Murder, Denunciation and Criminal Policing in Weimar Berlin

Abstract

The pre-history of the ‘culture of denunciation’ or, more accurately, ‘mutual surveillance’ of the nazi period can be found in the institutions and practices developed by the criminal police of the Weimar period. Excluding criminal policing from the realm of denunciation creates an analytically and historically false distinction that misses the interconnection between the public surveillance of criminal, political and sexual activity in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s. Focusing on the criminal police in Berlin, and in particular the work of the homicide squad, the article demonstrates how the efforts of police to cultivate a partnership with its citizens in the war on crime, through public relations campaigns and a close but problematic relationship with the press, helped to produce a set of ‘accusatory practices’ that both served and undermined the interests of the state. A case study of a 1931 murder investigation that lasted five years illustrates the similarities between citizens’ behaviour in criminal policing and the denunciatory behaviour of the nazi period. The article ultimately argues for a new approach to denunciation research that accounts for accusatory practices in liberal, not just authoritarian, regimes.