5
Ned Richardson-Little
The Treaty of Versailles (1919) had wide-reaching consequences for Germany, which faced the loss of its colonial empire along with significant territory within Europe and which reduced sovereignty over its domestic affairs, in particular the curtailment of its armed forces. One little-remembered provision of this treaty was the imposition of a global regime of narcotics regulation, an international legal system that Imperial Germany had opposed and then had reluctantly agreed to before sabotaging it through non-compliance before the war. For the Nazi regime under the leadership of Adolf Hitler, undoing the effects of the Versailles treaty and restoring Germany to its previous position of pre-eminence was a primary goal and a central aspect of the National Socialist party’s appeal. The Nazis soon withdrew Germany from the League of Nations, and, in the years leading up to the Second World War, there was “frenzied celebration […] whenever one more plank was ripped out of the Treaty of Versailles – Saar, Wehrmacht, Austria, Sudetenland”.1 Reclaiming the territory lost in 1919 and reasserting German sovereignty defined Nazi foreign policy in the early years of the regime.
Yet in the field of international narcotics control, Nazi Germany did not roll back the domestic drug laws that were drawn up to conform to the international control system that had been imposed by Versailles. At the beginning of the century, Imperial German officials had rejected Anglo-American plans to use international law to tackle narcotics additions. Once forced into the system of international narcotics control after 1919, activists, experts, and state actors in the Weimar era had embraced the system in support of its spirit of liberal internationalism and with the aim to reassert Germany’s place on the European diplomatic stage. Rather than return to the full rejection of the imperial era, the Nazis instead endorsed the emerging consensus that the narcotics trade needed to be regulated through international law and that illicit trafficking in drugs needed to be fought through international police cooperation, so long as it did so in conformity with National Socialist racial ideology.
The shift of international narcotics law from a threat to German sovereignty that should be sabotaged to a system that had widespread legitimacy across the political spectrum in the interwar period reflected a multifaceted internationalism that blended liberal and illiberal elements: one, idealistic and humanistic, grounded in medical and scientific expertise; the other, punitive and coercive, based on rising international cooperation in aid of nationalistic methods and goals.2 Far from being separable phenomena, these two impulses were often intertwined, were overlapping, and could even be promoted by the same specialists and experts depending on the changing constellations of political forces.3 Germany’s representative in the League of Nations, the chemist-diplomat Otto Anselmino, worked to create a more scientific international narcotics system while also defending German national economic interests and working with liberal nationalists like Gustav Stresemann to restore Germany’s diplomatic stature and its international influence. Influential police officials, such as Arthur Nebe and Werner Thomas, sought to foster international law enforcement cooperation against drug dealers in the later years of the Weimar Republic and then used the same tools to enforce Nazi racial oppression on a continental scale during the Third Reich. The ideologically malleable nature of international narcotics control that allowed it to gain support from a wide variety of expert groups also made it vulnerable to instrumentalization by the Nazis.
This evolution also reflected the changing meaning of international drug regulation itself: what began primarily as a form of moral internationalism driven by missionaries shifted to become most predominantly a liberal-technocratic system of international public health and medical commerce in the hands of scientists and regulators through the League of Nations. From the initial focus on restricting national commerce, it also served in the interwar period as a venue for the defence of state sovereignty in the hands of national diplomats and statesmen, and, finally, it became a platform for advancing international racial persecution in the hands of the Nazified police. The political meaning of international narcotics law changed as it was redefined by these different expert groups, each of which had their own understanding of drugs as a moral, social, economic, or criminal problem. The evolution of the German state’s attitudes towards international narcotics control is not simply a narrative of the rise and fall of progressive liberal internationalism but one demonstrating that the architecture of the liberal-technocratic legal order could be transformed into a vehicle for the internationalization of Nazi ideology.4 Even after the end of the Third Reich, the tensions within international narcotics prohibition between moral and health activism, profits of pharmaceutical companies, and the instrumentalizing of anti-drug laws for the purposes of asserting national sovereignty and legitimizing repressive state power.5
1 From Rejection to Forced Integration
At the start of efforts to regulate the international drug trade at the beginning of the twentieth century, the German state’s attitude ranged from ambivalence to outright hostility. The international campaign to regulate the opium trade stemmed from the confluence of American missionary anti-drug zeal, imperial Chinese reformers seeking to re-establish order in the wake of the Boxer Rebellion (1899–1901), and British officials who reversed the UK policy of using gunboats to open China to the opium trade, as mass addiction was now viewed as a threat to economic interests in East Asia.6 The International Opium Commission in Shanghai was established in 1909, which in turn led to the first international narcotics agreement – the Hague International Opium Convention (hereinafter the Hague Convention) – created in 1912.7 Imperial Germany took part in these negotiations and signed the Hague Convention, but Germany was also effectively responsible for sabotaging its implementation. The Hague Convention aimed to limit the international trade in opium, but it also targeted medical opiate products such as morphine, codeine, and heroin as well as cocaine.
German chemists had commercially developed both cocaine and heroin in the late nineteenth century, and pharmaceutical producers such as Bayer, Merck, and C. H. Boehringer Sohn reaped large profits from the manufacture and sale of both, as well as of codeine and morphine, as medications. The pharmaceutical giants of Germany had become globally dominant at this same time, and international sales and licensing were at the core of their business practices.8 The largest firms engaged in intensive political lobbying in order to protect their intellectual property and to forestall regulation that would limit the use of their product. This influence extended well beyond the borders of Germany, reaching even the United States, where Bayer and other German firms were credited for killing the protectionist Mann Act (1904).9 The chemical industry profited greatly from its dominance in the export market, so deflecting threats to this crucial national industry was a priority for state officials.10
Negotiations of the Hague Convention were handled by Foreign Office (Auswärtiges Amt) officials, who were highly sceptical of the need for a “global law” on drugs. Internally, the position of the German state was that the problem of narcotics was a national issue and that policy towards addiction and traffic should be determined by the affected states themselves.11 Internationally, the problem of addiction in China was viewed as a crisis, but there was no sense within Germany that this was a domestic social problem, and there was no significant movement from civil society, medical experts, or law enforcement demanding more stringent import-export controls, let alone the international prohibition of opiates and cocaine products. This left diplomats a free hand to pursue a policy oriented towards defending against impingement into national sovereignty and the export-based profits of the major German pharmaceutical and chemical concerns.
The Foreign Office did not want to appear to callously disregard the humanitarian problem of narcotics addiction nor did it want to needlessly antagonize the other great powers by opposing the initiative, but it was not going to sacrifice pharmaceutical industry profits for the sake of Anglo-Saxon morality – and political economy. In the negotiations, Germany insisted that the Hague Convention would only take effect when all 34 nations involved in the narcotics trade had also agreed to its terms. Though intended to create a global system of controls, the Hague Convention was only agreed to by 13 states, and, since crucial actors such as Peru, Bolivia, Switzerland, Serbia, and the Ottoman Empire had not signed, the advance of the international drug control system was effectively halted.12 The UK and US still lobbied for signatory nations to implement the terms of the treaty, but this was a non-starter with Germany so long as it meant unilaterally implementing controls that would make their nation non-competitive on the international market. Although the UK and US continued to pressure Germany to place its domestic cocaine production under international controls, the beginning of the First World War ended any cooperation between the belligerents on the problem of narcotics.13
The end of the First World War radically reorganized the international order, reducing the influence of Germany, the losers of the war and even to some extent the European victors, while elevating the United States to a new position of global power.14 Although the earlier Anglo-American initiatives to bring about global drug control had failed, the 1919 peace negotiations created a unique opportunity to impose a new hegemonic conception of drugs, outside of medicine and scientific uses, as a source of immorality that needed to be dealt with through a global prohibition system.15 Both the UK and US wanted not only to include the control of the opium trade in the responsibilities of the League of Nations but also to bind the losing powers to the terms of the stalled Hague Convention – in particular, Germany and the states of the former Ottoman Empire.16 By blocking Germany from continuing its mass export of cocaine and the Ottoman Empire from its production of opium products, “the triumph of the civilized nations over these states could also be understood as a victory against the danger of drug consumption”.17 The Allied powers aimed to use the Treaty of Versailles to realize “peace through law”, so the addition of progressive international legal reform of narcotics law was a logical step towards creating this better world. In the end, Article 295 of the Versailles treaty demanded that Germany implement the terms agreed to in the Hague Convention, and similar language was included in all other peace treaties.
2 International Narcotics Law and German Erfüllungspolitik
The end of the First World War left Germany in a state of political weakness. The revolution of 1918/19 had set off a bloody conflict over the type of state that would replace the fallen imperial monarchy, and the democratic Weimar Republic was created under the cloud of violent internal division.18 The punitive terms of the Versailles treaty weakened the already shaky Social Democrat–run state by stripping Germany of its colonial empire alongside significant territorial losses within Europe. As a result, Germany was demilitarized, subjected to military occupation of its western borderlands, and excluded from the international community, including membership in the League of Nations. In order to comply with Versailles, the Weimar Republic passed its first comprehensive Narcotics Law (Betäubungsmittelgesetz) in 1920, including provisions limiting production, import, and export and updating medical prescription regulations.19 The following year, the victorious allies met in London to determine the monetary terms of German reparations owed to the winners of the Great War and came to the figure of 132 billion gold marks to be paid in annual instalments of two billion in gold and foreign currency. German foreign policy elites knew that in Germany’s weakened state it could not outright demand the revision of the terms of Versailles, so they aimed to fulfil the terms of the peace treaty and the ruinous repayment plan as a means to lobby for its alternation – what would become known to both mainstream supporters and right-wing detractors as Erfüllungspolitik.20
The problems of state sovereignty, border control, and Germany’s pariah status on the international stage were central to the political crises of the early Weimar Republic. In the east, politicians of all political stripes saw the inability of the government to control the country’s frontier with the newly established Polish Republic as an existential emergency. In its state of reduced power, Germany was forced to accept international arbitration by a Japanese nobleman to determine the exact boundaries of Silesia with Poland, and mass immigration stemming from the chaos in the former Russian Empire led to fears that the border was unmanageable.21 In the west, the left bank of the Rhine river remained under allied occupation, and, when Germany was unable to pay its massive war debt, French forces moved to expand its occupation of the Rhineland to include the industrial Ruhr valley in 1923. Since Germany was not a member of the League of Nations, this unilateral military action by France was not under the purview of the international community. Domestic insurgents used the French intervention as an opportunity to challenge the state from within: in Munich, Hitler led the unsuccessful Beer Hall Putsch, while in Aachen, revolutionaries declared a short-lived breakaway Rhenish Republic.
For the influential liberal statesman Gustav Stresemann, first as chancellor (1923) and then as foreign minister (1923–1929), these crises demanded the revision of the Versailles treaty, the redrawing of Germany’s eastern borders, and the restoration of Germany’s status as a European great power.22 As one of the losers of the First World War, Germany had been displaced as a global power and was in the same position of being a supplicant seeking revision of the Versailles order alongside other recently formed nation-states of Eastern Europe. In order to gain admission to the League of Nations and regain sovereignty, Stresemann first pursued a policy of economic reconciliation, agreeing to the Dawes Plan (1924) for a revised schedule of German debt repayment in an attempt to regain control over its finances. In this context of marginalization, reduced sovereignty, and exclusion from the halls of international power in the 1920s, Germany entered the international narcotics control system. Just as other Central and Eastern European officials sought to use the newly created international institutions to assert themselves from the periphery, Weimar diplomats aimed to use the nascent narcotics control system as a backdoor to regaining German influence in international affairs.23
Rather than merely complying with the now global drug control system, the Weimar Republic moved to take an active role in crafting the increasingly stringent international regulation of narcotics in order to re-establish their position in the international sphere, reassert German power over its own borders, and defend national commercial interests. This was part of a wider strategy of diplomacy through participation in international prohibition regimes, including alcohol prohibition, and efforts to limit arms trafficking and to abolish slavery.24 The proliferation of medicinal opiates due to the First World War had created more widespread support for increased controls on addictive substances, but narcotics politics remained primarily the concern of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of the Interior. At the League of Nations, narcotics were part of the Social Section that covered “[o]pium, refugees, protection of children, relief after earthquakes, prison reform, municipal cooperation, alcoholism, and traffic in women”, led by Dame Rachel Crowdy of England, and controlling them were seen as part of the rise of idealistic internationalism of the 1920s together with other moral and pacifist causes of the era.25 Yet while this section was considered the realm of the section for do-gooders, peace activists, and teetotallers, the problem of narcotics regulation was closely intertwined with issues of commercial exchange, scientific-medicinal definitions, law enforcement, and the security of external borders. While the Allied powers jealously guarded their control over areas such as collective security and colonial governance, Germany was welcomed to take part in the international narcotics system as a major producing state.
3 Germany at the League of Nations
Even though Germany was not a member of the League of Nations, it was invited in 1921 to take part in discussions over a prospective new agreement to deal with the loopholes and practical problems of implementing the Hague Convention. The main actor sent to the League of Nations to navigate this delicate problem on behalf of Germany was Dr. Anselmino, who sat on the Advisory Committee on Traffic in Opium and Other Dangerous Drugs, the main body deliberating on the implementation and development of the international narcotic control system.26 While most countries sent representatives from their ministries of justice or the interior, the Weimar Republic uniquely chose to send a chemist and pharmacologist. As the only national representative with a scientific background, Anselmino acted as the interpreter of the growing body of specialized medical research into narcotic addiction. This special expertise was valued by the other delegations who often turned to Anselmino to provide technical information and scientifically grounded standards. When the League sought to develop a unified formula to determine the total amount of all types of narcotics that would be needed by a nation based on its population, Anselmino was tasked with its creation.27 Based on his work in providing technical legal guides to German drug laws, he wrote ABC of Narcotic Drugs (1931), the authoritative international reference guide to legal and illegal drugs, which was distributed by the League in English, French, and German.28
Anselmino was able to rise to a position of great respect as the objective man of science, but he was also a savvy political operator shaping the rules of the system on behalf of German industrial interests. The chemical industry continued to wield great political influence in the Weimar Republic, and Stresemann’s party relied on financial support from its leaders.29 Internal deliberations within the Foreign Office openly acknowledged the role of the German pharmaceutical industry in supplying black market sources – particularly exports of cocaine and heroin that flowed illicitly to China – and the difficulties in complying with international reporting requirements without embarrassing important domestic firms.30 In 1924, Anselmino reported to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs that the German strategy at the League’s negotiations would focus on national interests but that
[t]his does not exclude cooperation on individual points with England-America or another group of states, as far as we regard this as an advantage for us. Of course, in defending our point of view, as desired by German industry, we must avoid the charge of not being loyal and disinterested in the pursuit of the common goal of combatting the abuse of narcotics. If we succeed in this, we shall not jeopardize our reputation, even if our attitude is fundamentally different from that of England.31
On the national level, the German government did institute a ban on exports of cocaine to Switzerland – a notorious hub for re-export to the black market – and also worked with China to create a stricter export-import licensing regime for narcotics trade between the two countries.32
At the 1925 Geneva Conference on the creation of a new International Opium Convention, Anselmino advised that, on the matter of regulating opium, Germany should “choose the mildest form of disinterested abstention” while also fighting hard to ensure that heroin was not banned outright and that codeine was not classified as a narcotic drug at all.33 In the end, Germany was satisfied with the final text of the International Opium Convention, which aimed at regulating the drug trade – rather than limiting production or fully prohibiting narcotics – through the establishment of the Permanent Central Opium Board (PCOB) in Geneva, which would monitor international imports and exports. In contrast to China, which withdrew from the negotiations, and the United States, which refused to sign the International Opium Convention on the grounds that it was too lax, Germany was able to achieve its goals of protecting domestic production.34
After long negotiations, the Locarno Treaties (1925) secured political reconciliation in the West and paved the way for the end of the Ruhr occupation and German entry into the League of Nations with a new permanent seat on the League’s Council. Yet even with this normalization of Germany with regard to its neighbours, it remained demilitarized and distrusted. France remained wary of German nationalist expansionism and only tolerated the readmission of the Weimar Republic into the international community as a means of containing the Bolshevik threat in Eastern Europe. While the Allied powers withdrew from occupying Cologne, France and Belgium actually increased the number of troops stationed in the occupied zones around Koblenz and Mainz. Germany was now in the position of having all the obligations to collective security like all other League of Nations members, even though it remained under occupation and without a significant standing army. On the international stage, Stresemann had fought for Germany to gain a mandate over some of its colonial territory upon joining the League of Nations, but this was not included in the Locarno Treaties due to strong resistance from British and French diplomats. By 1927, however, it was admitted to membership on the Permanent Mandates Commission, which oversaw the post-colonial system, signalling a partial normalization of Germany as a fellow “civilizing” country.35
At the League of Nations, Germany was able to generally maintain its reputation for acting in good faith when it came to narcotics control diplomacy, but Anselmino was often in the position of having to deflect accusations, usually levelled by the English, that German pharmaceutical companies were turning a blind eye to smuggling. In 1925, a report on problematic “discrepancies” between official export figures and the imports of the destination country called attention to the unusually large German export of 159 kilogrammes of morphine sent to Estonia, which was flagged as being likely diverted into the hands of international traffickers.36 When pressed on such issues, Anselmino was quick to explain away such incidents, blaming untrustworthy middlemen and individual employees and excusing the slow reaction time of the German state as the product of federalism, which sometimes prevented rapid responses at the national level.37 The British diplomat and central architect of interwar League of Nations narcotics law advancements, Sir Malcolm Delevingne, was convinced that Germany was “very far from having clean hands in the matter of illicit traffic in drug” and believed that extensive use of forged labels was providing cover for firms that were knowingly trading with black marketeers.38 The German government did not actively facilitate diversions to the black market, but it was slow to act or to enforce harsh penalties unless it appeared that they would face diplomatic repercussions. In one case from 1928, narcotics produced by the German firm C. H. Boehringer Sohn were sent to Chemische Fabriek Naarden of the Netherlands before being shipped to Japan, where they were diverted to the black market in China. In order to quell British outrage, Anselmino himself was sent to inspect the companies involved, where he found that, as with several other suspicious cases, “no offences against German laws and ordinances had taken place”.39 Ultimately, the export licensing system was tightened in order to demonstrate that Germany aimed to prevent such incidents in the future.
Beyond defending domestic industrial interests, German officials also used their leverage to advance national diplomatic interests via the newly created International Opium Convention. Germany finally joined the League of Nations as a full member in 1926, but it still held out on ratifying the International Opium Convention that it had taken part in negotiating in the previous years. Stresemann told the League that Germany would sign the new agreement only on the condition that it would be guaranteed one of the seats on the Permanent Central Opium Board overseeing its implementation. Should the League refuse to grant Germany this position, it would revert to complying only with the Hague Convention. Although initially hesitant to make such guarantees – as PCOB seats were meant to be appointed based on expertise and independent of national government influence – the German government did not budge from its demands.40 Ultimately, guarantees were made, and Anselmino moved from his position on the Advisory Committee on Traffic in Opium and Other Dangerous Drugs to the PCOB when Germany signed the International Opium Convention in August 1929. Domestic compliance with the International Opium Convention followed soon afterwards with the passage of the Opium Law (Reichsopiumgesetz) in 1929, which strengthened prohibitions on personal use and trafficking and included the first German controls on cannabis.
Outside of the influence of the League of Nations, however, medical and police experts were also decisive in reshaping how international narcotics law would be understood and enforced (and not just written) by elites within Germany. The widespread use of morphine as a pain killer in the First World War, as well as the resulting proliferation of addiction, led to increased attention to the problem of drugs by the German medical profession.41 Already in the late nineteenth century, medical professionals had identified morphine addiction, but the spread of cocaine as a recreational drug during the Weimar era sparked a landmark study in 1926 on its addictive qualities.42 In Germany, and internationally, medical experts were assuming an increased role in determining public policy and gained ascendancy within national bureaucracies, leading these developments to play a vital role in shaping elite consensus towards international drug policy.43
As the ongoing negotiations over the narcotics control played out between diplomatic representatives, a parallel process of international integration was taking place among police organizations and legal experts. In 1923, the International Criminal Police Commission (ICPC) was founded in Vienna in order to tackle new forms of cross-border crime. A scandal involving revisionist Hungarians creating counterfeit francs as part of a plot to bring down the French government provided the initial impetus, but the purview of the organization rapidly expanded beyond crimes against currency.44 Some legal experts, most notably the Romanian jurist Vespasian Pella (who himself sought to aid the cause of revisionism in Romania, as discussed by Dietmar Müller in his chapter in this book), responded to the internationalization of crime by calling for the unification of penal law as part of a progressive legal agenda that would stretch beyond national borders.45 International legal cooperation was meant to be non-political, but this vision of international crime control had certain nationalist biases. The international criminal was seen as a “perpetrator without a fatherland”, which meant that they were outside the boundaries of civilized nations.46
Within the fields of law and law enforcement, narcotics ceased to be a problem of vice requiring local solutions and was now viewed as an issue to be handled by civilized states working in concert against a common transnational criminal enemy. The increasing effectiveness of international narcotics control meant that black market operators moved up the supply chain rather than continuing to divert supplies from legitimate firms, which led to the creation of a parallel illicit drug industry complete with manufacturing facilities and distribution networks.47 Locally organized crime groups in the Weimar Republic – the so-called Ringvereine – capitalized on the public demand for cocaine and forged international links as far abroad as China.48 For the police in the late Weimar Republic, this shift in illicit production and distribution repositioned the problem of drugs from one of domestic vice to an issue of transnational crime. In the recently founded criminal-science journal Kriminalistische Monatshefte, the Berlin police inspector Arthur Nebe – who had run the city’s narcotics division since 192649 – praised the Hague Convention and noted that “all modern states have recognized that the fight against drug abuse is necessary”. This was no longer a problem of mere morality, however, and Nebe warned that “the international narcotics trade, which is run by large organizations that have contacts in many countries and have considerable capital, is also flourishing”.50 At this time, Nebe did not depict organized drug crime in an openly racialized manner. The rhetoric surrounding progressive legal alignment against such criminals did, however, dovetail with chauvinism directed against minorities. International police cooperation in the field of narcotics and the League of Nations anti-trafficking bodies in particular fixated on Jews as a target group of presumed delinquents.51
With illicit narcotics profits flowing to criminal elements and no longer expanding the market for major German firms, the incentive for the state to oppose controls waned, and, instead, German officials aimed to prevent further interventions into the licit trade. By 1930, as the last foreign troops were evacuated, ending the occupation of the Rhineland, the German government was conducting bilateral diplomacy with Turkey, Chile, and China on the matter of increased cooperation to control illegal narcotics traffic.52 At the League of Nations, the UK delegation had initiated negotiations for yet another convention designed to close loopholes from the International Opium Convention. From the point of view of German Foreign Office officials, the top priority in these negotiations was to prevent “the solidification of English supremacy in narcotics control”. In public, however, German representatives spoke of their commitment to “the fight against contraband smuggling”, above all else in the name of humanitarianism.53
Although the fight against smuggling in the name of humanity was the rhetorical highlight of the negotiations, defending industrial interests continued to form the basis for Germany’s position, even if the shift away from grey market diversion meant illicit traffic was no longer a significant profit centre. By the late 1920s, some countries, mostly those without a significant pharmaceutical industry, began to call for the nationalization of narcotics production as a solution to the profit motive that they claimed was driving the illicit diversion of narcotics. In 1928, Estonia requested that all parties to the League agreements take control of all factories producing narcotics as a more practicable means of restricting illicit traffic than controlling the transit of raw coca and opium.54 This was also supported by the Soviet Union, which began in 1930 attending negotiations over the new convention. The Soviets advocated total state monopolies over production and distribution of narcotics – a convenient position, given that this had already been achieved in the Soviet Union.55
These initiatives were rejected, but the Convention for Limiting the Manufacture and Regulating the Distribution of Narcotic Drugs (hereinafter Narcotic Drugs Convention, 1931) created the Drug Supervisory Board, which kept track of domestic stockpiles of regulated drugs to ensure that traffic was in line with medical necessity rather than illicit use.56 The Narcotic Drugs Convention did include the recommendations that “[g]overnments should consider the desirability of establishing a state monopoly over the trade in, and, if necessary, over the manufacture of, the drugs covered by the Convention” and that they should “study the possibility of applying the system of international control provided in the Geneva Convention [the International Opium Convention] to every preparation containing any of the [regulated drugs], whatever the drug content of the preparation”. Of the 55 parties to the agreement, the only country to register a formal objection to these points was Germany.57 The threat of required nationalization had been downgraded to a request to study the possibility of doing so, and, once again, German representatives were not able to prevent codeine from being labelled a narcotic drug, but they were able to keep it from being as strictly regulated as heroin or cocaine.58 Active participation in the system prevented serious incursions on German sovereignty and economic activity while also enhancing the reputation of the country as an actor acting in good faith on matters of international health.
This international activity was reinforced by domestic law enforcement. By 1932, the warnings from German police had become even more dire. Thomas, another police officer from Berlin, wrote:
Organizations of dealers extend all over the world. The international solidarity of all participants represents their strength and assures them successes, despite occasional slip-ups. While the states that concluded the Geneva [International] Opium Convention, with their own legislation and often guided by economic considerations, try to achieve common control through an exchange of information on the League of Nations, their opponents work with all modern technical means in a very substantial and generous way.59
Like Nebe, at this time Thomas also refrained from racializing the figure of the international drug trafficker. While the spectre of narcotics traffickers loomed large for police as the Weimar Republic careened towards collapse, health officials viewed drug addiction as a social problem was on the wane. Only a month before Hitler’s rise to power, the Reich Health Office of the Ministry of the Interior stated that cocaine usage had peaked in 1927 and that “there is no illicit drug trade [neither opiates nor cocaine] in Berlin in a considerable amount as to pose a danger to the public”.60 By this time, however, Germany had become established as a key figure in international prohibition diplomacy, and it had thoroughly entrenched the criminalization of non-prescription drug use into its domestic legal system. With the establishment of the Third Reich, the new consensus around drugs forged during the Weimar era would be adapted to Nazi ideology and foreign policy but would never roll back to the norms of the pre-Versailles period.
4 The Third Reich: A Culmination, not a Repudiation
Nazi attitudes towards narcotics drugs were multifaceted and contradictory. On the one hand, recreational drug usage and addiction were publicly associated with genetic weakness and racial impurity and deemed a threat to the health of the German nation. On the other hand, condemnation and persecution of those connected to narcotics was differentiated along racial lines as targeted minority groups were scapegoated, but the majority of society was permitted to indulge. The Nazis deemed alcoholism to be a clear sign of hereditary deficiency, but domestic law on drugs remained relatively permissive, and addiction among racially favoured citizens was treated as a medical, not a criminal matter. Narcotics trafficking, however, was depicted as a dangerous criminal enterprise that was inherently linked to Jewish subversion and had to be fought collectively through international law and police cooperation.
Within the police, those who had been most enthusiastic about tackling the international drug trade in the Weimar era advanced rapidly within the Nazified law enforcement structures of the 1930s. Nebe – the Berlin police inspector who, in 1929, had warned of the growing threat of international drug trafficking and the need for international cooperation – joined the Nazi Party and the Schutzstaffel (SS) in 1931, was promoted to head of the Criminal Police in 1936, and then made chief of the newly formed National Criminal Police (Reichskriminalpolizeiamt) the following year.61 Similarly, Thomas, who had echoed his concerns about international trafficking, became the first head of the Reich Central Office for Combatting Drug Transgressions in 1935. The creation of the new office had been in the works since 1932 at the direction of the Foreign Office and the Ministry of the Interior to coordinate compliance with the Narcotic Drugs Convention.62 Although this new narcotics department actually had very little power and influence, Thomas continued to publish regularly on the dangers of drug trafficking and to promote the new successes achieved against this scourge by his own office and the Nazi state as a whole.63
Narcotics had emerged as a social problem in the Weimar Republic due to increased use of morphine following the First World War and then the rise of recreational cocaine use. Under the Nazis, what had been deemed a problem of public health was largely transformed into a threat of racial contamination. The attitudes of the Nazi state, and the experts that supported it, closely linked the social problems associated with narcotics to racial ideology, but that did not mean that all aspects of drugs policy in the Third Reich were instrumentalized as a means of oppression.64 Nazi-era doctors acknowledged that the addictive qualities of certain drugs were universal, but the intensity of addiction to various narcotics was racialized – it was claimed that Jews in particular were susceptible to morphine addiction.65 Thus the use and abuse of narcotics was of comparatively little concern, particularly if users were “Aryans” in good standing with the regime.66 In spite of concerns about restricted substances such as hashish, cocaine, and opiates, the widespread commercial success of the stimulant methamphetamine, under the brand name Pervitin, demonstrated that narcotics were not generally problematic for the Nazis. As Stephen Snelders and Toine Peters have argued, Western countries, including Nazi Germany, were “not drug-free, but rather societies where psychotropic drugs were highly integrated into everyday life, although still culturally ambiguous”.67
Although the consumption of drugs was not universally stigmatized, the Nazi world view built upon wider interwar prejudices that linked together drug crime with Jewishness, alongside other “alien” vices that corrupted the health and morality of the German volk.68 Already in his autobiography Mein Kampf (1925), Hitler claimed that Jews were habitual criminals and responsible for “white slavery”, and this was expanded upon by the Nazified medical profession in the 1930s to claim that they had a “racial predisposition” to serious crimes, including “pimping, but also drug-dealing and pickpocketing”.69 According to the Nazi-era police, a Jewish criminal was closely tied to drugs. In a 1933 issue of Neues Volk, the magazine of the Racial Purity Office, the Reich police chief Kurt Daluege explains how authorities could identify “the criminal Jew” on sight together with mug shots of a “pickpocket, confidence man, drug dealer, fence and passport counterfeiter”.70 One judge declared that the domestic problem of alcoholism had been constrained, but “one must therefore systematically fight the narcotics scourge threatening from abroad”, and a senior police detective was convinced that France was a central hub for the international drug trade connecting sinister Jewish smugglers in the Levant with their compatriots in New York.71 Even though Germany was still a leading producer of cocaine and heroin, and the recreational use of narcotics was seemingly widespread without serious repercussions, Nazi officials expressed an almost paranoid fear of the threat of foreign narcotics.
While Nazi Germany asserted that a “Jewish connection” lay behind the trafficking problems that it faced, the actual numbers of Jewish traffickers convicted in Germany were, however, very small. In 1938, there was only a single Jewish perpetrator out of 20 convictions that Germany reported nationwide for drug smuggling. In this case, a Yugoslav citizen named Albert Meisel was caught smuggling 306 kilogrammes of opium into Austria on Christmas Eve the year before. He was convicted to ten months of hard labour, while his non-Jewish Swiss accomplice was simply released.72 Although convictions were rare, accusations of drug peddling were often used as a pretext for the arrest of Jews. During the nationwide pogrom known as Kristallnacht, several thousand Jews in Berlin were arrested under the pretence of being part of an organized drug ring.73 In spite of the criminalization of Jews as drug traffickers, German narcotics law under the Nazis was not significantly adapted to this purpose. As Jonathan Lewy argues, “none of the drug laws or amendments bore a trace of Nazi ideology. Racial policies failed to infiltrate the drug laws.”74 Under Nazi rule, drug laws were regularly updated according to pharmaceutical innovations, but the basic legal architecture of the Opium Law remained unchanged. The racial disparities in enforcement came through the ideological projections of the police without the need for explicitly coded legal texts.
Although the Nazi regime did not see the reform of domestic law as being necessary to facilitate the use of the drug trade as a means of legitimizing racial persecution, the Nazi Party’s legal elite did embrace the role of international law as an essential tool in the fight against trafficking. Nazi legal theorists rejected Weimar liberalism and redefined law according to the Nazi Party’s ideology. Hans Frank – Hitler’s personal lawyer, legal counsel to the Nazi Party, and, after 1933, the director of the Academy for German Law – “declared that the law was what benefitted the German volk, and that whatever was to the detriment of the volk, by definition, constituted lawlessness”.75 Frank argued that it would be impossible to accept an international legal organization that was based on the ideals of the Treaty of Versailles, but “we National-Socialist jurists are however ready to cooperate in any way in the setting up of an international structure of ideas in the sphere of penal policy within the framework of our own ideas and their effects”.76 In keeping with imperial era experts, Frank argued that there was no need for a “world penal code” but that like-minded states could agree on the need to criminalize certain international crimes, including “offences against coinage, the white slave traffic”, as well as “the great crimes of international corruption”, such as “those who sabotage peace, spies, traffickers in drugs or patent sneaks”.77
In terms of diplomacy, Nazi-era narcotics diplomacy no longer had to concern itself with the profits of industry as the criminal underworld had transitioned away from grey market diversions. Although the Nazi definition of criminality was highly ideological, Nazi experts accepted the Weimar era framing of narcotics control as a field of technocratic regulation requiring international cooperation and did not revert to the imperial era’s perspective that international law in this field was inherently an assault on German industry and sovereignty.78 Narcotics control represented an important avenue for advancing the legitimacy of the Nazi regime and maintaining Germany’s position in international affairs, but, in the case of narcotics control, this went further by also legitimizing the legal persecution of the Third Reich’s racial enemies.79 Initially, it appeared as though the Nazi takeover would mean the end of German participation in the international narcotics system. Nine months after taking power, the Nazi government withdrew Germany from the League of Nations. In a letter protesting this decision sent to Berlin, Anselmino warns, “[t]he great significance of the withdrawal of Germany from the League of Nations for the policy of the Reich must be underlined by the cessation of all participation in the organs set up by the League of Nations.”80 The Nazi departure from the League of Nations did not, however, end its relationship with the international narcotics control system. In cooperating with the League of Nations after its withdrawal, however, the Nazis followed the guidelines set out by Frank by ostensibly complying with reporting institutions in Geneva while also flagrantly violating its rules when it suited German national interests.
This underhanded Nazi engagement with the League after its formal withdrawal was made possible as officials in Geneva bent over backwards to prevent Germany from completely abandoning its adherence to the opium conventions. Mass compliance with the Narcotic Drugs Convention had only been possible because British diplomats had secured the immediate signatures of France, Germany, and Switzerland so that the major producers would not lose to each other.81 Fearing that open defiance from Germany could bring down the system entirely, they decided it would be more effective to accommodate dishonesty from the Third Reich rather than punish it. As a result, the Third Reich diligently, though often fraudulently, filed reports to Geneva and technically fulfilled the reporting requirements of the International Opium Convention and the Narcotic Drugs Convention. In 1936, the Drug Supervisory Board determined that Nazi Germany was stockpiling drugs and using poppy stalks to produce heroin without the need for trackable imports. Rather than censure Germany, officials decided to tread lightly and hope for the best. The following year, when Italy left the League of Nations as well, holding onto German participation was seen as even more vital and precarious. In 1938, the chair of the PCOB, Herbert May, declined his position upon re-election as he feared his Jewish heritage would drive the Germans to leave the system. In the end, the Nazis continued to cooperate and even convinced fascist Italy to attend an international meeting in early 1939 of secret police services on the problem of narcotics.82 Cooperation with the League’s drug bodies only ceased at the end of 1939, soon after the invasion of Poland.83
In the field of international police cooperation, the Nazis went even further by hijacking the ICPC. Frank had praised the work of the ICPC, stating that “the criminal is international, hence the police who are to secure his arrest must also co-operate internationally.”84 Over the course of the 1930s, the ICPC had already taken a turn towards the authoritarian right and had turned its focus towards drug trafficking. It succeeded in lobbying for a new international narcotics agreement that would target smuggling rather than licit trade, which became the Convention for the Suppression of the Illicit Traffic in Dangerous Drugs (1936).85 In Nazi Germany, the convention was not signed, but a dissertation produced at the University of Jena’s School of Law declared that, with the creation of the recently drafted (though never actually implemented) agreement, “a common international foundation has finally been established that will enable effective and sustainable suppression of this global evil”.86 The ICPC had always been based in Vienna, and the head of that city’s police force served as its chief, so, after the German annexation of Austria in 1938, Nazi authorities were able to take control of the organization and install SS officers in charge of operations. The ICPC still maintained a membership of 35 police organizations after this and cooperated with the United States, but the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939 caused all members not allied with Nazi Germany to leave the organization. The ICPC headquarters were moved to Berlin, and it was integrated into the Reich Main Security Office under the leadership of Final Solution architect Reinhard Heydrich.87 Nebe was soon made director of the head office, and, in spite of the politicization of the organization, he enjoyed a productive working relationship beyond the Nazi sphere of influence, including the Danish justice minister and the head of police in Glasgow.88
After the outbreak of World War II, trafficking was disrupted, along with much of normal interstate commerce, but the Nazis who were outspoken in their support for combatting international narcotics traffic featured prominently in the racist atrocities of the regime. Nebe proved to be a fierce proponent of the Nazi euthanasia programme, the deportations of Sinti and Roma, and in 1941 he volunteered to lead the death squad Einsatzgruppe B as it advanced behind Army Group Centre into Soviet territory. After Heydrich’s assassination in 1942, however, Nebe was appointed as president of the ICPC. Frank was appointed as governor-general of occupied Poland in 1939 and served in that position, where he oversaw force labour operation and multiple death camps, until the end of the war. In 1946, he was executed at Nuremberg for war crimes and crimes against humanity. Late into the war, the Nazi security services continued to speak highly of international cooperation in the name of fighting drug trafficking. In a 1944 speech, SS Captain Erwin Kosmehl – successor to Thomas at Reich Central Office for Combatting Drug Transgressions – spoke proudly of “our work” before the rise of the Third Reich to cooperate with other countries on the problem of narcotics trafficking “so as to neutralize the international criminals, who often had their roots in Jewry”.89 For the Nazis, the interwar period was now a golden era of international collaboration against the shared threat of Jewish narcotics smuggling that could be looked back upon with fondness.
5 Conclusion
From the Kaiserreich to the Nazi era, German state policy toward international narcotics regulation focused on the protection of national industry, sovereignty, and security, but the methods by which this was achieved evolved depending on the interpretive lens of shifting expert groups. In the imperial era, officials viewed global legal controls over narcotics drugs as an external threat to state sovereignty, but, after being coercively integrated into the international system under the Weimar Republic, German officials discovered that such rules could be used to advance national interests, and, under the Nazis, it could be used to realize an ideological programme of racial oppression and terror. When international controls were first advanced from a moral perspective, Imperial Germany aimed to sabotage the implementation of a global legal system regulating narcotics. Once the implementation of the Hague Convention was imposed via the Versailles treaty, Germany turned to constructive engagement with the League of Nations to regain its position in diplomatic affairs. As Germany’s representative, Anselmino leveraged his position as a scientific expert to shape rules to the advantage of Germany’s pharmaceutical producers and deflect international blame for their quasi-criminal transgressions.
Once criminal organizations had taken over the illicit drug trade, police then sought to integrate Germany into regional cross-border police structures and to implement international narcotics law. The rise of illicit international networks promoted the realization of internationalized networks of police and law enforcement that had the means of securing controls over tenuous state frontiers and precarious national sovereignty through international cooperation to contain the threat of transnational crime. Under the Nazis, this process of engagement culminated with international narcotics law being used to legitimize the persecution of Jews under the cover of fighting transnational crime. The transition from moral to liberal-technocratic and finally a Nazified and illiberal internationalism in the field of narcotics control was not seamless, but each new phase built upon the structures of the old.
Notes
1
P. Fritzsche, Life and Death in the Third Reich, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009, p. 10.
2
On the tensions between nationalism and internationalism in the interwar era, see G. Sluga, Internationalism in the Age of Nationalism, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013. On liberal internationalism in the interwar era, see also M. Mazower, Governing the World: The History of an Idea, New York: Penguin, 2012; P. Clavin, Securing the World Economy: The Reinvention of the League of Nations, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.
3
On the “mutual dependence of liberal and illiberal internationalism”, see P. Hetherington and G. Sluga, “Liberal and Illiberal Internationalisms”, Journal of World History 31 (2020) 1, pp. 1–9. On the role of experts in creating internationalism in this era, see D. Rodogno, G. Struck, and J. Vogel, Shaping the Transnational Sphere: Experts, Networks and Issues from the 1840s to the 1930s, New York: Berghahn Books, 2014.
4
On the idea of an alternative “fascist internationalism”, see M. Herren, “Fascist Internationalism”, in: G. Sluga (ed.), Internationalisms: A Twentieth-Century History, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016, pp. 191–212.
5
On the contradictions of the post-war narcotics system, see C. Boggs, Drugs, Power, and Politics: Narco Wars, Big Pharma, and the Subversion of Democracy, London: Routledge, 2015.
6
H. Barop, “Building the ‘Opium Evil’ Consensus. The International Opium Commission of Shanghai”, Journal of Modern European History 13 (2015) 1, pp. 115–137.
7
The International Opium Commission’s participants included the USA, Austria-Hungary, China, France, Germany, the UK, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, Persia, Portugal, Russia, and Siam.
8
T. Cramer, “Building the ‘World’s Pharmacy’: The Rise of the German Pharmaceutical Industry, 1871–1914”, Business History Review 89 (2015) 1, pp. 43–73.
9
J. McTavish, “What Did Bayer Do before Aspirin? Early Pharmaceutical Marketing Practices in America”, Pharmacy in History 41 (1999) 1, p. 14, fn. 69.
10
On German chemical and pharmaceutical industry in the globalizing economy, see C. Torp, The Challenges of Globalization: Economy and Politics in Germany, 1860–1914, New York: Berghahn Books, 2014, pp. 55–57.
11
See A. Hoffmann, Drogenkonsum und -kontrolle: Zur Etablierung eines sozialen Problems im ersten Drittel des 20. Jahrhunderts, Wiesbaden: Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 2011, pp. 36–43.
12
The signatories included China, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Persia, Portugal, Russia, Siam, and the UK (including its overseas territories). On the negotiation of the Hague Convention, see W. B. McAllister, Drug Diplomacy in the Twentieth Century: An International History, London: Routledge, 2004, pp. 28–34.
13
H. R. Friman, “Germany and the Transformations of Cocaine, 1880–1920”, in: P. Gootenberg (ed.), Cocaine: Global Histories, New York: Routledge, 2002, pp. 83–104, at pp. 91–95.
14
A. Tooze, The Deluge: The Great War and the Remaking of Global Order 1916–1931, London: Penguin, 2014.
15
E. A. Nadelmann, “Global Prohibition Regimes: The Evolution of Norms in International Society”, International Organization 44 (1990) 4, pp. 479–526.
16
S. D. Stein, International Diplomacy, State Administrators, and Narcotics Control: The Origins of a Social Problem, Aldershot: Gower, 1985, pp. 120–123.
17
M. Payk, Frieden durch Recht? Der Aufstieg des modernen Völkerrechts und der Friedensschluss nach dem Ersten Weltkrieg, Berlin: De Gruyter, 2018, p. 390.
18
M. Jones, Founding Weimar: Violence and the German Revolution of 1918–1919, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016.
19
Germany had increased domestic regulation of drug distribution and manufacturing during the First World War due to increased usage of morphine products, see Hoffmann, Drogenkonsum und -kontrolle, pp. 79–81.
20
See A. McElligott, Rethinking the Weimar Republic: Authority and Authoritarianism, 1916–1936, London: Bloomsbury, 2014, p. 38.
21
On Silesia, see Tooze, The Deluge, p. 5. On the eastern border and sovereignty, see A. H. Sammartino, The Impossible Border: Germany and the East, 1914–1922, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2014, p. 4.
22
On Stresemann and his foreign policy, see K. H. Pohl, Politiker und Bürger: Gustav Stresemann und seine Zeit, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2002; J. Wright, Gustav Stresemann: Weimar’s Greatest Statesman, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004; C. M. Kimmich, Germany and the League of Nations, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976, p. 63.
23
On how states and experts from East-Central Europe strategically engaged with the League of Nations, see K. Naumann, “The Polycentric Remaking of International Participation after World War I: (Post-)Imperial Agents from East Central Europe in and around the League’s Secretariat”, in: P. Becker and N. Wheatley (eds.), Remaking Central Europe: The League of Nations and the Former Habsburg Lands, Oxford: Oxford University Press (forthcoming).
24
Germany signed a bilateral agreement with the United States in 1924 as well as the Helsingfors Convention (1925) with the Scandinavian/Baltic Sea states on the restriction of the alcohol trade. See A. Mitter, “Rum Runners of the Baltic – The Rise of Transnational Liquor Smuggling Networks in Interwar Europe”, Zeitschrift für Ostmitteleuropa-Forschung 68 (2019) 4, pp. 527–550. Germany also took part in the negotiations over the League of Nations Convention for the Supervision of the International Trade in Arms and Ammunition and in Implements of War (1925) and the Convention to Suppress the Slave Trade and Slavery (1926).
25
G. Sluga, “Women, Feminisms and Twentieth-Century Internationalisms”, in: G. Sluga and P. Clavin (eds.), Internationalisms: A Twentieth-Century History, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017, pp. 61–84, at 68.
26
On Anselmino’s life and career, see P. Schendzielorz, “Die Anfänge der Betäubungsmittelgesetzgebung in Deutschland: unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der Opiumstelle Berlin und des Pharmazeuten Otto Anselmino (1873–1955)”, PhD thesis, Free University of Berlin, 1989.
27
S. K. Chatterjee, Legal Aspects of International Drug Control, Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands, 2013, p. 157.
28
O. Anselmino, ABC of Narcotic Drugs, Geneva: League of Nations, 1931. His earlier work on German drug regulations included O. Anselmino and E. Gilg, Kommentar zum Deutschen Arzneibuch, Berlin: Springer, 1911; O. Anselmino, Das Opiumgesetz und seine Ausführungsbestimmungen, Berlin: Julius Springer, 1924.
29
L. E. Jones, German Liberalism and the Dissolution of the Weimar Party System, 1918–1933, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017, p. 191.
30
Hoffmann, Drogenkonsum und -kontrolle, pp. 135–36.
31
Politisches Archiv des Auswärtigen Amtes (hereafter PA AA), R901/46373, Anselmino to Auswärtiges Amt (7 November 1924).
32
H. R. Friman, NarcoDiplomacy: Exporting the U.S. War on Drugs, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996, p. 31.
33
Quoted ibid., p. 25.
34
Y. Zhou, Anti-Drug Crusades in Twentieth-Century China: Nationalism, History, and State Building, Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999, p. 55; McAllister, Drug Diplomacy in the Twentieth Century, p. 82.
35
S. Pedersen, The Guardians: The League of Nations and the Crisis of Empire, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015, pp. 195–203; S. A. Wempe, “From Unfit Imperialists to Fellow Civilizers: German Colonial Officials as Imperial Experts in the League of Nations, 1919–1933”, German History 34 (2016) 1, pp. 21–48.
36
A. A. Block, “European Drug Traffic and Traffickers between the Wars: The Policy of Suppression and Its Consequences”, Journal of Social History 23 (1989) 2, p. 320.
37
See Anselmino’s responses at the League of Nations, League of Nations Archives, C.393.M.136.1926 XI, Eighth Session, pp. 74–82.
38
R. Davenport-Hines, The Pursuit of Oblivion: A Social History of Drugs, London: Phoenix, 2002, p. 218.
39
Friman, NarcoDiplomacy, pp. 28–31.
40
See Foreign Office correspondence in PA AA, R96847.
41
J. Haverkamp, “Rauschmittel Im Nationalsozialismus. Die gesetzliche und therapeutische Entwicklung 1933–1939”, Sozial Geschichte Online (2012) 7, p. 42.
42
H. W. Maier, Der Kokainismus: Geschichte, Pathologie, Medizinische und behördliche Bekämpfung, Leipzig: G. Thieme, 1926.
43
Stein, International Diplomacy, pp. 123–139.
44
D. Petruccelli, “Banknotes from the Underground: Counterfeiting and the International Order in Interwar Europe”, Journal of Contemporary History 51 (2016) 3, pp. 507–530.
45
M. Lewis, The Birth of the New Justice: The Internationalization of Crime and Punishment, 1919–1950, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.
46
J. Jäger, Verfolgung durch Verwaltung: Internationales Verbrechen und internationale Polizeikooperation 1880–1933, Konstanz: Universitätsverlag Konstanz, 2006, pp. 167–168.
47
On this structural shift, see Block, “European Drug Traffic”, pp. 315–16.
48
A. Hartmann and K. von Lampe, “The German Underworld and the Ringvereine from the 1890s through the 1950s”, Global Crime 9 (2008) 1–2, pp. 113, 120.
49
W. Kiess, Der Doppelspieler: Arthur Nebe zwischen Opportunimus, Verbrechen und Opposition, Stuttgart: Gatzanis GmbH, 2011, p. 15.
50
A. Nebe, “Kriminalpolizei und Rauschgifte”, Kriminalistische Monatshefte 3 (1929) 4, pp. 81–85, at pp. 83–84.
51
On the antisemitic portrayals of drug trafficking by contemporary experts, see P. Knepper, “Dreams and Nightmares: Drug Trafficking and the History of International Crime”, in: P. Knepper and A. Johansen (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of the History of Crime and Criminal Justice, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016, pp. 208–225, at 214–216. International police cooperation also targeted the so-called “gypsy plague”, with the very existence of the Sinti and Roma portrayed as a transnational criminal threat to public order that needed to be monitored and controlled. See G. Margalit, Germany and Its Gypsies: A Post-Auschwitz Ordeal, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2002, p. 32.
52
Hoffmann, Drogenkonsum und -kontrolle, p. 222.
53
Ibid., p. 143.
54
Block, “European Drug Traffic”, p. 317.
55
M. Bogomoloff, League of Nations Archives, C.509.M.214.1931 XI, p. 52.
56
The 1931 Convention also targeted the evasion of international controls through shipping via non-signatory countries. See McAllister, Drug Diplomacy in the Twentieth Century, pp. 76–77, 100.
57
Convention for Limiting the Manufacture and Regulating the Distribution of Narcotic Drugs of July 13, 1931: Historical and Technical Study by the Opium Traffic Section of the Secretariat of the League of Nations, Opium and other Dangerous Drugs, Geneva: League of Nations/London: Allen and Unwin, 1937, pp. 230–231.
58
McAllister, Drug Diplomacy in the Twentieth Century, p. 97.
59
W. Thomas, “Ueber internationalen Rauschgiftschmuggel”, Kriminalistische Monatshefte 6 (1932) 11, pp. 250–252, at p. 250.
60
J. Lewy, “The Drug Policy of the Third Reich”, The Social History of Alcohol and Drugs 22 (2018) 2, p. 148.
61
On Nebe’s rapid advance within the Nazi hierarchy and the police, see G. C. Browder, Foundations of the Nazi Police State: The Formation of Sipo and SD, Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2015, p. 57.
62
Lewy, “The Drug Policy of the Third Reich”, p. 159.
63
See W. Thomas, “Der internationale Rauschgiftschmuggel und seine Bekämpfung”, Deutsche Rechtspflege 5 (1937), pp. 140–141.
64
On the entanglement of racial ideology with drug regulation and addiction treatment under the Nazis, see H. Mach, “Exclusion and Extinction – The Fight against Narcotics in the Third Reich”, Journal of Drug Issues 32 (2002) 2, pp. 379–394; T. Holzer, Die Geburt der Drogenpolitik aus dem Geist der Rassenhygiene: Deutsche Drogenpolitik von 1933 bis 1972, Norderstedt: Books on Demand, 2007; Haverkamp, “Rauschmittel im Nationalsozialismus”; W. Pieper (ed.), Nazis on Speed, Drogen im 3. Reich, Münchenstein: Grüne Kraft, 2016; J. Lewy, “Vice in the Third Reich”, in: L. Pine (ed.), Life and Times in Nazi Germany, London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016, pp. 49–74; Lewy, “The Drug Policy of the Third Reich”.
65
K. Pohlisch, Rauschgifte und Konstitution, Berlin-Dahlem: Wacht-Verlag, 1937, p. 9.
66
Lewy, “The Drug Policy of the Third Reich”, p. 157.
67
S. Snelders and T. Pieters, “Speed in the Third Reich: Metamphetamine (Pervitin) Use and a Drug History from Below”, Social History of Medicine 24 (2011) 3, p. 697. Although the use of methamphetamines was common among German civilians and armed forces in the Second World War, the impact of this has been exaggerated in sensationalist works such as N. Ohler, Blitzed: Drugs in Nazi Germany, London: Penguin, 2016.
68
M. Berkowitz, The Crime of My Very Existence: Nazism and the Myth of Jewish Criminality, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007.
69
M. H. Kater, Doctors Under Hitler, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005, p. 180.
70
C. Koonz, The Nazi Conscience, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003, p. 119.
71
Quoted in Mach, “Exclusion and Extinction”, p. 382; R. Thumser-Wöhs, “Vom Betschina Karl und dem Zahnluckerten Poldl: Einblicke in Drogensysteme, Drogenkriminalität und Drogenbiografien 1929 bis 1945”, in: R. Thumser-Wöhs et al. (eds.), Außerordentliches: Festschrift für Albert Lichtblau, Cologne: Böhlau Verlag, 2019, pp. 242–255, at 253.
72
Lewy, “Vice in the Third Reich”, p. 67.
73
C. Dirks, “The Juni-Aktion (June Operation) in Berlin”, in: B. Meyer, H. Simon, and C. Schütz (eds.), Jews in Nazi Berlin: From Kristallnacht to Liberation, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009, pp. 22–35, at 25.
74
Lewy, “The Drug Policy of the Third Reich”, p. 157.
75
J. Meierhenrich, The Remnants of the Rechtsstaat: An Ethnography of Nazi Law, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018, pp. 110–111.
76
H. Frank, International Penal Policy, Berlin: Akademie für deutsches Recht, 1935, p. 14.
77
Ibid., pp. 17, 19–20.
78
On the continued success of the technical institutions of the League of Nations into the 1930s, see P. Clavin, “Conceptualizing Internationalism”, in: D. Laqua (ed.), Internationalism Reconfigured: Transnational Ideas and Movements Between the World Wars, London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020, pp. 1–14, at 10–11.
79
See P. Wagner, “Urban Planning and the Politics of Expert Internationalism, 1920s–1940s”, Journal of World History 31 (2020) 1, pp. 79–110. The League’s “blacklist” of known drug smugglers was disproportionately filled with names of Jewish traffickers. See Knepper, “Dreams and Nightmares”, pp. 214–216.
80
Schendzielorz, “Die Anfänge der Betäubungsmittelgesetzgebung in Deutschland”, p. 200.
81
McAllister, Drug Diplomacy in the Twentieth Century, p. 110.
82
Ibid., pp. 128–29.
83
Lewy, “The Drug Policy of the Third Reich”, pp. 156–57.
84
Frank, International Penal Policy, p. 18.
85
D. Petruccelli, “The Crisis of Liberal Internationalism: The Legacies of the League of Nations Reconsidered”, Journal of World History 31 (2020) 1, p. 131.
86
H. Werner, Abkommen zur Bekämpfung internationaler Delikte, Meuselwitz: Müller, 1937, p. 79.
87
C. Fijnaut, “The International Criminal Police Commission and the Fight against Communism, 1923–1945”, in: M. Mazower (ed.), The Policing of Politics in the Twentieth Century: Historical Perspectives, New York: Berghahn Books, 1997, pp. 107–128, at 115–17.
88
R. Rathert, Verbrechen und Verschwörung: Arthur Nebe der Kripochef des Dritten Reiches, Münster: LIT Verlag, 2001, pp. 73–74.
89
G. Feuerstein, Suchtgiftbekämpfung, Berlin: Neuland Verl. Ges, 1944, p. 34.