ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at police efforts to monitor and collect the personal data of Gypsies, including the targeted use of fingerprinting, which became central to policy in the years before the First World War. Given the difficulties police faced in ascertaining individual identity, it is not surprising that some officials sought certainty through the acquisition of biometric data. The eventual adoption of fingerprinting by Bavarian police was also closely connected to the emergence of the Gypsy Information Service. In the war years police intensified their efforts to capture the biometric data of Zigeuner, conducting fingerprinting exercises in several cities including Leipzig, Berlin and Hamburg. The importance that the police involved attached to fingerprinting, and a clear admission that the collection of data was about exacting punitive control, can be seen from comments made in 1925 and 1927 by Karl Merz, head of Criminal Investigation and Registry in Munich from May 1920.
