Conclusion: Germany’s Police: A Model for Democratic Policing?

Summary

THIS BOOK BEGAN as a project to explore Germany's democratization through an analysis of the Bundesgrenzschutz, a militarized border guard that over time evolved into Germany's modern national police force. Over the course of researching, writing, and revising the final draft, many of the historical issues it raised about the Federal Republic's law enforcement institutions re-emerged as topics of current events. In the United States, journalists often invoked Germany's police as an ideal model for de-militarizing and reforming America's police departments, citing stark differences in the levels of police violence between the two countries. Yet propping up Germany's police as a model for law enforce-ment without also recognizing its own problematic legacies forms another layer of the success narrative this book set out to question. In the after-math of George Floyd's brutal murder by Minneapolis police officers, for example, the New York Times published an article citing Germany as a country that got policing right and learned from its mistakes. According to the article's subtitle: “In the postwar era, Germany fundamentally rede-signed law enforcement to prevent past atrocities from ever repeating. Its approach may hold lessons for police reform everywhere.” For support, the article claimed that in postwar Germany “the privacy of citizens was rigorously protected, and the police and military were strictly separated,” neither of which is really true.

As my analysis of the BGS has shown, the Federal Republic struggled, and still does, with the question of how to tame its coercive forces of legitimate violence. As the government tried to weigh how to keep citizens safe without eroding the rule of law in the process, it faced some of the same challenges and considered similar authoritarian responses that corrupted its police institution in 1933. During its response to domestic terrorism in the 1970s, for example, border police officers recorded the personal data of unsuspecting individuals and transmitted it to the Federal Republic's intelligence agencies. Moreover, the BGS established a top-secret telecommunications unit, Group-F, which clandestinely monitored West German citizens without their knowledge or consent, and concealed its existence and activities from parliament for almost forty years. The true scope of its surveillance operations is still largely unknown, because its records remain classified.