The persecution of “asocials”

On 24 November 1933 the Reich government passed the “Law against Dangerous Habitual Criminals and on Measures of Security and Reform” (Gesetz gegen gefährliche Gewohnheitsverbrecher und über Maßregeln der Sicherung und Besserung). It introduced into the German criminal code the indefinite detention of people deemed dangerous repeat offenders, the committal of beggars, vagrants and prostitutes to workhouses, compulsory treatment for alcoholics and the castration of sex offenders. It was one of the first laws with which the Nazi state set about “cleansing” society not of political opponents but of people on its margins. Popular chronologies sometimes state that on this day “the homeless, alcoholics and the unemployed were sent to concentration camps”. This is a simplification that compresses a process lasting several years into a single day. No one was deported to a camp on 24 November, and unemployment was not grounds for any form of repression. The law came into force on 1 January 1934 and operated through the courts and prisons. The mass deportation of people labelled “asocial” to concentration camps came only in 1938. The autumn of 1933, however, was the start of that road.

Poverty after the Great Depression

At the beginning of 1933 there were more than six million unemployed in Germany. Hundreds of thousands of people who had lost their jobs and homes wandered the country from one hostel to the next, begging or selling whatever they could on the streets. Begging and vagrancy had been offences in Germany since the days of the Empire. A court could sentence offenders to a few weeks’ detention, and once they had served their sentence the police could confine them for up to two years in a workhouse, a prison-like institution where the poor were to be “reformed” through labour. Already in the final years of the Weimar Republic, influential welfare officials were calling for a tougher line towards what they called “asocial elements”. The Nazis therefore did not need to invent the notion of the “asocial”. They merely gave it a new meaning: in their ideology poverty, alcoholism or the lack of steady employment were symptoms of hereditary “inferiority”, and people who did not fit into the “national community” were its enemies.

“Beggars’ Week”

The first great blow was the round-up of beggars in September 1933. The idea came in July from Joseph Goebbels’s Propaganda Ministry, which was preparing the first collection of the Winter Relief of the German People and believed that beggars were taking donors’ money away from it. The Reich Interior Ministry took up the idea and ordered a nationwide operation. From 18 to 23 September 1933 the police, supported by the SA and the SS, detained every homeless person and beggar they could find on the streets, in night shelters and in cheap inns, as well as pedlars and street musicians. In Württemberg alone 4,818 people were detained, in Hamburg about 1,400 and in Munich more than 500. The total was never published. The German historian Wolfgang Ayaß, the leading expert on the subject, estimates it at around 100,000. Never before had so many people been detained in Germany in a single police operation.

The round-up was accompanied by a press campaign. Newspapers portrayed beggars as frauds who earned more than honest workers, bought houses with the money they collected and communicated by secret signs chalked on doors. They urged readers not to give them a penny but to donate to Winter Relief instead. The large charitable organisations, the Protestant Inner Mission and the Catholic Caritas, knew of the operation in advance and did not warn the people in their care. Most of those detained were released after a few days or weeks in custody. Several thousand, however, were sent to workhouses, which were soon overcrowded. The Bavarian Interior Ministry solved the problem in its own way: some of the inmates of the overcrowded workhouse at Rebdorf were transferred to the Dachau concentration camp. In March 1935, 270 of them were still being held there.

The law of 24 November

The law followed two months after the round-up. It was drafted by the Justice Ministry of Franz Gürtner, a conservative who had been minister before Hitler came to power, and the government passed it on its own, without the Reichstag, under the Enabling Act. Some of its ideas came from criminal-law reform drafts of the Weimar years, but the Nazis made them considerably harsher. The law introduced heavier penalties for “dangerous habitual criminals”, that is, people with multiple convictions, and a new kind of sanction – measures of security and reform – imposed alongside or after a sentence:

• committal to a psychiatric institution of offenders found to lack or to have diminished criminal responsibility,
• committal of alcoholics and drug addicts to an institution for addiction treatment,
• committal to a workhouse of beggars, vagrants, prostitutes and people deemed “work-shy”,
• preventive detention (Sicherungsverwahrung) for “dangerous habitual criminals”, with no fixed term, for as long as “public safety” required it; a court was to review every three years whether it should continue. It could also be imposed on people already serving prison sentences,
• castration of “dangerous sex offenders”,
• bans on practising a profession and the expulsion of foreigners from the Reich.

Ten days earlier, on 13 November 1933, the Prussian Interior Ministry had issued a decree on “preventive police custody” for “professional criminals”, a term applied to people sentenced at least three times within five years to at least six months’ imprisonment for crimes committed for gain. These people could be sent to a concentration camp without trial, on the strength of a police decision alone, even after serving their sentence. By February 1934 more than five hundred of them had been confined in the Lichtenburg camp. It was here, and not in the law of 24 November, that the concentration camp for people whose offence was not political had its beginnings.

The law of 24 November must be read together with another law of the same year. On 14 July 1933, the day the NSDAP became the only party in Germany, the government adopted a law on the compulsory sterilisation of people with supposedly hereditary diseases, including “congenital feeble-mindedness” and “severe alcoholism”. Both laws came into force on the same day, 1 January 1934. Both struck at the same people: the poor, the sick and the helpless, regarded as a burden on the nation.

From workhouses to camps

Repression of “asocials” grew harsher year by year. Before the 1936 Olympic Games the Bavarian Political Police ordered beggars, vagrants, “Gypsies”, prostitutes, drunkards and the “work-shy” to be placed in “protective custody” so that they would not spoil Germany’s image in the eyes of tourists. On 14 December 1937 the Reich Interior Ministry extended preventive police custody to the whole Reich and to everyone who “endangers the community through asocial behaviour”. It was the police, not a court, that decided who was “asocial”.

In 1938 came the mass deportations, later known as the “Arbeitsscheu Reich” (“Work-shy Reich”) operation. In April the Gestapo detained between 1,500 and 2,000 men who had twice refused a job assigned to them by the labour exchange and sent them to Buchenwald. In June, from the 13th to the 18th, the criminal police arrested more than nine thousand more, among them, on Hitler’s personal order, some 2,300 Jews with any conviction at all on their record, however minor. All were sent to concentration camps. Reinhard Heydrich explained that the state could not tolerate people who shirked work and thereby sabotaged the Four-Year Plan, that is, rearmament. The SS also needed labour for its brickworks and quarries. “Asocial” prisoners wore the black triangle in the camps and stood at the very bottom of the camp hierarchy. In some camps they made up the majority of prisoners until the outbreak of war.

In 1942 the Justice Minister, Otto Thierack, agreed with Himmler that prisoners in preventive detention and other “asocial” prisoners held by the judicial system would be handed over to the SS for “extermination through labour”. Thousands of them died in the camps. Researchers estimate the total number of concentration camp prisoners classified as “asocial” or “professional criminals” at 60,000–80,000.

Forgotten victims

After the war, people who had worn the black and green triangles were for decades not recognised as victims of Nazism. They received no compensation, and even other former prisoners often looked down on them. Many provisions of the 1933 law were not repealed: the Allies abolished castration and the death penalty for habitual criminals, but preventive detention, in modified form, remains part of German law to this day. Only on 13 February 2020 did the Bundestag recognise those persecuted as “asocials” and “professional criminals” as victims of National Socialism.

Significance

The persecution of “asocials” shows that the terror of the Third Reich was never confined to political opponents and Jews. Hitler’s state sought to create a disciplined, “racially healthy” and hard-working national community, ready for the effort of rearmament and war. Anyone who did not fit was to disappear from the streets: first into custody and the workhouse, then into the camp. The same categories – the “hereditarily tainted”, the “asocial”, the “useless” – made it possible in 1939 to begin murdering the mentally ill in Aktion T4. From the first weeks of the war the Germans also murdered patients of Polish psychiatric hospitals in the occupied territories, among them at Owińska and Kocborowo. The round-up of beggars in September 1933 and the law of 24 November were the first steps in that process.