ‘moral misconduct’. In October 1934 a
corresponding directive of the Bavarian Ministry of Interior authorized the welfare
centres to enact § 20 also at Dachau concentration camp. This procedure was not
confined to Bavaria and can also be seen, for example, with the Kislau concentration
camp in Baden.
After a Reich Decree of April 1934 had allocated the competence to issue ‘protective
custody’ exclusively to the Gestapo, its imposition on ‘asocials’ declined rapidly, if not
totally. Until 1937 in most German states the § 20 of the Reich Welfare Code
remained the main instrument to confine alleged ‘asocials’ to the camps.
Turning now to the legal basis for the internment of so-called ‘professional criminals’,
two crucial regulations were issued in November 1933: the Prussian Decree on
Preventive Police Custody and the Habitual Criminals Law.
The latter introduced the indefinite ‘security confinement’ of repeat offenders,
imposed by the courts in conjunction with a custodial sentence and was served in
prisons and penitentiaries. As such, the Habitual Criminals Law exclusively affected
offenders who could actually be convicted by a court, and not those delinquents who
had indeed committed crimes in the past, but could not be found guilty of a
punishable act at present.
The Prussian Decree on Preventive Police Custody was intended to close precisely
this gap. It enabled the criminal police to take a limited number of repeat offenders
into indefinite ‘preventive police custody’ without legal adjudication being necessary.
The target group of ‘preventive police custody’ was clearly defined by criteria such as
the cause, incidence, and severity of earlier offences and previous convictions.
At the turn of the years 1933/34 the Prussian Ministry of Interior requested the
governments of the other German states to stipulate similar regulations for
‘preventive police custody’. Whereas some states met the demand rapidly, others
required a reminder. Baden, for example, issued its decree in March 1934, whereas
the decrees of Bavaria and Thuringia both date from January 1935. In their wording
4
Dipl. Pol. Julia Hörath
Fondation pour la Mémoire de la Shoah
Séminaire des Boursiers
Présentation de la Thèse de Doctorat
Décembre 2011
the decrees of Bavaria and Thuringia closely followed the Prussian model. The
regulations stipulated by the Ministry of Interior in Baden, however, differed greatly.
For instance, they did not target ‘professional criminals’, but ‘asocial and work-shy
persons’. Likewise, the Thuringian Ministry of Interior extended the ‘preventive police
custody’ on ‘female asocial persons’ in July 1935. As such it covered alleged or
actual prostitutes who were kept for treatment of a venereal disease at the State
Sanatorium Stadtroda. Initially, this institution was also to serve as site for carrying
out the ‘preventive police custody’. But from June 1936 onwards the women in
question could also be committed to the women’s concentration camp in Moringen.
Not until December 1937 did the Reich Decree on Preventive Police Custody
standardize these regulations and put an end to the strikingly heterogeneous arrest
practice described above. By extending ‘preventive police custody’ on ‘asocials’ the
Reich Decree institutionalized the ideological and organisational amalgamation of the
persecution of ‘asocials’ and ‘professional criminals’ that had loomed already in the
local decrees of Baden and Thuringia in 1934/35 and had characterized the arrest
practice in many other regions, too.
After the waves of mass raids against ‘asocials’ and ‘professional criminals’ in
1937/38, prisoner numbers in the camps rose considerably. In the aftermath
‘asocials’ and ‘professional criminals’ temporarily represented the two biggest groups
of inmates. By the end of World War II the criminal police had taken at least 70,000
‘asocials’ and ‘professional criminals’ into ‘preventive police custody’ and deported
them to the camps (Patrick Wagner).
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Dipl. Pol. Julia Hörath
Fondation pour la Mémoire de la Shoah
Séminaire des Boursiers
Présentation de la Thèse de Doctorat
Décembre 2011
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Fondation pour la Mémoire de la Shoah
Séminaire des Boursiers
Présentation de la Thèse de Doctorat
Décembre 2011
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