Auf der Flucht erschossen, or 'Shot while trying to Escape': Legalized State Terror and Summary Execution in Nazi Germany

This article evaluates the use of lethal force by state and non-state political actors, a practice that found one of its clearest expressions in the phrase ‘shot while trying to escape,’ a pretext for extra-legal killing that emerged during the Weimar period in the actions of police and nationalist paramilitaries; however, the use of summary execution became an established institutional practice among SS and police forces under the Nazi regime, and extended to the Wehrmacht with the start of the war. Without doubt, Adolf Hitler’s intervention in creating a parallel legal code through his personal edicts proved decisive in the transformation of killing under the pretext of alleged escape attempts into an accepted and routine bureaucratic practice. Further, Reich Leader of the SS and Chief of the German Police Heinrich Himmler and the SS and police forces under his command provided the means by which the Führer’s conceptions of crime and punishment advanced legal fiction into recognised legal terror in which summary murder became a bureaucratic prerogative.