Reich Commissioner for Public Order Monitoring
The Reich Commissioner for the Supervision of Public Order , in official correspondence also referred to as the Reich Commissioner for Public Order (RKO), was an authority subordinate to the Reich Ministry of the Interior and existed from spring 1920 until its dissolution on July 1, 1929. The RKO was with the Was commissioned to monitor left and right-wing extremist political movements and was thus indirectly a forerunner of the Secret State Police Office (Gestapo) and the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution . It was the first central German police authority to record political movements. It had no executive powers, but was limited to gathering news from the countries and their news agencies. The situation reports regularly recorded by the RKO to the Reich government, various Reich authorities and the state governments were edited in 1979 by the Koblenz Federal Archives on 399 microfiches. They are an important source on the political, social and cultural history of the Weimar Republic, but also on the history of the KPD , the NSDAP and left and right-wing extremist splinter groups as well as the activities of foreign secret services in Germany.
Prehistory. State protection in the German Empire 1871–1918
The first real political police in Europe to monitor the so-called internal order was the Haute Police of the French King Louis XIV. They also survived the turmoil of the French Revolution and, under Eugène François Vidocq, became more influential as Sûreté than ever before. The Sûreté became the model for numerous secret services in Europe; Their special feature was the extensive use of informers or the lure spitz, the so-called agent provocateur .
Two assassinations on Kaiser Wilhelm I in 1878 brought about efforts in the German Reich to build up an effective political police force aimed primarily at combating or monitoring social democracy. The Prussian secret police consisted mainly of the Central Office for Combating Social Democracy , which was attached to the Political Department of the Berlin Police Headquarters. In 1899 the Central Office for Combating the Anarchist Movement was also set up there. The central offices continuously reported to Prussian and non-Prussian civil administrations as well as the commanding generals as the highest regional military authorities. In 1907, the state police station was also set up at the Berlin police headquarters to ward off treason , which expanded rapidly during the First World War .
Although larger German federal states had special departments similar to those of the Prussian police, the observation of political and criminal offenses had not yet been separated. Medium-sized or small federal states, such as the Grand Duchy of Oldenburg , did not have special departments, often not even state criminal police. Since it was founded in 1907, however, the Prussian state police station was also allowed to operate in Oldenburg on the basis of a state treaty. The November Revolution of 1918 only led to the dissolution of the Political Police for a short time. Social democracy, too, which had previously been subject to state surveillance, quickly recognized the usefulness of a political police apparatus. The political police were re-established as early as 1919 and set up as Department IA of the Berlin Police Headquarters.
The political and social chaos in the so-called German post-war also affected the political secret services in Germany. In 1919 a good 60 "military or military raised" agencies are said to have existed. They were dissolved or converted at the end of the year and continued to work for private employers. The most important of these organizations was the German News Center , which was also known as Deutsche Ostmarkenhilfe . The director was the private detective Gustav Gerhardt . At times she seems to have been subordinate to the Reichswehr Ministry, but also worked for the security police . It was later converted into a pure detective agency and was still detectable in 1927. On July 21, 1919, the State Commissioner for the Monitoring of Public Order was set up in the Prussian State Ministry , which was renamed State Commissioner for Public Order on December 9, 1919 . It was directly subordinate to the Prussian Prime Minister and the Minister of the Interior.
Tasks and competencies of the Prussian State Commissioner
The state commissioner was responsible for collecting news from opponents of the imperial constitution. To do this, he made use of the registration offices of the Prussian high presidia, but also of police authorities in other federal states as well as abroad and private sources. Until 1923 he also ran the security service for the Reich President , the Reich Chancellor and individual Reich Ministers.
The Kapp Putsch of March 1920 led to a cut in the authority. The first State Commissioner, Herbert Ritter and Edler Herr von Berger , was relieved of alleged political unreliability and replaced by the former First Public Prosecutor Robert Weismann . Weismann had close personal relationships with the Prussian Prime Minister Otto Braun (SPD), but was not without controversy because of allegations of corruption.
The State Commissariat was dissolved on October 1, 1923; apparently at the instigation of the Prussian Minister of the Interior, Carl Severing , who presumably wanted to use this measure to strengthen the Prussian police that he had built up. The tasks of the State Commissioner were now taken over by Department IA of the Berlin Police Headquarters.
Independently of this, 16 news offices were set up as quasi political police in the Reich by around 1925. The services in the states of Bremen and Württemberg were considered particularly effective . The medium-sized and smaller states naturally did not have specialist personnel with intelligence training, and they were also not financially able to maintain a larger network of informants ("informants").
The Reich Commissioner. Initial competition with the Prussian State Commissioner
As early as 1919 there were two options for a future central German intelligence service. The Prussian State Commissioner (PrStKom) was possibly in a position to expand its activities to the entire territory of the Reich in terms of personnel and technology, but in most states the distrust of Prussia was too great. Therefore, as early as 1919/20, the Reich government planned to set up a central news point as part of a Reich Criminal Office planned during the Empire . This so-called Reichsinformationsamt (Reichsinformationsamt) was supposed to replace the news offices of the federal states, but this higher authority was never realized in the Weimar Republic for political and financial reasons.
Due to the events surrounding the Prussian State Commissioner von Berger during the Kapp Putsch, the Reich government decided to found its own authority. On April 28, 1920, the budgetary basis for this was created. The first Reich Commissioner for Public Order was Hermann Emil Kuenzer , who was born on April 18, 1872 in Eppingen / Grand Duchy of Baden and is now colonel and commander of the Baden Gendarmerie Corps . He was a member of the German Democratic Party (DDP), a liberal-conservative forerunner of today's FDP . The authority was affiliated to the Reich Ministry of the Interior.
Kuenzer, who only had a small staff of around 20 civil servants, was confronted with various disputes over competence between the Reich and state authorities from the start. The Foreign Office, as the central authority for intelligence gathering abroad, was extremely reluctant to transfer data; possibly out of fear of the leakage of highly sensitive data to police authorities, especially those in smaller countries, who are not very experienced in handling secret service material. Until its dissolution in October 1923, the Prussian State Commissioner saw the RKO as simply an institutional competition. In Bavaria, where an extremely conservative or right-wing policy was pursued, there was no interest in surveillance by a Reich authority. The connections to the news offices of the other federal states were relatively good, especially to Bremen and Württemberg. The head of the IA department in Berlin, Bernhard Weiß, criticized Kuenzer heavily . He openly accused him of using agents provocateurs and thereby in one case endangered the life of the Reichswehr chief , General Hans von Seeckt .
Despite these disputes over competencies, Kuenzer expanded his institution. At news conferences with the other news agencies in the Reich, experiences were exchanged and cooperation intensified.
The situation reports
From August 3, 1920, the RKO initially wrote weekly situation reports, later (1928) only three times a year. The KPD was clearly the object of reporting in the so-called left movement. The right-wing movement, on the other hand, was severely fragmented until 1927/28; only gradually did the NSDAP emerge as the leading party, which, especially in northern Germany, competed for a long time with the Deutschvölkische Freedom Party (DVFP). The KPD in particular accused the RKO of political one-sidedness in favor of the right-wing camp; an accusation that Ernst Ritter did not accept in 1979:
“Kuenzer was undoubtedly dependent on his informants for the type, scope and to a certain extent also in the evaluation of the news on offer, the majority of whom were certainly not part of the political left, and who himself were clearly legally liberal. All in all, however, he endeavored to achieve a balanced, cautious judgment that was strictly based on the values of the Weimar Constitution and was guided by no other interest than to expose and at an early stage all attempts of all stripes to political violence and the threat to public security and order thus prevent. In the 1920s he was certainly the best informed man in Germany in this regard, and there is no evidence that he misused his knowledge. "
The processing of the RKO. The whereabouts of the files. State of research
Apparently out of a competitive thinking that had already led to the abolition of the Prussian State Commissioner five years earlier, Severing, who was now Reich Minister of the Interior, carried out the abolition of the RKO in 1928, which also took place on July 1, 1929. Severing considered the political system of the Weimar Republic ten years after the proclamation of the republic to be stable enough and an institution like the RKO to be superfluous. The RKO was handled with practically no resistance, and Severing came to his aid as a favorable occasion. Kuenzer had been in contact for years with the Russian émigré Orloff, who had operated his own intelligence service and had now been exposed as a swindler.
The RKO was settled a good three months before the outbreak of the global economic crisis in September 1929, which made the rapid rise of the NSDAP and the so-called seizure of power in 1933 possible. According to Ritter, the news collection point established as the successor to the RKO in the Reich Ministry of the Interior was not a real alternative to the RKO; both due to a lack of staff and the fact that hardly any informal sources have been evaluated, for example by informants. From 1930 on, there was a lack of sources that could be evaluated by authorities. However, it is certain that the federal states were still interested in working with a coordinating imperial institution, as this was the only way to obtain information on the radical political camps from the entire imperial area at the regional level.
Although some of the files of the RKO remained in National Socialist successor organizations such as the Secret State Police Office or the Reich Security Main Office and thus came into the possession of the American and Soviet occupying powers for a time after the Second World War , a good 1280 volumes of files were apparently already deposited in the Reichsarchiv in Potsdam by the 1930s been. They apparently survived the heavy bombing raid on Potsdam in April 1945, in which large parts of the holdings of the Reichsarchiv were destroyed, relatively undamaged. The files received have now been archived in the Central State Archives of the GDR in Potsdam. After 1990 they were merged with the files of the RKO in the Federal Archives in Berlin (new signature BA-R 1507). There are 1400 file units in 34 running meters of shelves. A further 1,382 file units are held as Fond 772 in the so-called Moscow Special Archives.
In 1979 the situation reports, partly supplemented by copies from the Bremen State Archives , the Lower Saxony State Archives Oldenburg , the Main State Archives Munich and Stuttgart and the Nuremberg State Archives , were edited by the Koblenz Federal Archives on 399 microfiches and provided with an introductory introduction and an index of subjects and persons. The Bremen State Archive is the only archive in Germany that still has the only complete inventory of the original situation reports. From management report no. 92 these are provided with a table of contents by the editors.
literature
- Heinz Boberach: The written tradition of the authorities of the German Empire 1871-1945. Backup, return, replacement documentation , in: Heinz Boberach / Hans Booms (ed.): From the work of the Federal Archives , Boppard am Rhein 1977.
- Dirk Emunds: From the Protection of the Republic to the Protection of the Constitution? The Reich Commissioner for the Supervision of Public Order in the Weimar Republic (= Federal College for Public Administration [Hrsg.]: Series of publications College - Performance - Responsibility. Research reports of the Federal College for Public Administration . Volume 5 ). Dr. Kovač, Hamburg 2017, ISBN 978-3-8300-9445-6 .
- Reinhard Höhn (Ed.): Patriotic journeymen. The social democracy in the light of the secret reports of the Prussian political police (1878-1914) . Only volume I (1878–1890), Cologne / Opladen 1964, was published.
- Ernst Ritter (Hrsg.): Reich Commissioner for the Monitoring of Public Order and News Collection Point in the Reich Ministry of the Interior. Management reports (1920–1929) and reports (1929–1933). Holdings R 134 of the Federal Archives, Koblenz published as a microfiche edition. Introduction and indices , Munich a. a. 1979.
- Bernhard Weiss: Police and Politics , Berlin 1928.
- Helmut Roewer / Stefan Schäfer / Matthias Uhl : Lexicon of the secret services in the 20th century . Munich 2003.
- Dirk Emunds: From the Protection of the Republic to the Protection of the Constitution? The Reich Commissioner for Monitoring Public Order in the Weimar Republic , Kovac, 2017, 166 pp., ISBN 978-3830094456 .