By the end of January 1940, Franz Gürtner, the Minister of Justice, counted eighteen extrajudicial executions by the Gestapo since the war began and complained that the civil courts were being bypassed. In fact, this relatively small number of interventions often stemmed directly from Hitler’s reading of the sensationalist crime reporting in the Völkischer Beobachter. In October 1939, he was outraged to learn about a petty thief in Munich who had been sentenced to ten years in prison for stealing a woman’s purse during the evening blackout. Even though the purse only contained a few marks and
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