Kripo Fact Sheet

Criminal investigation under Nazi rule

The Kriminalpolizei, commonly called the Kripo, was Nazi Germany’s criminal-investigation police. Its detectives investigated offenses such as theft, homicide, fraud, and narcotics, while Nazi doctrine and police powers redirected the institution into racial classification, preventive detention, persecution, forced-labor control, occupation security, and mass murder. This fact sheet examines those connected histories without presenting the Kripo as a politically neutral detective service.

Across 39 pages, the book traces the Kripo from its state and municipal origins through national centralization, its place in the Security Police, and its integration as Amt V of the Reich Security Main Office. It covers leadership, authority, organization, personnel, recruitment, training, institutional relationships, conventional investigation, forensic work, persecution, wartime deployment, dissolution, and postwar accountability. The text distinguishes the Kripo from the Gestapo, SD, Order Police, and other institutions even where their work overlapped.

Built for careful OSINT-6 campaigns

The game material translates documented roles into eight occupational packages, including criminal investigators, identification and records officials, forensic specialists, preventive-policing officials, persecution administrators, occupied-territory investigators, and records staff. Each package defines limited skill, qualification, contact, and equipment benefits within a dated assignment. None grants universal authority, automatic access, or a mechanical reward for persecution or mass violence.

An equipment chapter separates publicly documented items from period-plausible and assignment-specific claims, then tracks custody and provenance. Assignment records tie each character to a date, territory, office, supervisor, case, authority, evidence access, and complicity record, giving Game Masters concrete boundaries for historical play.

Inside the fact sheet

• A dated institutional history from the pre-Nazi police organizations through 1945 and postwar accountability.

• Coverage of leadership, jurisdiction, personnel, training, institutional relationships, and operational roles.

• An account of conventional criminal investigation alongside preventive detention, racial persecution, forced labor, occupation security, and mass murder.

• Eight historically bounded occupational packages for OSINT-6 characters.

• Equipment verification categories, custody rules, and role-based assignment packages.

• Research references, rules cross-references, and an index for further investigation.

Historical play requires care

This supplement keeps the Kripo’s ordinary investigative work in view alongside its role in Nazi persecution and mass murder. Its guidance asks groups to agree on portrayal limits and preserve the perspective and agency of victims, survivors, witnesses, resisters, archivists, and prosecutors. A campaign can examine complicity, bureaucracy, concealment, rescue, investigation, or accountability without treating persecution as colorful occupational background.

For Game Masters and readers who want a sourced historical foundation for an OSINT-6 campaign, this fact sheet pairs gameable material with explicit limits and historical context. The OSINT-6 Core Rulebook supplies the rules referenced here.