Why Police Records Matter
Historians and the Anarchist Movement
In the last few months, however, dangerous competition has arisen in the well-known Hasselmann, who, after years of seclusion, has resumed his participation in anarchist agitation and, within a short time, has gathered around him a large number of Most's former followers as well as members of the other anarchist clubs existing in New York.1
This bit of intelligence on two leading German-American anarchists (more on Most in upcoming posts) was penned by a German police spy operating in New York in July 1886. Another police agent in London infiltrated the circle around the revolutionary Freiheit newspaper and even managed to supply copies of letters written by the editor. Agents also obtained newspaper clippings or entire issues of radical papers. After these materials arrived in Berlin, summary reports were composed to brief the appropriate authorities. Hundreds of these records brimming with invaluable information on the socialist and anarchist movements now sit neatly in rows of archival boxes at Berlin’s Landesarchiv.
When law enforcement gathers information it is usually with the intent of uncovering a crime and possibly charging a suspect. But what, you ask, is illegal about Hasselmann poaching anarchist followers from John Most during the summer of 1886? Nothing. The reports bound for Berlin are part of a surveillance operation in a world where thousands of German workers and artisans emigrated to different continents. The vast majority of these migrants were not radicals, but the German state believed that detailed knowledge of the organized radicals among them was indispensable. To be clear, we are talking about surveillance and intelligence by the “political police,” a branch of law enforcement quite common in European states of the 19th century. The point was not always to prosecute, although if they had to they would, but rather to monitor and record, and thus anticipate potential harmful actions. This kind of data mining was for the most part geared toward internal analysis. The intention was to piece together as accurate a picture as possible of a dispersed, decentralized enemy, and it is precisely this objective that makes police records worthwhile for the historian. Not that such records are impeccable or without bias; they are not; unintended factual errors and misinterpretations regarding anarchist philosophy are not uncommon. Also, many police services targeted “famous” anarchists while downplaying local grassroots groups. Still, the historian can venture beyond the anarchists’ own records and venture into the vaults of state security.
A casual glance at the history of policing radicals reveals that not all spy services were created equal, and perhaps more significantly, that cooperation between nations was pretty lousy. Nineteenth-century Europe was miles removed from the current union of liberal, social democracies; instead, the continent was a fractious collection of rather undemocratic nations, heavily armed and mutually suspicious, precariously balanced by the machinations of the “Great Powers.” Intergovernmental cooperation was slow and ineffective. If two police services wanted to talk to each other, it was usually through mid-level administrators, say a Parisian and Belgian police commissioner, rather than via treaties or official government channels. As you may have guessed, the German political police were one of the best organized. It was the Germans who helped the Czar in Russia set up Okhrana’s infamous Third Section as a surveillance unit against domestic revolutionary elements. The Swiss secret police were often bullied by Berlin for not doing enough about the large exile community of radicals. The French built a sophisticated political police service but suffered from bureaucratic gridlock. Britain, the most democratic of the European nations, put Scotland Yard in the field against radical threats, but they proved hostile to foreign requests (usually from Berlin) to share intelligence on radicals in London. And what about the United States? No central police agency existed until the creation of the Bureau of Investigation in 1908 under Attorney General Charles Bonaparte (grandnephew of Emperor Napoleon). Before that time, any probing of anarchists was done by municipal police detectives mostly in New York and Chicago, or by private firms such as the notorious Pinkerton Detective Agency. Some cooperation was attempted between German police agents and diplomats on the one hand and the Pinkertons. It didn’t go well. After vetting reports received from Pinkerton agents, Berlin officials discovered that the Americans simply copied wildly exaggerated reports about the strength of anarchists printed in mainstream newspapers.2
So what data can be mined from these records by modern-day historians? Police records shed light on the extent and quality of contact between anarchists in different countries. They often contain unique information, for example, the 4,139 photographs stored within the German police records for 1884.3 Historians can find clippings or sometimes whole issues of obscure anarchist newspapers: the German police files contain clippings from 178 newspapers in 9 languages from 10 countries.4 The Paris police (Series B) collected clippings from papers never listed in standard guides allowing historians to find special issues that only appeared once!5 Undercover police agents frequently attended anarchist meetings and sometimes transcribed entire speeches with attendance estimates and reactions from the audience jotted in the margin.
Historians must maintain a healthy skepticism when assessing these records. It is crucial to find out why records were kept, what was the intention, and who was the intended audience. There is a reasonable incentive for accuracy when agents are collecting information for the express purpose of monitoring the movement. However, this can change when a government finds it expedient to release unsettling information to the public to manipulate public opinion. Likewise, some agents have been known to leave the service and monetize their experience by publishing sensational, self-aggrandizing accounts.
Dieter Fricke & Rudolf Knaack, eds., Dokumente aus geheimen Archiven. Übersichten der Berliner politischen Polizei über die allgemeine Lage der sozialdemokratischen und anarchistischen Bewegung 1878-1913. Band 1: 1878-1889 (Weimar, 1983), p. 317.
Dirk Hoerder, Plutokraten und Sozialisten: Berichte deutscher Diplomaten und Agenten über die amerikanische Arbeiterbewegung 1878-1917 / Plutocrats and socialists: Reports by German diplomats and agents on the American labor movement 1878-1917 (München, New York ; London ; Paris: Saur, 1981), p. 381.
Hoerder, Plutokraten und Sozialisten, p. xxxiii.
Hoerder, Plutokraten und Sozialisten, p. 375.
Marvin L. Brown Jr., "Les Archives de la Prefecture de Police,” French Historical Studies, Vol. 4, No. 4 (Autumn, 1966), pp. 463-467.