Berlin Police and the Holocaust in the Benie Gunther Series (Part I)

Berlin Police in 1945

I have just completed and reviewed the trio of books featuring Bernie Gunther that make up Berlin Noir by Philip Kerr. In the books the role of Berlin police in Nazi Germany is not limited to their enforcement of the law and the solving of crime. Kerr explores the roles police officers took in implementing Nazi ideology against German citizens prior to the war and their participation in World War II.

It is little surprise that police officers were brought into the Army during the war to deal with issues of crime especially in occupied areas. Soldiers are not trained to be police officers. However, police officers participated in the Holocaust especially during the invasion of Russia in 1941.

Arthur Nebe, a senior police officer in the books, was a real life high ranking Berlin police officer before the war. During the war he volunteered to lead Einsatzgruppe B. Wikipedia describes some of its actions while he commanded:

Around 5 July 1941, Nebe consolidated Einsatzgruppe B near Minsk, establishing a headquarters and remaining there for some two months. The killing activities progressed apace. In a 13 July Operational Situation Report, Nebe reported 1,050 Jews had been liquidated in Minsk, and that in Vilna, the liquidation of the Jews was underway, and that five hundred Jews were shot daily. In the same report Nebe remarked that: "only 96 Jews were executed in Grodno and Lida during the first days. I gave orders to intensify these activities". He also reported that the liquidations were being brought into smooth running order and that the shootings were carried out "at an increasing rate". The report also announced that in Minsk Einsatzgruppe was now killing non-Jews.

Nebe’s unit, as with the other units, kept careful track of their killing. Nebe’s troops killed 45,467 people during the 4 months he was in command.

Bernie had considerable regard for Nebe prior to the war. He thought of Nebe as less political and more concerned with proper policing than most of the police leadership anxious to gain favour with the Nazi leadership.

Why would police officers sworn to uphold the law and find criminals take part in mass murder? A Berlin exhibition in 2011 delved into the issue:

     What was it that turned respectable family men into henchmen

     involved in mass murder? Hölzl (historian and curator Martin

     Hölzl) said there many reasons, including the stable income,

     social acceptance and respect which the role of policeman

     guaranteed. Police were also spared frontline duty which had a

     greater chance of survival than Wehmacht soldiers.

     The exhibition also points to obedience, peer pressure, esprit de

     corps, as well as ideological convictions, brutalization and

     reutilization as important factors. Some policemen got rich at

     the expense of victims and others pursued perverse career

     ambitions, Hölzl explained.

In Wikipedia it states that historian Ronald Headland “concluded that Nebe was an ambitious man who may have volunteered to lead an Einsatzgruppe unit for careerist reasons, to get a ‘military decoration’, and to curry favor with Heydrich.”

Another example involving police is Austrian police officer Franz Stangl who commanded concentration extermination camps. In her powerful book The Healing Wound, German writer Gitta Sereny interviewed Stangl after his conviction for war crimes long after the war.

Sereny explored how he became a mass murderer. To keep a promotion in Austria he had to give up his Catholic faith. Subsequently, he was called to Berlin to be put in charge of a special unit for euthanasia of “people who were hopelessly insane or monstrously deformed”. Reluctant to take the command he was assured he would not have to kill anyone but “merely to be responsible for law and order”. Later he had a choice of returning to Austria or going East on some vague anti-partisan action. He opted for the East to fight against partisans. Stangl claimed that he did not know that he was building a death camp at Sobibór and that he would likely have been killed if he had refused. He subsequently commanded the Sobibór and Treblinka death camps. He came to think of the prisoners as “cargo” not human beings.

Step by step Stangl had let himself be turned from an ordinary police killer to an efficient mass murderer.

Stangl died of heart failure 19 hours after the interview was completed.

In German Requiem Bernie is called upon to find the evidence that would clear Emil Becker, a police colleague before the war, who had helped Bernie solve the murders in A Pale Criminal. Becker has been wrongfully charged with murder.

During the investigation Bernie learns that during the war Becker was a member of an execution squad in the Ukraine and personally engaged in murdering Jews. Becker is a Nazi killer. Should Bernie work to clear Becker of this charge when he was actually a mass murderer?

Bernie chooses to work on Becker’s case for much the same reason lawyers represent all clients. It was not Bernie’s job to decide guilt for Becker’s actions during and after the war.

While Becker did not achieve a high ranking position like Stangl he was comparable to a real life example of a police officer referred to in the Exhibition:

Julius Wohlauf was one of them. Born in Dresden in 1913, he completed a commercial apprenticeship after taking his school leaving examinations and then became a member of the Nazi Party. He progressed from constable to commander of a reserve police battalion in Poland, which was responsible for deporting Jews and killing them in mass shootings.

Bernie did not follow the above paths to the killing fields and camps of Eastern Europe. My next post will discuss his decisions and comparable real life individuals. 

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Kerr, Philip – (2004) - Dark Matter; (2016) - March Violets; (2016) - The Pale Criminal; (2016) - A German Requiem; Paperback