By Thom L. Jones for Gangsters Inc.
Definitions:
Organized Crime: Criminal activities performed by groups or networks in a systematic and organized way. Source: Rosella Selmini. University of Chicago Press.
The Mafia: A large group of organized criminals. Source: Cambridge Dictionary.
Ringvereine: Served as an underworld-government and maintained close ties to police officials, judges and politicians. Source: Feraru/Muskel. Die Ringvereine. Argon, 1995.
Following the end of the Great War of 1914 to 1918, Germany struggled to recreate itself out of the wreckage and chaos they had created across Europe and the world, and in 1919 eventually established a constitutional federal republic, the first of its kind in the country’s history. The convocation that created it took place in the city of Weimar, the capital of the Thuringia province in Central Germany. From 1919 until 1933, the country was known as The Weimar Republic.
Although the obvious choice should have been Berlin for this important political and social event, directors of The National Assembly decided this was too dangerous a place to host the congregation. They were close to the mark. The largest city in Germany was lawless for many years, before during and after the war. Part of this culture developed around a group of organized criminals who became known as The Ringvereine.
The city, the third biggest in the world, known as “The Chicago of Europe” was sometimes referred to as Babylon, a term carrying with it the biblical nuance of excess, sin, and looming demise; it’s political, social and criminal activities often revolving around the hedonistic life style enjoyed across nightlife and club culture, prime criminal sources for customers and victims of illegal activities.
Crime in Berlin was at its apex in the years between the two great wars, with the city gaining a reputation as a hub of black market trading and other nefarious activities.
The post-war economic crisis that helped trigger poverty and crime, resulted in over 300 murders in 1926 alone.
In the late 19th century there was a surge in the establishment of clubs and associations across Germany and using this as cover, groups of ex-convicts created their own “clubs” as sporting or wrestling affiliations-hence Ringvereine, literally ring association. The first Ringverein was established in 1890, called “Reichsverein ehemaliger Strafgefangener” (Reichclub former prisoner).
By 1898, multiple clubs were forming into an umbrella that called themselves “Ring Berlin.” The members of these groups called themselves Ringbrȕder- ring brothers.
Unlike the Mafias of Italy, in Germany, the Ringvereine were officially registered under the Reich Association Law. The group’s own laws forbid members to carry out criminal activities, but like mobsters anywhere, rules were rules, until they were not. In Berlin, the organization held sway over all significant illegal operations. Their philosophy demanded a strict obedience to the code of Ringvereine, and transgressors were rapidly and violently dealt with. And in Berlin, the capital of crime, they saw themselves less and less as probation officers for ex-convicts and more as dealers in drug trafficking, extortion and prostitution.
Similar to the Sicilian Mafia, the Ringvereine relied heavily on territorial control. In most cases, only those with a criminal record and who could name a guarantor from among the members, (just like the rules of the Mafia,) were allowed in to a ring.
Although only men could become members, wives and girlfriends were part of the community providing financial and moral support to gang members. Loyalty and comradeship were overlocked into the fabric of their community, and when someone was in trouble with the law, support was offered and lawyers hired to help. When one died, like the Masonic movement, all members had to attend his funeral.
They were a big mob of mobsters. According to estimates of the Prussian Ministry of the Interior, there were seventy rings in Berlin alone, with membership north of 5,000 prior to the end of the Weimar Republic. No city in the western world contained this many bad guys in an organized criminal network of this size, at this time.
Public opinion varied over just what Ringvereine were, as some believed them to be highly skilled professionals, others looked on them as hereditary criminals who needed to be incarcerated on a permanent basis.
A powerful businessman and politician, Alfred Hugenberg, who owned Der Montag newspaper, postulated that the emergence of organized crime in the form of gangs across the country, was due to American influence, and the degeneration of the Weimar Republic as a state.
It wasn’t until the end of 1928 that media attention highlighted how significant a problem Ringvereine was.
On the night of December 29th, a group of well-heeled men entered Naubar pub and restaurant near the Silesian Railway Station, in the seamy underside of Berlin, the Friedrichshain district, an impoverished area notorious for dodgy criminals and ladies of the night. It was here, in Lange Strasse, that one of the city’s most prolific murderers was finally caught by police in 1921. Carl Grossmann was the main suspect in the killing up to 100 young women, but committed suicide in his cell before he could be sentenced.
Legend has it that Grossmann, who ran a sausage stand at the station now known as Ostbahnhof, chopped up his prey and turned them into bratwurst.
The men drinking in the bar this night were part of Immertreu (‘Always Loyal’) and Norden (‘North’) ring crime syndicates. Their leader was a notorious gangster called Adolf Lieb, whose underground name was Muskel-Adolf, Muscle Adolf.
Earlier that evening, one of his men, called Emil Malchin, had been attacked and knifed by a carpenter called Schulniess, who was with a large crew of builders from Hamburg working on a nearby railway underground installation. Lieb approached the joiner, demanding a sum of money to cover the medical costs of Malchin’s treatment. A donnybrook erupted, which ended up outside the building.
Police arrived, moved the Hamburgers to another, nearby bar, and everything seemed sorted, but when they left, an anthill of Ringverein members arrived, and a battle involving over 200 gangsters and workmen erupted on Breslauer Strasse. Things were rapidly changing, it was dark, there’s stuff going on, and a lot of moving parts. A profusion of weapons being used-snooker cues, hammers, guns, police discover over 150 shell casings littering the area, knives, clubs, and according to one source, a least one dead fish used as a lethal weapon.
Surprisingly, only one of the combatants died-a bricklayer, in hospital from his injuries.
Although arrested and subsequently tried in court, Lieb and his associates walked free, highlighting the public’s perception that an omnipresent gang of dangerous criminals, undermining Germany’s authority, were seemingly untouchable from law and order.
Following the Breslauer Strasse commotion, the deputy leader of The German National People’s Party, the major political force in the Weimar Republic, claimed in the Prussian parliament:
“Never have these professional criminals been so brazen and shameless… and never have these criminals dared to prostitute themselves in huge public celebrations and to show off what they can afford. There have been occasions where 4,000 convicted delinquents got together, in dinner jackets, patent leather shoes, probably also with top hats… One really has to say that it is time to take drastic action.”
The objectives of the Ringvereine extended further than the realm of professional criminal activity. Their networks offered aegis, loyalty and companionship, providing members a distinctive, regulated and vigorous sub-culture. Almost a parallel universe in which members socialized like similar political groups. A responsible outward appearance was important to the Ringvereine to detour from the perception, (rightly so) that they were ex-criminals appearing to re-emerge as part of society, blurring the division between criminals and the respectable public.
The media had a heyday reporting and proselytizing their own viewpoints on the battle at the railway station bar. Der Angriff, Berlin’s own Nazi newspaper, edited by Joseph Goebbels (Gauleiter of Berlin and a master propagandist in the making), carried an expose´ of the extent of organized crime in Berlin, demand harsh measures against ‘insolent gangs of pimps and criminals’ who were operating across the city. Goebbels’ aim was to attract the support of middle-class voters for the Nazi Party, still a struggling marginal political entity. He insisted the Nazis will eradicate criminality once and for all. Which, of course, they never did. Nobody ever has. Goebbels would lie like a rug and was a murderer of words.
If the press and the public seemed to have strong anti-crime sentiments regarding Ringvereine, the attitude of the police was a lot more complex.
Ernst Gennat the head of Berlin’s police homicide squad attended parties held by Ringvereine cells, (where legend has it, the massed throngs would wave and shout as he sauntered through the ballroom waving his baton,) along with the deputy president of the police force, Bernard Weiss, who looked to the rings as a necessary evil, helping to control areas of the city where police were ineffectual enforcing law and order. As long as the Ringverein remained in the shadows, the police tolerated them.
Gennat was one of Europe’s top police detectives. Nicknamed the Buddha of Alexanderplatz, (the Berlin police headquarters until 1945,) because of his short, squat and heavy (270 pounds) figure, in 1931, he had a clearance rate solving homicides of an impressive 94%. Among his many accomplishments, he is the first police officer to use the term “serial killer” when describing the activities of Peter Kűrten, a notorious murderer known as The Vampire of Düsseldorf. In the wildest years of the city, when cocaine was the philosopher’s stone of the night, killers roamed the streets and law and order came and went like a lost butterfly, Gennat was profiling criminals forty years before it became a commons law enforcement tool. No one knew the Ringverein better than him. Gennat was perhaps the first policeman to set up a modern murder squad in the world and professionalized their work.
He became a figure of international renown, with police officials from across the world visiting him in Berlin, along with celebrities like author Edgar Wallace and movie actor Charlie Chaplin.
He understood the rings blackmailed innkeepers, employed former prisoners as their protégés, demanded protection money, and dominated the “red-light districts”. In short, they controlled the underworld. The police tolerated the ring associations as a matter of necessity. Police Commissioners, including Gennat, even keep close contact with the ring brothers because of their ability to ensure “order”. They controlled the unorganized criminals, specifically the aggressive youth gangs, and supported the police in cases of murder. When asked about it once, Gennat replied, “You come to terms as best you can.”
Law enforcement wondered whether Ringverein was constructed in the sense of an organized unit that planned crimes or whether they only operated as an internal milieu, to keep police out of their affairs as much as possible. Rings maintained support as insurance funds for the families of imprisoned members, procured lawyers and relief witnesses and acted as arbitrator in environmental disputes.
Criminologists also recognized that the rings served a social purpose, functioning as a quasi-middle-class club with meetings, club banners, excursions, and club festivals. These rings provided companionship to their members, all of whom had criminal records, filling the void left by society’s denial.
Their media strategy was to image themselves as harmless, self-governing clubs of ex-criminals. The public’s view of the Ringvereine as self-policing crime syndicates, maintaining law and order instead of the inefficient police of Berlin, also suited them.
In 1931, a shoot-out occurred between members of two different clubs, and again, the police could not press charges. The media once more highlighted the spectre of an underworld organized criminal entity, impervious to the law.
After 1933, Ringvereine seems to have submerged deep from the scrutiny of society and law enforcement, and with Hitler’s rise to power as chancellor, their strength as a criminal cartel appears to have weakened under the Nazi party’s determination to combat crime and outlaw illegal associations through draconian anti-crime legislation. Following their rise to power, the Nazi Party arrested many ring members, and contained them in concentration camps set up since the spring.
Finding members was easy, the police having access to the Ringvereine membership files, so all the cops had to do was to track down and arrest those listed as members.
In September 1933, Hermann Gőring, Prussian Minister President and in charge of the Prussian police, gave a speech in which he stated:
“The Ringvereine must not appear in public any longer and will be further repressed until the underworld is annihilated.”
Although the Nazis had clamped down on crime organized or otherwise, locked up hundreds if not thousands of ring members, the Ringvereine were still active in Berlin two years after the great purge against them. According to The Prussian State Criminal Office. Police cases investigating rings kept popping up until 1938 and the beginning of the Second World War.
In December 1937, the Nazis, preparing for this war, introduced new swingeing police measures which had a disastrous impact on the Ringvereine movement, especially the March mass arrests of some 2,000 ex-convicts and alleged criminals and the December introduction of preventive police custody in concentration camps for suspected criminals.
Many ring members were imprisoned in concentration camps, carrying a green triangle on their prison clothing identifying them as “professional criminals.”
Police records and court summaries provide limited information from this period of German history, but scholars speculate that the Ringverein, an underground society, intentionally submerged itself even deeper to evade Nazi death squads, who were actively hunting down criminals of all types after assuming power in Germany.
Muscle Adolf came back to haunt the police of Berlin following the defeat of Hitler’s regime. Tracked by the Gestapo, he was arrested in January 1934 and disappeared, somewhere—prison, concentration camp. We don’t know. In June 1946, the police arrested him in a bar in north Berlin and charged him with illegal gambling. The police confiscated the sum of over 11,000 Reichsmark, about $18000 by today’s conversion, a staggering amount for the time. They sent him to trial, but nobody will testify against Muscle Adolf, and the police had to close the case…it seems like the omertà of the Ringvereine held fast even after the war.
A trial against the “Sparverein Südost” ring club and its chairman Gerhard Hirschfeld in 1957 was of particular interest to crime watchers, as it heralded the final nail in the coffin for Ringverein. A spectacular success for the West Berlin police, it signalled the end of the ring club era in Berlin. The public, greedy for a scandal, expected the best wingdig: witnesses and defendants put on a great performance with sometimes priceless interludes, for example, when a photo of Hirschfeld’s bare behind was presented under the criminal category “Do you recognize this man?”
Across the wall in East Berlin, their feared secret police, the Stasi did their bit to finish the job, removing all traces of the rings by the 1960s.
The significance of the Ringvereine as part of the social landscape of early twentieth century Germany lies in the myth surrounding them as much as their reality. Dismantling this kind of myth in the context of German organized crime is difficult because of the lack of surviving evidence to fully support conclusions. Archival material is rare and raises methodological problems because of the way crime and policing interrelated through the filing system records. It was believed Weimar Germany was undermined by the Ringvereine. But perhaps, this was more a product of Weimar angst and concerns in the early days of the 20th Century, and Nazi propaganda, before and after 1933. The Ringvereine characterized themselves as law-abiding citizens, striving for respectability while beavering away in the background doing their best to coin the market in lawlessness.
As Ringvereine clubs grew and expanded across Germany, including its biggest city, across the woods and forests of Berlin, another criminal entity was emerging and catching the attention of the authorities. They will become known as “wild guilds” or gangs, and would number in excess of 600, mostly young men, mostly gay, operating like a fairy story on acid created by Tim Burton.
But that’s another story, for another time.
The Nazi Party under Adolf Hitler (February 1920 to October 1945) was an organized crime phenomena that triggered the deaths of an estimated 17 million people who were murdered by the German Nazi regime and their collaborators between 1933 and 1945, according to data published by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, irrespective of the millions who dies as a result of World War Two.
Maybe they were the biggest and baddest Mafia of them all.
“In short: the Ringvereine regulated organised crime in Berlin and had divided the city into different precincts. The police did nothing since the underworld was easier to control if it regulated itself.”
Volker Kutscher, Babylon Berlin
Sources:
http://www.organized-crime.de/organizedcrimedefinitions.htm
Feraru, Peter, Muskel-Adolf & Co.:Die “Ringvereine” und das organisierte Verbrechen in
Berlin. Argon, 1995.
Martin Eberhardt: The Crime Police 1933-1939 Constance, October 19, 1999
Goeschel, Christian: The Criminal Underworld in Weimar and Nazi Berlin. History Workshop Journal, Issue 75. 21 January 2013.
Grabowsky, Dennis. Diamond Willi & Gold Tooth Bruno. Tagesspiegal, December 15, 2018.
Hobsbwam, Eric. Bandits. Penguin, 1985.
http://www.weimarberlin.com/2022/12
Ludersocke I Pornographie. Moral und Sexindustrie (wordpress.com)
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