Background
Werner Best was born on 10 July 1903 in Darmstadt, Germany.
Werner Best was born on 10 July 1903 in Darmstadt, Germany.
His parents moved to Dortmund in 1912 and then to Mainz, where Werner Best completed his education.
From 1921 to 1925 he studied law at Frankfurt am Main, Freiburg, Giessen and Heidelberg, here he received his doctorate in 1927.
During 1921-1927 he was strongly influenced by the German youth movement with its return to nature, its Germanic myths and völkisch world-view. He was twice imprisoned between the end of 1923 and the spring of 1924 by the French authorities during the nationalist struggle in the Ruhr region. In 1929 he was appointed Gerichtsassessor (judge) in the Hessian Department of Justice, but was forced to resign from his position two years later when the so-called Boxheim documents were found in his possession. (The name came from the Boxheim estate near Worms, where groups of National Socialists had held meetings to discuss a plan for seizing power after a hypothetical communist revolution.) The documents, which bore Best's signature and contained a blueprint for a Nazi putsch and the subsequent execution of political opponents, embarrassed Hitler at a time when he was seeking power by legal means. Nevertheless, Best was made Police Commissioner in Hessen in March 1933 and by July of the same year he was appointed Governor.
Best advanced rapidly in the next six years, becoming the deputy of Heydrich and Himmler, chief legal adviser to the Gestapo (helping it to get rid of ‘relics’ from the old Weimar legal system and demonstrating how to operate by means of orders for preventive arrests without judicial checks), as well as holding the position of Chief of the Bureau of the Secret State Police at the Reich Ministry of the Interior.
The role of the political police was to fight all symptoms of ‘disease' in the national organism, ‘to discover the enemies of the State, to watch them and render them harmless at the right moment'. As a leading constitutional theoretician and Nazi jurist in the Third Reich, Best did a great deal to give respectability and legitimacy to the political police and the concentration camps. As long as the Gestapo was carrying out the will of the leadership it was, in his view, ‘acting legally'.
By 1935 Best was already a Standartenführer - during World War II he was promoted to SS-Obergruppenführer - and the closest collaborator of Heydrich in building up the Gestapo and the Security Services (SD). Between 27 September 1939 and 12 June 1940 Best was Chief of Section I of the RSHA (Reich Main Security Office) and it was in this capacity that he was charged twenty-five years after the war with complicity in the murder of thousands of Jews and Polish intellectuals in occupied Poland. After leaving the RSHA, Best served for the next two years as Chief of the Civil Administration in occupied France, involved in fighting the French Resistance and in the deportation of Jews. The climax of his career came in Denmark, where he was Reich Plenipotentiary from November 1942 to 1945. In spite of his record as a ‘desk murderer', there is evidence that in Denmark Best sought to sabotage Himmler's orders concerning the implementation of the ‘Final Solution'. Only 477 out of more than 7,000 Danish Jews were finally rounded up by German troops who were forbidden by Best to break into Jewish apartments.
Best was originally sentenced to death by a Danish court in 1948 following his extradition, but his sentence was commuted to five years and he was granted a clemency release in August 1951. He returned to West Germany, working for a time in a solicitor's office and then as a lawyer for Stinnes Co., one of the largest German trading concerns. In 1958 he was fined 70,000 marks by a Berlin de-Nazification court for his past activities as a top SS officer. In March 1969 he was held in detention for new investigations concerning responsibility for mass murder, finally charged in February 1972 and released in August of the same year on medical grounds, though the accusations were not withdrawn. One of the most illustrious figures of the Third Reich, the author of a famous book on the police. Die Deutsche Polizei (1941), a free-floating intellectual with a blurred sense of morality, who devoted his legal talents to the service of a power-mad clique of criminals, Best's role remains ambiguous, at least in relation to his Danish period. A combination of personal ambition, opportunist careerism and ideological inclinations drove him to the apex of the Nazi system where he helped ensure the smooth functioning of a system of terror. Yet at the end of his National Socialist career it would appear that he belatedly began to revert to that respect for law which he had done so much to destroy from within at an earlier period.
Was characterized as an ambitious, cool, amoral technician of power, who used his academic and legal skills to justify the totalitarian practice of the Nationalist Socialist Führer State ‘which corresponds to the ideological principle of the organically indivisible national community'.
His father, a senior postmaster, had fallen in France at the outset of the war in 1914.