Crime, Identity and Power : Stories of Police Imposters in Nazi Germany

This article is based on research for a larger project on the Nazi police and German society. In the course of studying rare Gestapo files that survive for only three regions of the country, I was struck by one case in which a man was caught by the police and charged with the crime of impersonating a Gestapo official. In subsequent research, I found nearly 150 additional dossiers of people who were accused or suspected of the crime of impersonating a police official, usually a member or officer in the Gestapo. In this essay I map out some of the contours at the grassroots level of the timing, nature, extent, and variety of motives of these impostors, and offer some general reflections about this crime in the Third Reich.