Bernd Paul

Bernd Paul, born in 1958, is a senior German law enforcement official and former Chief of Police. Over the course of nearly five decades in service, he held leadership roles in criminal investigations, state security, intelligence, and police administration. After joining the Hesse State Police in 1974, Paul moved to the Hessian State Bureau of Criminal Investigation, where he worked in specialized divisions and later directed units for robbery, property, and economic crime in Frankfurt, Germany. He coordinated major investigations, including the recovery of stolen masterpieces from the Tate Gallery in London, the high-profile sixfold homicide on Frankfurt’s “Kettenhofweg”, and the nationwide crackdown on the so-called “toxic-waste mafia,” one of the largest police raids in postwar Germany. From 2001 on, Paul served as Department Head and Lecturer at the University of Applied Administrative Sciences in Giessen, Germany. In 2007, he moved to the Hessian Ministry of the Interior, working as a senior advisor on criminal police matters and serving as deputy to the State Police Inspector - the highest-ranking operational police officer in the state. In 2011, he was appointed Deputy Police Chief of the North Hesse Police Headquarters. In 2014, he served as Deputy Director of the Hessian domestic intelligence service—Germany’s state-level agency for counterintelligence and extremism—, where he directed counter-Islamism operations. Two years later, he returned to uniformed policing as Chief of Police for Central Hesse, a post he held until his retirement in 2023.