Sippenhaft

Sippenhaft or Sippenhaftung (English: "kin liability") refers to the principle of families sharing the responsibility for a crime committed by one of its members. It is a form of collective punishment. A relative of the perpetrator could thus be punished in place or in addition to the perpetrator, depending on the circumstances. This legal principle is derived from Germanic law in the middle ages. It has been practiced in some countries until the modern age as well as in communist East Germany and on a larger scale in Nazi Germany towards the end of the World War II. The term "Haft" does not necessarily imply a prison sentence, but can refer to any form of punishment. The same principle is also found in many non-western cultures, including in Japan until the mid 19th century.

Nazi Germany
Sippenhaft was a legalized practice in which relatives of persons accused of crimes against the state were held to share the responsibility for those crimes and subject to arrest and sometimes execution. Many people who had committed no crimes were arrested and punished under Sippenhaft laws introduced after the failed 20 July plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler in July 1944.

Examples of Sippenhaft being used as a threat exist within the Wehrmacht from around 1943. Soldiers accused of having 'blood impurities' or soldiers conscripted from areas outside of Germany also began to have their families threatened and punished with Sippenhaft. An example is the case of Panzergrenadier Leiss, who was accused of desertion on the Eastern Front in December 1942. After the Düsseldorf Gestapo discovered supposed 'Polish' links in the Leiss family, in February 1943 his wife, child, two brothers, sister and brother-in-law were arrested and executed at Sachsenhausen concentration camp. By 1944, several general and individual directives were ordered within divisions and corps, threatening troops with consequences against their family. After 20 July 1944 these threats were extended to include all German troops and in particular, German commanders. A decree of February 1945 threatened death to the relatives of military commanders who showed what Hitler regarded as cowardice or defeatism in the face of the enemy. After surrendering Königsberg to the Soviets in April 1945, the family of the German commander General Otto Lasch were arrested. These arrests were publicized in the Völkischer Beobachter.

After the failure of the 20 July plot, the SS chief Heinrich Himmler told a meeting of Gauleiters in Posen that he would "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 is 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 members of the family of Stauffenberg (the one who had planted the bomb that 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 Wehrmacht 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.

After the 20 July 1944 as well, numerous families, such as von Seydlitz and Paulus, connected to the Soviet sponsored League of German Officers group made up of German prisoners of war were also arrested. Unlike a number of the 20 July conspirators families, those arrested for connection to the League were not released after a few months but remained in prison until the end of the war. Younger children of arrested plotters were not jailed but sent to orphanages under new names: Stauffenberg's children were renamed "Meister."

Other totalitarian regimes have used similar practices even if they did not codify them in law. During Joseph Stalin's 1930s Great Purge, 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, the wife of Nikolai Bukharin. Red Army soldiers, particularly before brutal battles such as the one at Stalingrad, were told that relatives of soldiers who surrendered would be killed. Similar practices took place in the People's Republic of China during the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s. A prominent example is Deng Pufang, the son of Deng Xiaoping.