Spartan Helotage Transformed Sparta Into a Police State
To maintain its system of mass slavery, Sparta became a police state – history’s first – and established a secret police force known as the Krypteia. It was comprised of Sparta’s brightest young men who showed the most promise. Their key function was to spy on the Helots, and kill any who seemed restive, showed leadership potential, or seemed more prosperous than the rest. To enable them to commit murder without the religious pollution attendant upon such an act, Sparta’s leaders, the ephors, formally declared war on the Helot population every autumn.
Armed with that religious dispensation, the Krypteia fanned out among the Helots, and subjected them to a reign of terror and murder. Millennia later, the Nazis looked to the Spartan treatment of Helots when they concocted their plans for lebensraum. Like the Spartans, the Nazis hoped to conquer their neighbors – in their case, the neighbors in Eastern Europe and Russia. They planned to then exterminate most of the native Slav population, and institute a system of mass state-owned slavery. The Slavs who survived would be reduced to modern Helots, and serve the German ‘Master Race’ like the Messenians had served the Spartans.