Criminal Police

The Criminal Police, known in the novel as the Kripo, is the Reich’s investigative police organization, but its work cannot be separated from the political system that controls it. Its numbered files record the lives of those who have come into contact with the authorities; its officers are monitored for political reliability; and its investigations can be overridden by the SS. The same bureaucratic machinery that disciplines the population can also preserve clues to crimes the state seeks to conceal.

Records and investigative practice

The Criminal Police’s files are neither a complete registry of the population nor an impartial record of events. Files are kept for people whose lives have left a trace through contact with the Reich’s criminal justice system. To reconstruct the histories of the Wannsee Conference participants, Xavier March supplements those files with information from the Alexander-Platz information bureau and obituaries in the Völkischer Beobachter. Tracking every name takes him two hours. The episode shows both the reach and the limits of the archive: a person’s official file may be incomplete, but separate administrative sources can be combined to make a more comprehensive record.

That record-keeping has a second, more intimate face in the scrutiny applied to officers themselves. A dossier on March lists his refusal to contribute to Winter Relief and join the NSDAP, disparaging remarks about Heinrich Himmler, and inquiries about Jews who once lived in his apartment. Reports from party officials and others turn private conduct and speech into grounds for suspicion. The archive does not merely preserve a career; it makes the officer’s dissent legible to the state and helps explain the pressure he faces.

The institution’s official language is also visible in the documents it produces and preserves. March encounters a battered copy of A Commentary on the German Racial Laws, with passages underlined in red and charts classifying marriages between Aryans and non-Aryans. The Kripo’s old file on Wilhelm Stuckart records allegations that, while serving on the Interior Ministry’s Committee for the Protection of German Blood, he traded marriage licenses for bribes and demanded sexual favors. The file also records that complaints brought to the authorities were not investigated, and that one complainant and his fiancée were sent to concentration camps. In this history, administrative documentation does not guarantee justice: it can preserve evidence of abuse while the authorities refuse to act on it.

Surveillance and political control

The novel places the Criminal Police within a broader system in which information is gathered, sorted, and used to enforce conformity. The pressure on March is cumulative: his career stalls, reports accumulate, and ordinary acts of refusal are recast as political offenses. The result is an organization where investigative knowledge is not simply directed at crime. It can be turned inward, making police personnel themselves objects of surveillance.

The regime’s monitoring extends beyond police files to private communications. An American portable tape recorder, fitted with a suction cup rather than an ordinary microphone, captures a telephone call between Charlotte Maguire and Martin Luther. Hearing the recording allows Maguire to identify Luther as the caller. Later, Max Krebs tells March that the authorities learned Luther planned to meet the American journalist through a wiretap, not an Embassy tip. He produces a brown-paper transcript marked as a top-secret state document, rushed from the wiretappers in Charlottenburg. Telephone interception thus turns a private plan into actionable intelligence, while the transcript supplies documentary proof of how the state knew.

This surveillance has a history beyond the immediate investigation. In 1934, Gestapo agent Georg Hannes Thomae, sent to Switzerland by Reinhard Heydrich, sought to identify German account holders by cultivating bank employees and posing as an intermediary. Once an account was exposed, its holder could be arrested and tortured, and the bank pressured to return the assets. German interceptions of calls, cables, and letters helped make cross-border communication dangerous. Switzerland responded with a banking code that criminalized disclosure of clients’ holdings; Thomae was exposed and expelled, and the German numbered-account business had collapsed by 1939. The episode shows information-gathering as an instrument of coercion and helps establish the wider surveillance environment in which police and intelligence work operate.

Authority, law, and institutional limits

The Criminal Police does not hold final authority over every investigation. During March’s pursuit of the Stuckart case, SS officials and other political authorities can direct operations, obstruct inquiry, or take command. The novel makes this subordination explicit through Max Jaeger’s denunciation of the decision that every Criminal Police officer in the Reich had to wear an SS uniform. His complaint that officers were judged by academic credentials rather than the older measure of courage expresses contempt for the changed institution, but also reveals that the Kripo has been incorporated into a hierarchy whose standards and power lie elsewhere.

The law itself is shown as part of that hierarchy rather than a reliable restraint upon it. Göring’s written directive of July 31, 1941, charges Heydrich with making organizational, technical, and material preparations for a complete solution of the Jewish question in Germany’s European sphere of influence, and requires other government agencies to cooperate. Stuckart’s sworn account adds that Heydrich described a Führer order but said it could not be put in writing for political reasons. Stuckart says Heydrich told him to raise any legal reservations with Hitler personally, then joked that the Reich’s chief legal draftsman and chief policeman need not worry about legalistic grounds. Together, the documents distinguish a written authorization from an unwritten order, while showing how police and legal offices can be made participants in a policy whose authority is designed to evade ordinary accountability.

Function in the investigation

The Criminal Police’s importance to the plot lies in this double capacity: it is an apparatus of state control, yet its files and investigative procedures can expose the state’s crimes. March uses records to reconstruct the fate of the Wannsee Conference participants; he also sees how the habit of not asking questions protects the institution and those who command it. A children’s poster warns the public not to open a parcel without knowing what is inside. March turns its warning inward, treating it as a maxim for police officers: do not open a parcel, and do not ask a question, unless the answer is already known. The caution captures the discipline demanded of a police force in a political system that controls both inquiry and its consequences.

The organization is therefore not depicted as a neutral professional body standing outside the regime. Its archives can reveal what its officials failed to investigate; its officers can be monitored and disciplined; and its methods of collecting information can be adapted to political ends. Yet those same records, recordings, and transcripts provide March with fragments from which suppressed events can be reconstructed. The Criminal Police embodies the novel’s central institutional contradiction: a machinery built to classify and control people can also retain evidence that undermines the official account.