The commissioners

Criminal Police Careers between Democracy and Dictatorship For the first time, this volume presents the history of the Düsseldorf criminal police from the 1920s to the postwar period. As a "criminal investigation department," the Düsseldorf Criminal Investigation Department was responsible for "fighting crime" throughout the region from 1936 onward. In addition to regular tracing and investigation work, the officers actively participated in the crimes of the Nazi regime after 1933: people were literally "sorted out" as alleged "asocials," "aliens from the community" or "pests of the people" and deported to concentration camps. They became victims of a brutal "cleansing of the German national body of undesirable elements". The criminologists from the Rhine and Ruhr were responsible for this not only on the "home front," but also almost throughout the entire country.