Nazi Police Tactics in Today's Germany

From German-Foreign-Policy.com
Police Tradition

2007/09/10

BERLIN/WIESBADEN

(Own report) - In the course of a conference on the roles played by several founding fathers of the German Federal Office of Criminal Investigation (BKA) during the Nazi dictatorship, BKA President, Jörg Ziercke, warned against drawing comparisons between the methods of state repression during the Nazi regime and repressive measures taken by the police today. Those who today apply "terminology used by the Nazis or in the German Democratic Republic" - "i.e. 'preventive state' or 'surveillance state'", according to the BKA President, is trivializing the "suffering of the victims". With this statement, he is attempting to remove the obvious continuity of the unprecedented extension of police surveillance from its historical context. Critics are convinced that NS continuity within the BKA cannot be limited to merely biographies of some of its leading officials: they are accused of serious war crimes and crimes against humanity. It is much more to be found in the BKA's organizational structure, which is based on the Nazi Reich's Criminal Investigation Office, whose traditions are still in evidence and can be seen for example in the BKA'S collaboration with globally ostracized torture regimes. Recently, another leading police official, Ulrich Wegner, the founder of the GSG 9 special police force, admitted that he has Nazi role models: he owes "important impulses" to the Wehrmacht's "Brandenburg" division. That division helped carry out serious war crimes.

Clarification

As the BKA confirmed upon inquiry, the second of three colloquiums on the history of the BKA will take place September 20. According to BKA President Jörg Ziercke, this colloquium will be focused on what personnel, organizational and ideological influence the Nazi police apparatus had on police forces established in the Federal Republic of Germany. Ziercke candidly admits that high-ranking BKA officials had been implicated in Nazi crimes, but he claims: "I also can see that much of these remnants had been thrown over board at the end of the Sixties, beginning of the Seventies."[1] He rejects the criticism of the unprecedented expansion of police competence: Those who use terms such as "surveillance state" or "snooping state", "are comparing our present police with police forces of the Nazis or other totalitarian states" and are "trivializing (...) the totalitarian dictatorial Nazi regime." In other words, he is demanding a halt to criticism on state intrusion into ever wider areas of social life, because it could also be applied to old Nazi methods.[2]

Bad Imitation

It has been known for years, that the BKA, founded in 1951 on orders of the (West) German interior ministry, was but an "organizational bad imitation" of the Criminal Investigation Office of the Third Reich (RKPA). The RKPA was a sector of the Main Office of the Reich Security (RSHA), the Nazi terror headquarters, founded by SS Lt. Gen. Reinhard Heydrich. Almost all of the personnel in the BKA's leadership had served in the RSHA. Of the 47 top officials in the founding years, 33 had been SS officers - some even high-ranking. They were responsible for thousands of murders of Jews, Sinti and Roms, so-called social misfits, forced laborers and resistance fighters in Germany and in the countries occupied by the Wehrmacht in WW II.[3]

Exemplary

The biography of the BKA president from 1955 to 1964 is exemplary. The jurist, Reinhard Dullien, born 1902, joined the NSDAP and the SS in 1933 and attained the status of Assistant Ministerial Counselor in the administration of East Prussia. In the fall of 1941, he became the director of the "Main Division III", of the so-called General Commissioner's Office of Wolhynia and Podolia in the German occupied Ukraine. Within his functions was the responsibility for the economic plundering of and conscripting of forced laborers from the region. A report from his office sheds light on the methods used by Dullien to export labor slaves to Germany ("labor recruitment"): "Recruitment in Wolhynia always gives the same picture, the inhabitants flee at the sight of the recruitment commission, because there are insufficient police officers to occupy the villages in a blitz action." The report also provides examples of "punishment methods" used by the future BKA President against the recalcitrant rural population: "confiscation of livestock, fines and burning down the farms."[4]

Torture Cooperation

According to critics, traditions of the NS police are still alive in the BKA. The former BKA criminal director, Dieter Schenk, who had worked for the BKA until 1989, observed, there is no consequent suppression of rightwing extremism and there is intensive collaboration with states, where severe human rights violations are on the daily agenda. In 1988 alone, according to Schenk, 130 visitors from torture states and 18 from states with death squads were welcomed by the BKA with all honors", where modalities of German assistance for the foreign torture administrations ("equipment aid") were discussed. A program involving this aid from 1995 to 1998, lists "27 countries, of which 23 are mentioned in the annual report [of Amnesty International, author], and 15 of these as torture regimes of the worst sort." According to Schenk, these "business relations" of the BKA serve "not in rare cases (...) the silencing of labor unions and environmentalists, critical of big business."[5] Similar accusations concerning the cooperation with Lebanese authorities have also recently been raised by other BKA-employees.[6]

No International Law

Historical continuity is obvious within another police force: the Federal Border Police (BGS, today: Federal Police), an apparatus founded on March 16, 1951 - the anniversary of the founding of the Wehrmacht - with a majority of ex-Wehrmacht personnel. As the border police official, Ulrich Wegener, recently made public, he was inspired by "precious impulses" from the Nazi secret service division "Brandenburg", when he founded the BGS special unit GSG 9. Wegener was referring to"impulses" for operational practice - concerning "unconventional lines of action", "finesse" and "deception of the adversary".[7] The "Division Brandenburg", from which he was receiving his impulses, is said to have been "one of the most brutal" units in the Wehrmacht.[8] In late June 1941, for example, alongside SS intervention commandos and Ukrainian nationalists, the "Division Brandenburg" helped carry out a massacre of 4000 Jews in occupied Lviv.[9] The report describes these activities of this model unit: "These were actions recognizing neither treaties nor conventions of international law."[10]
[Emphasis mine - DBA]

Please read also Dieter Schenk: Auf dem rechten Auge blind. Die braunen Wurzeln des BKA.

[1] "Internet kein Raum ohne Strafverfolgung"; Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 05.09.2007
[2] Das Bundeskriminalamt diskutiert seine Geschichte. Einführungsvortrag von BKA-Präsident Jörg Ziercke am 8. August 2007
[3] Dieter Schenk: Auf dem rechten Auge blind. Die braunen Wurzeln des BKA, Köln 2001
[4] Dieter Schenk: Auf dem rechten Auge blind. Die braunen Wurzeln des BKA, Köln 2001. See also Nationalrat der Nationalen Front des Demokratischen Deutschland/Dokumentationszentrum der staatlichen Archivverwaltung der DDR (Hg.): Braunbuch. Kriegs- und Naziverbrecher in der Bundesrepublik. Berlin (DDR) 1965
[5] Dieter Schenk: Auf dem rechten Auge blind. Die braunen Wurzeln des BKA. Köln 2001
[6] see also Täuschen und lügen, The Torturers, And Still Waiting and Praktische Unterstützung
[7] Reinhard Günzel/Wilhelm Walther/Ulrich K. Wegener: Geheime Krieger. Drei deutsche Kommandoverbände im Bild, Selent 2007
[8] "Division Brandenburg" - Hitlers Terror-Einheit; www.mdr.de/artour/archiv/1546161.html
[9] Enzyklopädie des Holocaust. Die Verfolgung und Ermordung der europäischen Juden, München 1995
[10] "Division Brandenburg" - Hitlers Terror-Einheit; www.mdr.de/artour/archiv/1546161.html
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