[4] The arrest and deportation of "asocial individuals" goes back to the "basic decree on crime prevention by the police" issued by the Ministry of the Interior on 14 December 1937.
The order called for a preventive detention of those deemed professional or habitual criminals, and later was extended to any who might "endanger society with asocial behavior.
An implementing directive of the Reich Criminal code in April 1938 defined "asocial" as any person who showed continual misconduct or repeated violations of the law, who did not fit into the community and submit to the "self-evident order" the Nazi state desired.
[9] The focus of security police activity to combat political enemies had shifted to the rejection of "anti-social" behavior, which tended to be socially harmful conduct supposedly due to hereditary predisposition.
[15] Heydrich justified the action in a quick letter to the criminal police control centers, stating anti-social behaviour would not be tolerated beyond the ability to work, so as to have no set backs to the Four Year infrastructure plan.
[16][17] Wolfgang Ayass suggests that workers were often not chosen based on the alleged dangerousness of the individual or his "asocial" behaviour, but his work ability was often the decisive arrest criterion.
In many concentration camps, these men were marked with a black inmate insignia and formed groups of "asocial" workers until the outbreak of the larger war.
Martin Broszat noted that at this time the SS began increasing material production for its armaments and buildings and in concentration camps, larger prisoner quotas were needed.
[22] Christian Faludi noted a connection between Joseph Goebbels and Wolf-Heinrich Graf von Helldorf in staging "anti-Semitic street riots" in Berlin and advancing the goal of a "totally centralized state solution” by the intelligence apparatus of Reinhard Heydrich and Heinrich Himmler.
[23] Wolfgang Ayass believed numbers in the "work-shy Empire" deteriorated, considering that they were mostly freed in 1939 in the amnesty on occasion of Hitler's fiftieth birthday.