What Fascist Regimes Did to Homeless People

Berlin, winter 1933. Police sweep through a railway station, pulling men off benches and out of corners. Some are drifters, some just out of work, some veterans still sleeping rough more than a decade after the First World War. By the end of the night, dozens are in custody. The charge is vague: “asocial,” “work-shy,” “public nuisance.” Under the new Nazi government, that is enough to disappear.

Fascist regimes in Germany and Italy did not simply ignore homeless people. They treated visible poverty as both a political threat and an aesthetic stain. The result was a mix of welfare, coercion, and outright violence aimed at making the poor either invisible or dead.

Homeless people in fascist states were classified as “asocial” or “dangerous,” swept up by police, sent to camps or work colonies, sterilized, or forced into regimented labor schemes. The goal was not to solve poverty but to remove it from public view and from the national body.

Here are five patterns that explain what actually happened to the unhoused under Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, with concrete examples and why each one mattered.

1. Redefining homelessness as a crime against the nation

First, fascist regimes changed the language. Homelessness stopped being a social problem and became a moral and political offense. In Nazi Germany, people who did not fit into the ideal of the disciplined, productive “Volksgenosse” (national comrade) were labeled “Asoziale” (asocials). That category included the homeless, beggars, long-term unemployed, sex workers, alcoholics, and others who were seen as failing their duty to work and conform.

In 1937, Heinrich Himmler issued a directive targeting “professional criminals and asocials.” The police were told to identify “vagrants,” “work-shy” people, and those who “refuse to adapt to the community.” The language was deliberately vague. It allowed local police and Gestapo offices to treat visible poverty as a kind of treason against the racial and social order.

One concrete example is the 1938 “Aktion Arbeitsscheu Reich” (Operation Work-Shy Reich). In two waves, in April and June 1938, German police arrested more than 10,000 people classified as “work-shy” or “asocial.” Many were homeless or semi-homeless men who had been living in shelters, cheap lodging houses, or on the streets. They were sent without trial to concentration camps like Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen, where they wore black triangles as “asocials.”

Fascist Italy used different terms but a similar logic. The 1930 Italian Penal Code, known as the Codice Rocco, created the category of “pericolosità sociale” (social dangerousness). People considered “habitual vagabonds” or “professional beggars” could be subjected to “misure di sicurezza” (security measures) even if they had not committed a specific crime. That could mean forced residence, confinement in agricultural colonies, or police surveillance.

Redefining homelessness as “asocial” or “dangerous” mattered because it turned a visible symptom of economic and social failure into a police matter. Once poverty was framed as deviance, the state could use its harshest tools on people who had done nothing except be poor and visible.

2. Police sweeps, vagrancy laws, and making the poor disappear

With the legal and ideological groundwork laid, fascist regimes used police power to clear the streets. Vagrancy laws were tightened, and police were encouraged to conduct sweeps of train stations, parks, and city centers to remove beggars and rough sleepers.

In Nazi Germany, the 1933 “Law against Dangerous Habitual Criminals and Measures for Security and Improvement” expanded the use of preventive detention. Combined with municipal police regulations, this allowed local authorities to arrest “vagrants” and “beggars” in large numbers. Cities like Hamburg and Berlin organized regular “Bettlerrazzien” (beggar raids), especially before major public events or visits by Nazi leaders.

A concrete example comes from Cologne in the mid-1930s. Local police files show organized campaigns to “clean up” the city center by rounding up people sleeping in doorways or begging near churches and markets. Those arrested were sent to workhouses, prisons, or later to concentration camps, often on the vague charge of “asocial behavior.”

In Fascist Italy, the regime’s obsession with public order and decorum led to similar practices. The police and the paramilitary Milizia Volontaria per la Sicurezza Nazionale (MVSN, the Blackshirts) were used to clear beggars from central Rome, Milan, and other cities, especially before parades and public ceremonies. Under the 1931 Public Security Laws, “oziosi e vagabondi” (idlers and vagabonds) could be arrested and sent to “colonie agricole” (agricultural colonies) or forced residence in remote areas.

One example is the use of the island of Ustica, off Sicily, which before the war was used as a place of forced residence not only for political dissidents but also for people labeled socially dangerous, including some chronic vagrants. Being poor and out of place in the wrong city could get you shipped to an island or a rural colony hundreds of kilometers away.

These police sweeps mattered because they made homelessness less visible in fascist cities, creating the illusion of order and prosperity. They also normalized the idea that the state could remove unwanted people from public space without due process, a habit that would be applied with far deadlier force to Jews, Roma, and political opponents.

3. Workhouses, labor colonies, and forced “re-education”

Not everyone swept off the streets went straight to a concentration camp or prison. Both Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy used older institutions like workhouses and poorhouses, then reshaped them into tools of forced labor and discipline.

In Germany, there was a long tradition of “Arbeitshäuser” (workhouses) and “Fürsorgeerziehung” (welfare education) for the poor and “wayward.” The Nazis did not invent these, but they intensified and racialized their use. Homeless people, especially men, could be sent to workhouses where they were put to hard labor under strict discipline. Those who were judged “incorrigible” or “hereditarily inferior” were then passed on to concentration camps or sterilization programs.

A concrete example is the workhouse at Rummelsburg in Berlin. Before 1933, it functioned as a municipal institution for the poor, including the homeless and alcoholics. Under Nazi rule, Rummelsburg became a harsh detention center for “asocials.” Inmates were subjected to forced labor, beatings, and medical examinations aimed at identifying those to be sterilized under the 1933 Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring.

In Italy, the regime promoted “colonie agricole” and “case di lavoro” (labor houses) where “vagabonds” and “idlers” could be sent for “re-education” through work. These were often in rural areas, tying into Mussolini’s rhetoric about returning Italians to the land and away from the supposed corruption of the cities.

One example is the agricultural colony of Castelfranco Emilia, which housed people considered socially dangerous, including habitual beggars. They were put to work in agriculture under police supervision. The line between welfare and punishment was thin. Being homeless or jobless could land you in a place that looked like a farm but functioned like a prison.

These institutions mattered because they blurred the boundary between social assistance and coercion. They allowed fascist states to claim they were “helping” the poor through work, while in practice they were using forced labor and confinement to discipline and hide people who did not fit the ideal citizen mold.

4. Sterilization, “euthanasia,” and the idea of the “asocial” body

In Nazi Germany, the treatment of homeless and “asocial” people went further than policing and forced labor. It merged with racial hygiene policies. The regime’s eugenic ideology treated chronic poverty and homelessness as signs of hereditary inferiority. That justified sterilization and, in some cases, murder.

The 1933 Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring allowed for compulsory sterilization of people with conditions like schizophrenia, epilepsy, and “congenital feeble-mindedness.” In practice, social workers, doctors, and police often flagged “asocial” individuals, including some homeless people, as candidates for sterilization on the grounds that their behavior showed hereditary defects.

A concrete example is the use of the Hereditary Health Courts (Erbgesundheitsgerichte). Case files from cities like Hamburg and Düsseldorf show petitions for sterilization of men and women described as “vagabonds,” “habitual beggars,” or “asocial,” with references to stays in workhouses or poor relief institutions. Their poverty and homelessness were treated as medical evidence of unfitness to reproduce.

From 1939, the Nazi “euthanasia” program, known as Aktion T4, targeted people with disabilities in hospitals and care homes. While the primary victims were institutionalized psychiatric patients, the logic of the program extended to those labeled “ballast existences,” people whose lives were deemed unworthy of life. Some chronically ill or disabled homeless people who had been swept into institutions ended up in this killing program or in its later, more decentralized forms.

Fascist Italy did not build a mass sterilization or euthanasia program on the German scale. Italian eugenics was more cautious and often blocked by the Catholic Church. However, the idea that chronic poverty and vagrancy reflected biological inferiority circulated among Italian criminologists and social reformers. That thinking fed into harsh treatment and long-term confinement of “incorrigible” vagrants in asylums or colonies.

This fusion of social policy with eugenics mattered because it turned homeless people into biological threats. Once poverty was medicalized as hereditary defect, the state could justify permanent removal from society, whether through sterilization, life-long confinement, or murder.

5. War, camps, and the collapse of any pretense of welfare

With the outbreak of war, the already thin line between welfare and repression snapped, especially in Nazi Germany. The regime’s need for total control and labor, combined with bombing and displacement, created new waves of homelessness. The response was not compassion but more camps and more violence.

During the war, German cities were heavily bombed. Many people lost their homes. Those who had family or party connections could be rehoused. Those on the margins, including earlier “asocials,” Roma, and others, were more likely to be swept into the camp system. The category of “asocial” in concentration camps expanded to include people who had been homeless or itinerant for years.

A concrete example is the fate of Roma and Sinti communities, many of whom lived in caravans or informal settlements on the edges of German and Austrian cities. They were often labeled “asocial” and “work-shy” even before racial decrees targeted them explicitly. From 1938 onward, many were arrested in the same “asocial” roundups as homeless Germans, then later reclassified as racial enemies and sent to camps like Auschwitz-Birkenau, where they were held in the “Zigeunerlager” (Gypsy camp) and murdered.

In occupied territories, German authorities used similar methods. In cities like Warsaw or Prague, people sleeping rough or begging could be arrested as “asocial elements” and sent to forced labor or concentration camps. The war gave cover to clear streets not just for aesthetics but as part of a broader terror regime.

In Italy, after 1940 and especially after the German occupation of northern and central Italy in 1943, economic collapse and bombing increased homelessness. The Fascist welfare apparatus, already limited, largely broke down. Police repression remained, but the state’s capacity to run colonies or work schemes shrank. Many poor and homeless Italians survived through informal networks, black markets, and charity from the Church or local communities rather than the fascist state.

This wartime phase mattered because it showed the end point of fascist thinking about the poor. When resources tightened and violence escalated, any pretense of rehabilitation or welfare fell away. Homeless and marginal people were simply disposable, swept into the same machinery of camps and forced labor that targeted political and racial enemies.

Why this history still matters

Fascist regimes in Germany and Italy did not solve homelessness. They criminalized it, hid it, and, in some cases, killed the people who embodied it. They turned visible poverty into a moral failing, a police problem, and finally a biological threat.

The pattern is clear. First, redefine a social problem as deviance. Second, give police and bureaucrats wide discretion to “clean up” public space. Third, build institutions that mix welfare language with coercion. In Nazi Germany, that path ended in sterilization programs and concentration camps. In Fascist Italy, it meant forced residence, rural colonies, and long-term confinement.

When modern politicians talk about “rounding up” homeless people or “cleaning up” cities, they are not repeating Nazi or Fascist policies in full. But they are touching the same nerve: the idea that the poor are a problem to be removed rather than people in need of housing, healthcare, and income. The history of fascist treatment of the unhoused is a warning about how quickly aesthetic disgust and fear of disorder can slide into organized cruelty.