Everything about Sippenhaft totally explained
Sippenhaft or
Sippenhaftung (English: "kin liability") was a legal practice in
Nazi Germany whereby relatives of those accused of crimes against the state were held to be equally responsible and were arrested and sometimes executed. Many people who hadn't committed any crimes were arrested and punished under
Sippenhaft laws introduced following the failed
July 20 plot to assassinate
Adolf Hitler in July 1944. A law of February 1945 also threatened death to the relatives of military commanders who showed what Hitler regarded as cowardice or defeatism in the face of the enemy.
After the failure of the July 20 plot, the
SS chief
Heinrich Himmler told a meeting of
Gauleiters in
Posen that he'd "introduce absolute responsibility of kin... a very old custom practiced among our forefathers." According to Himmler, this practice had existed among the ancient
Teutons. "When they placed a family under the ban and declared it outlawed or when there was a blood feud in the family, they were utterly consistent... This man has committed treason; his blood is bad; there's traitor's blood in him; that must be wiped out. And in the blood feud the entire clan was wiped out down to the last member. And so, too, will
Count Stauffenberg's family be wiped out down to the last member."
Accordingly, the family of Stauffenberg (who had planted the bomb which failed to kill Hitler) were all under suspicion. His wife,
Nina Schenk Gräfin von Stauffenberg, was sent to
Ravensbrück concentration camp (she survived and lived until 2006). His brother Alexander, who knew nothing of the plot and was serving with the German Army in
Greece, was also sent to a concentration camp. Similar punishments were meted out to the relatives of
Carl Goerdeler,
Henning von Tresckow,
Adam von Trott zu Solz and many other conspirators. The fact that most of these families belonged to the old Prussian aristocracy, a class detested by the Nazis, added to the zeal with which they were persecuted. Younger children of arrested plotters were not jailed but instead sent to orphanages under new names: Stauffenberg's children were renamed "Meister."
It should be noted that other
totalitarian regimes have used similar practices, even if they've not codified them in law. During
Joseph Stalin's
Great Purge of the 1930s many thousands of people were arrested and executed or sent to labour camps as "relatives of the enemies of the people." One well-known example was
Anna Larina, wife of
Nikolai Bukharin. Similar practices took place in the
People's Republic of China during the
Cultural Revolution of the 1960s. A prominent example is
Deng Pufang, son of
Deng Xiaoping. They also take place currently in
North Korea.
Further Information
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