Gangs and organized crime in the shadows of III Reich
⌛ Reading time: 9 minutes
The III German Reich (aka Nazi Germany) is a period of Germany history well known by everyone in the whole world. History books, movies, poems, iconography, stories...all recalling a dark and cold period in the history of the German nation. From that period most people remember the II World War, Nazi Genocide in concentration camps, SS, Gestapo, Adolft Hitler, Joseph Goebbels, Heinrich Himmler and many past unfortunate events and dark personalities. But there is a part of III Reich history deep buried in the shadows of the time and oblivion.
By that time, different gangs and organized crime were having their “Golden Age” in tha USA. Names like Al Capone, Bugsy Siegel and Lucky Luciano made the cover of newspapers and magazines by that time. Different Italian American gangs organized in families ruled most of the commerce and daily life in some important cities of USA together with Irish and Russian gangs organized the same way. The 30's and 40's were “sweet years” for organized crime and gangs in the USA but what about Nazi Germany? Was there any sort of organized crime and gangs acting under the hood and moving parallel to the shadows of III German Reich? Could be possible? Let's move on and dig a bit in some untold stories of dark past of Nazi Germany and find some answers! :)
Gangsters vs Nazis? Let's take a look under the hood.
According to some historians Hitler wrote once that: ”...there was no word in German for Gangster”. Germany has never been a favorable ground for organised crime in general terms. This is probably linked with the religious tradition of the lutherans, for north Germany, and the rural character of the Bavarian and Schwabish people.
Criminals have existed always in every part of the world and Germany was not an expecption...neither the III Reich. They existed in big towns, particularly Hamburg and Berlin, but not really in groups and the organization was very basic if existed, except for one organization we will see later in this article. One of the benefits of the strong (and feared and deadly) police system established by both 2d and 3rd Reich, was the strict control of population and the activities they were developing on their daily basis. The system allowed to know what people were doing or even what they were going to do at some point in the future. The strict control over population, together with a zero tolerance to criminal activities in local territory brought as consecuence that criminal activities and gangs were as difficult to organise as Resistance.
Fig 1. *Berlin police with bolt-action Mauser 98 rifles patrolling the streets. (http://www.germaniainternational.com)*
Only in 1944-45 did crime begin to be a problem, mainly because of bombing damages and disruption of the normal way of life of germans. The local police noted particularly an increase of thieves in camps and works employing foreign workers, and reacted by numerous executions on the last year of III Reich.
One of the main causes of low power of action of gangs and organized crime in III Reich was, as said before, the police system they adopt. Feared and terrible organization, they associated with Nazi ideology from the very first moment Hitler seize the power in Germany. Back in the Weimar Republic the police system was hard to understand, desorganized at some point and lacked modern equipment that would allow it to better carry out its daily tasks. The Nazi state in fact alleviated many of the frustrations the police experienced in the Weimar Republic.
The Nazi state increased staff and training, and modernized police equipment. Police manpower was even extended by the incorporation of Nazi paramilitary organizations as auxiliary policemen giving as a result that crime did indeed go down and the operation of criminal gangs “almost” ended. The police direction was also centralized: Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS, also became the chief of all German police forces.
Fig 2. *SS members and Nazi police prepare for a raid. (https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org)*
The idea of a superior race proclaimed by the Nazis, was incompatible with the proliferation of criminal gangs and even with more organized ways of criminal activities. The Nazis were proclaimed as criminals themselves(the police, SD, SS and other organizations as well) by other countries but clearly they did not see themselves as a criminal organization and fought to bring some kind of stability to inner society (at least the “wrong” society they wanted to create). It is true that the Nazis took control and transformed the traditional police forces of the Weimar Republic into an instrument of state repression and, eventually, of genocide; but it is widely recognized the contribution of police forces to drastically reduce the crime and gangs proliferation inside German territory.
According to the Statistiches Handbuch von Deutschland, 1928-1944 (statistical handbook of Germany 1928-1944) the crime rate under the Nazis went down. However for many people is hard to distinguish between common crime and “crimes against the state” by consulting this source, because police forces were gave much greater latitude in their fight against crime – allowing them to arrest people with almost no evidence and the use of preventive arrests – two things that would not have been sufficient under democratic rule, as the police was acting against common criminals as well as against “state criminals” (aka jews, gays, communists,...) at the same time, statistics tend to get confused. However, general consensus indicates that gangs proliferation as well as crime ratio went down.
Ringvereine: the only one who resisted?
As said before, criminal organizations did not have it easy when it came to positioning themselves within a centralized Germany. But there is maybe one case of an organization that resisted the Nazi attacks: Ringvereine.
Ringvereine, as stated by Wikipedia, were “criminal gangs operating in late 19th and early 20th century Germany, notably the Weimar period”. Individual associations formed umbrella organizations depending on each other, so-called “rings”, from which the term Ringvereine is derived. Also their members identified themselves by using a special ring.
Fig 3. *Sport Club Immertreu, one of the many clubs that made up Ringvereine, 1928. Under the hood of a sport club criminals from small to large, all men, gathered together to drink and hold conspiratorial meetings. (https://www.tagesspiegel.de)*
This group started as organizations for the mutual help for released prisoners whose public mission was to provide mutual aid and cultural activities for their members. But very soon they became criminal organizations and networks. Their main center was Berlin however, at the zenith of his power, they had several small networks spreaded around other important cities in Germany.
They shared many similarities with some German craftsman guilds by tht time: e.g. they “regulated” crime that was not sanctioned by them and they acted as a “social security system” ...but for criminals. The Ringvereine was declared illegal 1934 but continued acting under the shadows of III Reich despite several members were sent to concentration camps without trial.
This organization reached a high level of operational independency despite the obstacles imposed by Nazi regime. Only men were allowed to join, and candidates for membership had to be young people (21 to 24 years old) involved in the following types of crimes: prostitution, extortion, illegal gambling, drug trafficking, receiving stolen goods, illegal labor brokerage, burglary, arms smuggling, currency counterfeiting, and sophisticated forms of begging among others. Convicted murderers and sex offenders, however, could not be members. Ringvereine have also been linked to protection extortion of businesses in the night-time economy (the same modus operandi their USA cousins of Italian American gangs used asking for a fee to get protection).
According to some historians the Ringvereine honoured a strict criminal code: they never used violence against “civilians”, only against fellow gangsters. To keep the public opinion favorable they presented themselves as Robin Hood-type outlaws. They always made sure to give a portion of their “gains” to poor mothers and children. The Sass Brothers were local legends in this regard. In the 1920s, they robbed banks mostly, keeping most of the loot for themselves but also making a point of stuffing stolen banknotes through the letterboxes of homes in working-class neighborhoods. For the Saas Brothers everything went fine till Nazis seize the power in Germany: the pair ended up being killed in Sachsenhausen concentration camp in March 27th, 1940...without any trial.
Fig 4. *The Sass Brothers were executed in a concentration camp in 1940. (http://www.executedtoday.com)*
Ringvereine contacts with Nazis started from the very first moment Nazis tried to block their bussiness. As some important club members realized that the Nazis were not going to patronize their activities one part of the Ringvereine join forces with Communists while the other part kept fighting both Nazis and Communists. As early as 1932, on the 3rd of August, members of the Northern Lodge Ringverein shot and killed a Nazi party member named Fritz S., aged thirty-seven. It eventually emerged that the Nazis had attacked Communists in areas of Berlin which the Northern Lodge laid claim to.
After 1933, Nazi repression of the Ringvereine was extremely tough, but not all members were arrested, sent to concentration camps or executed and some continued with their illegal activities. Here we have the story of a gangster known as “Muscle Adolf” who acted before, during and after the rise of the III Reich. He survived the Third Reich’s reign of terror and in June 1946 he was picked up for illegal gambling, in a pub in north Berlin. He was sent to trial but nobody would testify against Muscle Adolf, he was convinced about that, and the police had to close the case...it seems like the omerta` of the Ringvereine still functioned even after the War.
Is said that Ringvereine organizations survive even beyond: they continued acting under the rule of Communists in the first years of the German Democratic Republic. But with Communists the problem went far beyond mere appearances: it was more ideological and less practical. So East Germany police joined forces with USSR intelligence agencies and swept, once and for all, the name of the Ringvereine...from that moment they will only appear in history books and in one film...The end!... The end?... We will never know...
Final thougths...by now
As you can see dear reader **:)** under the Nazi regime there was at least one organization that ruled the criminal life. The repression of organized crime and crime in general under the III Reich ensured that there were no openly famous gangsters, and the activities of criminal organizations like Ringvereine were heavily disrupted.
The truth is that they did not succeed in entirely eliminating either organized crime, or the gangsters inherited from the Weimar Republic, but their activity was very limited and now they belong to history, a dark history disguised by the Nazis because it revealed the limits of their ability to control the German everyday life.
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