PAUL WERNER (1900–1970), photographed after 1945. Werner headed the Baden State Office of Criminal Investigation in Germany from 1933 and moved to Berlin in 1937 to set up the Reich Criminal Police Office (RKPA). He became its deputy head and advocated the concept of ‘preventive fight against crime’, which gave the police the power to commit any person to a concentration camp at their own discretion. The family-by-family deportation of Sinti and Roma to Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration and extermination camp from 1943 onwards was also implemented by the RKPA on the basis of the ‘preventive fight against crime’. In 1944, he reached the fifth highest rank within the SS (Schutzstaffel) as SS-Oberführer.
The end of the Nazi regime did not cause a career break. From 1954 until his retirement in 1966, he was a government director in the Ministry of the Interior of the federal state of Baden-Württemberg. Three investigations against the ‘desk perpetrator’ were dropped.
