Asocials

Strangers to the Community: Asocials and Career Criminals 
(Gemeinschaftsfremde: Asoziale und Berufsverbrecher)

1933–1938: Persecution and Systematic Oppression

People's Community and “Strangers to the Community”

At the heart of the National Socialist’s worldview was the idea of the people's community (Volksgemeinschaft). Only German comrades who agreed to fully obey the Führer belonged to this community. All others were a danger; the State regarded them as Strangers to the Community (Gemeinschaftsfremde) or Enemies of the Reich (Reichsfeinde). The regime also targeted people because of their social background or supposedly deviant behavior.

The National Socialists were convinced that alleged inferiority and criminality were hereditary. Therefore, they harassed poor families, the homeless, non-conformist young people, prostitutes, alcoholics or other drug addicts, and people who, for example, didn’t show up for work or continuously came late. 

The Nazis also passed the Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring, which went into effect in January 1934. This law allowed hereditary health courts to order forced sterilizations of people they considered to be career criminals. This included, for example, alcoholics, for not only did Nazis view alcoholics as criminals, they also saw alcoholism as hereditary. 

The Nazi government removed many people who did not conform to the ideas of the German people’s community from their homes and placed them in workhouses or welfare institutions. The latter were usually not welfare institutions in the modern sense, but places where poor treatment, humiliation, and forced work under harsh conditions were the norm.

Injustice under the Guise of Averting Danger

Exactly four weeks after Adolf Hitler came to power in January 1933, an arsonist set the German parliament, the Reichstag, on fire. The National Socialists (Nazis) used the fire and subsequent capture of a Dutch communist to issue the Reichstag Fire Decree  – a Decree for the Protection of the People and the State – as an excuse to abolish fundamental rights. Mass arrests, particularly of communists, followed, and the Nazi party gained strength. 

However, for Germans who the authorities already viewed as destructive to the German character, these new laws didn’t change life very much. The police had already denied many people a self-determined life. Theories of racial hygiene and criminal biology, which limited the freedoms of asocials or born criminals, had received some official endorsement since the 1800s. The term asocials was very vague and used to label a wide range of people, for example poor people, homeless, alcoholics or other drug addicts, prostitutes, homosexuals, people not coming to work or coming late, and people living, in the eyes of the National Socialists, a so called nonconformist life. The term “career criminal” often didn’t mean people who committed violent felonies. For example, a teenager from a poor family who was caught shoplifting a few times could be labeled as a habitual or career criminal. There are even cases of the Nazis deporting young men with no previous criminal records to concentration camps because local police officers predicted they would have a future criminal career.

But, after 1933, these ideas became the basis of welfare, healthcare and criminology, and the police gained enormous power over the judicial process. Starting in January 1934, the police could take individuals into preventive detention without a court ruling and deport them to concentration camps, labeling them as habitual or career criminals.

The Beggar Raid of 1933

In September 1933, the police and SA spent days combing through pubs, night shelters and public places, arresting people who did not have a permanent address. Although homelessness had been criminalized for a long time, this raid was on a new scale; it was the first centrally organized mass arrest operation by the National Socialists. The homeless were left without any protection. At the same time, the government began a press campaign that painted a picture of supposedly career beggars who were enriching themselves through handouts and were not actually in need. The Nazis portrayed these beggars as vermin from whom the people’s community had to be freed.

The Nazis released most of those arrested after a few weeks, but others were deported to workhouses, care homes and concentration camps. Importantly, this action against the beggars showed the power of Nazi propaganda to influence German ideas about the purity necessary for the people's community to thrive as well as the ability of the Nazi regime to take uncontested action.

Centralization, Systematization and Expansion of Persecution

With the start of 1937, the National Socialist state and party apparatus took a more systematic approach to the persecution of asocials and career criminals. By February, the head of the German police, Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler, had laid down guidelines for the arrest of 2,000 habitual and career criminals as well as other moral offenders. On March 9, 1937, the criminal police carried out mass arrests and deported these individuals to concentration camps.

In December 1937, the Reich Ministry of the Interior published the Basic Decree on Preventive Crime Control by the Police. This was the first nationwide regulation of preventive detention in the Reich. The criminal police could now not only arrest people they defined as career or habitual criminals, but also those they calledasocials. Targets of systematic arrests included homeless people, itinerant traders, alcohol or other drug addicts and women who worked as prostitutes or were believed to be such by the authorities. The criminal police often transferred these victims to concentration camps without trial. Mass arrests led to a sharp rise in the number of prisoners.

A second instrument of persecution involved planned police surveillance. This meant that criminal police could control people without the need for a court order; these individuals had to report regularly to the police or health authorities. Often the police restricted them to their homes at night or denied them the right to contact certain other people. The planned police surveillance mainly affected women who the National Socialists accused of leading an immoral lifestyle.

In January 1938, Himmler gave the Gestapo the power to make arrests under the pretext of crime prevention. From that time onwards, the Gestapo could also use the instrument of protective custody against alleged asocials. Among those targeted were people who had refused or resigned from jobs offered to them. Himmler considered these individuals to be hereditarily work-shy people. Therefore, he ordered unannounced mass round-ups.

Action Work Shy Reich 

In April 1938, the Gestapo arrested 2,000 alleged work-shy people and deported them to Buchenwald concentration camp. Some were even arrested at their workplace and did not understand what was happening to them. From June 13 to 18, the wave of arrests throughout the Reich continued under the name Action Work Shy Reich (Aktion Arbeitsscheu Reich) with the target of arresting 200 people per criminal police district. The police arrested far more than the specified quotas. In total, they detained more than 10,000 people whom they considered to be asocial. Among those arrested were people in debt, homeless people and alleged prostitutes, as well as numerous Jews and Sinti and Roma. In Berlin alone, more than 1,000 Jews were arrested under flimsy charges and immediately deported to Buchenwald, Dachau and Sachsenhausen concentration camps. For a short time, those arrested during this action formed the largest group of prisoners in the concentration camps - recognizable by the markings assigned to them, such as the black triangle. The National Socialists labeled the different prisoner groups in the concentration camps with different colored triangles. For example, political prisoners were forced to wear a red triangle, Jews a yellow triangle, so-called asocials a black and career criminals a green triangle.

Asocial Housing Estates –  Forced Communal Institutions

Another aspect of National Socialist persecution occurred in the asocial housing estates or settlements. Local authorities built these housing projects for the poor, usually on the outskirts of large cities. The National Socialists, instead of providing welfare support to families in precarious circumstances, forced them to move into these settlements. As a result, these areas often became overcrowded. Because the National Socialists were convinced of the hereditary nature of alleged asociality, the capture, imprisonment, control and destruction of these supposedly asocial extended families became a central concern of racial hygienists.

As a result, welfare officers and the police monitored the families living in the asocial housing estates, allegedly to secure peace and quiet at night. They punished anyone who did not comply with the regulations. The settlements were not closed camps, but these rules transformed them from social housing estates into forced institutions. Racial hygienists, along with the authorities and police, decided whether to transfer the residents to closed institutions, like workhouses and concentration camps, or to offer them living space in the city.

1938-1945 Radicalization and Extermination

The Austrian Model of Radicalization: the Asocials Commission

After the German army’s invasion of Austria and the subsequent incorporation of Austria into the Reich in March 1938 (Anschluss), the Nazi regime extended its persecution there, carrying out deportations to concentration camps. In 1940, the new Reich Governor and Gauleiter of Vienna, Baldur von Schirach, called for an even more radical approach. Presumably in response to soccer riots during which his car was damaged, he ordered the identification of Vienna’s so-called "asocial elements"—a term the Nazi regime used to label individuals they deemed socially undesirable, including the homeless, beggars, alcoholics, and those who refused to conform to Nazi ideals. The police immediately arrested 500 people.

In 1941, the government formed the Asocials Commission in Vienna, consisting of NSDAP members (Nazis), the criminal investigation department, the employment office and central offices of the Vienna municipal administration. The commission also included doctors and welfare workers. These people expedited deportations and decided on individual cases – without ever hearing from the person concerned. Initially, the commission primarily dealt with the incarceration of men until the Gestapo began prosecution. Later the commission targeted asocial women, and the criminal police carried out street raids against them. 

The Asocial Commission deported 563 men and 651 women to different forced institutions and concentration camps in Vienna. The commission gave its actions the appearance of legality through the bureaucratic procedures and notices issued. For those affected, the deportations meant forced labor, physical assaults,  torture and often fatal imprisonment.

Radicalization and Extermination

With the beginning of the Second World War in 1939, the National Socialists realigned the ideological goals of the fight against crime. The terror of imprisonment in camps was now legitimized by the damage asocials and career criminals caused to the people’s community; this justified the Nazi philosophy that these individuals had to be eradicated from society. The Nazi extended the provisions on preventive detention, threatening more so-called unruly or non-conformist young people with imprisonment in camps.

Starting in 1940, the Reich Main Security Office set up three youth protection camps, which were actually concentration camps for young people and which the female criminal police department controlled. In these camps, members of the Racial Hygiene Research Center carried out forced examinations on inmates and drew up prognoses for their future social behavior. As a result, they ordered sterilization for many of the young people there to prevent them from passing on their unruly and non-conformist behavior to their children. 

The Holocaust – Systematic murder of prisoners 

From the spring of 1941 onwards, thousands of concentration camp inmates became victims of an ongoing mass crime: the euthanasia murders. Members of medical commissions, who had carried out selections on people with disabilities starting in 1940, now traveled to the concentration camps. Together with the camp administrators, they designated prisoners to be murdered using carbon monoxide gas in the euthanasia killing centers in Bernburg, Sonnenstein and Hartheim. The National Socialists selected prisoners whom they deemed no longer fit for work – as well as Jews, asocials and career criminals – for deportation to the killing centers. The Nazis named this mass murder campaign which killed approximately 20,000 people “14f13.” In 1942, the Main Economic and Administrative Office issued a circular decree imposing stricter selection criteria. The sole reason for this policy change was the increased demand for workers in the armaments industry. 

The Himmler-Thierrack Agreement

Otto Thierack, who became the new Reich Minister of Justice in August 1942, agreed with the head of the German police, Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler, that all asocial persons held in preventive detention, as well as others held in prisons, should be handed over to the Reichsführer SS for extermination through labor. In the following months, the Nazi regime sent approximately 20,000 individuals from prisons or in preventive detention to concentration camps. There, thousands suffered and died from the hard labor and inadequate care. 

1945-2020 Denial, Marginalization and Recognition

For decades Germany refused to recognize the asocials and career criminals as victims of the Nazi dictatorship. This denied them a place in society’s commemorative memory.  

The Forgotten Ones 

In 1946, people persecuted as asocials and career criminals established an association in Munich. These survivors of the Dachau concentration camp called themselves “The Forgotten Ones" and expressed their disappointment at the lack of solidarity from other former prisoners. From May to July 1946 they published three monthly publications under the title “Truth and Justice! Black and Green, Internal Information Sheet of the German Black and Green Concentrationaries.” In these publications, they called on their former fellow prisoners to organize and work for the “good reputation of the Blacks and Greens.” However, their commitment came to an abrupt end when the Occupying US military banned the association after just a few months. This reflected the continued assumption that the Nazis had rightly persecuted the so-called asocials and career criminals. 

Grassroots Initiatives for Recognition 

Working against Forgetting 
Those persecuted as asocials and career criminals had no representation of their interests after 1945. Finally,  the Association of the Euthanasia Victims and Forcibly Sterilized Persons, founded in 1987, offered an opportunity for recognition because forced sterilization also affected many people persecuted as asocials and career criminals. More recently, other groups have begun to campaign for the recognition of those persecuted as asocials and career criminals. 

Commemoration from the Grassroots Level 
An initiative for a memorial at the site of the former Uckermark youth concentration camp for girls and young women began in 1997. The group organizes regular excavations on the site, constructed several meeting areas, and starting in 2006, began holding commemorative ceremonies and tours of the former camp. In 2009, the initiative also dedicated a self-financed memorial stone.  

Rethinking Forms of Remembrance 
For some years now, “Stolpersteine” (stumbling or tripping stones) have been placed for a few of those who suffered because the Nazis labeled them asocials or professional criminals4. However, some now question if the use of the Nazi terminology on the plaques is appropriate or if it once again stigmatizes these victims. 

No Lobby for the Alleged “Career Criminals” 

The Nazi persecution of people who they labeled career criminals was not addressed until very recently. No initiative or organization discussed their suffering or confronted their lack of recognition and compensation after 1945. In recent years, Professor Frank Nonnenmacher5 initiated a vigorous campaign for the recognition of those whom the Nazis persecuted as career criminals. Nonnenmacher, whose uncle the Nazis had first labeled asocial and later a career criminal, argued for the founding of an “association of descendants of the social - racist persecutees.” 

As a result of this and other initiatives, in February 2020, the German Bundestag finally recognized those the Nazis had designated as asocials and career criminals as victims of National Socialism.