LEARNING WITH HISTORY? HUMAN RIGHTS EDUCATION WORK WITH POLICE OFFICERS IN GERMANY

A functioning memorial site since 1999, Villa ten Hompel, the home of a former industrialist from the 1920s, can be found at the edge of Munster city centre in the northwest Germany. In 1940 the National Socialist police, headed by the SS-chief Heinrich Himmler, bought the Villa ten Hompel to use as one of their control centres. Until 1944 it was the headquarters of the uniformed police in the military district VI. Up to 60 policemen (and a few policewomen) and civilian staff members co-ordinated the operation of uniformed police within a single geographical district known as a "Wehrkreis", which comprised of large parts of western and northern Germany, including the cities of Cologne, Dusseldorf, Essen, Dortmund and Munster. No fewer than 200,000 police officers and auxiliary police officers served in this Wehrkreis in the 1940s. The Villa ten Hompel turned into a location for desk-bound perpetrators. Their bureaucratic actions had consequences for the whole of Europe, in part with murderous results. In examining this site of commemoration, this article analyses how human rights education for German police officers has come to embrace the topic of police actions during the Nazi epoch.