According to Law and Order or Personal Profit? The Kripo, Judiciary, and Gestapo in the Nazi Persecution of Sinti and Roma
By: Verena Meier
Abstract
This article examines the role of the criminal police officers in the persecution and incarceration of Sinti and Roma during the Nazi regime, focusing on the incarceration of individual Sinti or Roma in the years following the outbreak of the Second World War. These cases highlight the interplay between legal frameworks, racial ideology, institutional logics, and situational constraints such as Lagersperren, as well as personal economic enrichment through bribery. The cases reveal how local criminal police officers pragmatically navigated and expanded their powers of repression in the ‘dual state’. They further underline the evolution of repressive practices through the cooperation between criminal police and Gestapo; and through the application of traditional means of cooperating with the judiciary in accusation of criminal acts, convictions through courts and imprisonment in jails. By analysing local case files from Magdeburg, Halle, and Berlin, this article shows how criminal police officers used both legal and extralegal mechanisms to persecute Sinti and Roma, revealing the pragmatic and racialised application of the Nazi ‘dual state’, as well as their use of agency and bribery for their personal economic enrichment.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.21039/jpr.8.1.214 | Journal eISSN: 2514-7897
Language: English
Page range: 215 - 245
Published on: Dec 22, 2025
Published by: Winchester University Press
In partnership with: Paradigm Publishing Services
Keywords:
© 2025 Verena Meier, published by Winchester University Press
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.