Irredeemable: Framing Crime in the Shadow of the Holocaust

• In Event: Historical Perspectives on Crime, Culture, and Ethnicity

Abstract

While German courts famously showed leniency toward Nazi war criminals, the postwar German justice system handed out harsh sentences to non-violent, repeat offenders. Among them were so-called “career criminals,” who had spent years doing slave labor in concentration camps. While these Holocaust victims served long sentences in German prisons after the war, Nazi perpetrators were acquitted of war crimes. Based on this counterintuitive sentencing this paper addresses two questions:
1) Why did this discrepancy in sentencing remain viable after the war?
2) What role did this sentencing practice play in maintaining the stability of social stratification between the Third Reich and the Federal Republic of Germany?
Analyzing police records and testimonies of more than 160 individuals ranging from the 1920s to the 1970s, this paper shows how certain ethnically German victim groups (i.e. “asocials,” “career criminals”) were considered irredeemably “inferior”, and their behaviors remained criminalized. This paper further argues that eugenicist frames of crime justify the social and political status quo, beyond the narrow confines of postwar German society. Comparing the construction of “otherness” in Germany with framing of criminal behavior in the United States reveals that both justice systems equated biological traits with “deviance” to create a permanent underclass.

Author

• Michaela Soyer, Hunter College