Police training institution
Deutsche Hochschule der Polizei
A specialised state university for serving police officers from across Germany, whose central task is a two-year master’s degree taken mid-career rather than any entry training.
At a glance
- Official name
- Deutsche Hochschule der Polizei (DHPol)
- Commonly rendered in English as
- German Police University — a rendering in common use, not necessarily the institution’s own name.
- System
- Germany
- Who runs it
- Borne jointly by the interior ministries and interior senators of the federation and the Länder.
- Does it recruit officers?
- Not a recruiting authority
This institution trains. It does not decide who joins a police service. Applications to join are made to the service, not to the school.
- Does it award degrees?
- States that it awards degrees
The institution describes its own degree-awarding status. That establishes nothing about how any qualification is recognised in another country.
- Official website
- https://www.dhpol.de/ — confirmed against the institution’s own pages on 17 September 2026.
- Facts last checked against sources
- 17 September 2026
What it is
The DHPol describes itself as a universitäre Spezialhochschule borne by the interior ministries and interior senators of the federation and the Länder, and states that its inclusion in North Rhine-Westphalian higher education law in December 2016 made its status as a state university precise in higher-education law. Its central task is an accredited two-year master’s degree, “Öffentliche Verwaltung – Polizeimanagement”, whose students are serving police officers from across the federal territory. It is the clearest case in this family of an institution that is unmistakably a university and equally unmistakably not a police academy: nobody enters policing through it.
What kind of training it provides
Taken from the institution’s own account of what it does. A body can carry out several of these, and most do.
- Leadership training — teaching aimed at command and senior roles
- Academic education — teaching towards an academic qualification
- Research — published by the institution as one of its own functions
Who decides admission
Its students are serving police officers; the master’s degree is a route to senior service rather than a route into policing.
Where to go next
- Does police training lead to a degree? — the comparative question across systems, which this page deliberately does not answer on its own.
- Official police recruitment destinations — where each system publishes its own joining information. That is where an application goes, not here.
- Police organisations — the named forces themselves, which are separate bodies from the institutions that train them.
Sources
Die Hochschule — Deutsche Hochschule der Polizei
Deutsche Hochschule der Polizei · Government publication · link verified 2026-09-17
SCOPE: the Deutsche Hochschule der Polizei only. The institution's own page in German, read directly. Supports the official name, the abbreviation DHPol, its self-description as a 'universitäre Spezialhochschule' borne by the interior ministries and interior senators of the federation and the Länder, its inclusion in North Rhine-Westphalian higher education law in December 2016 as the precise basis of its status as a state university, and its central task of running an accredited two-year master's degree, 'Öffentliche Verwaltung – Polizeimanagement', whose students are serving police officers from across the federal territory. Establishes nothing about entry-level police training in any German Land.