Encyclopedia
The
Gestapo was the official secret police of
Nazi Germany. Under the overall administration of the
SS, it was administered by the
RSHA and was considered a dual organization of the
Sicherheitsdienst was the intelligence service [i] of the SS [i]. ...
and also a suboffice of the
Sicherheitspolizei.
History
The Gestapo was established on April 26, 1933 in
Prussia, from the existing organization of the Prussian Secret Police. The Gestapo was first simply a branch of the Prussian Police, known as "Department 1A of the Prussian State Police".
Its first commander was Rudolf Diels who recruited members from professional
police departments and ran the Gestapo as a federal police agency, comparable to several modern examples such as the
Federal Bureau of Investigation in the USA. The Gestapo's role as a political police force was only established after
Hermann Göring was appointed to succeed Diels as the Gestapo Commander, in 1934. It was Göring who invented the term "Gestapo" , which came from the suggestion of an obscure postal employee who suggested it be called the "Geheime Staatspolizei;" or "Secret State Police." Whence, GESTAPO. Göring urged the Nazi government to expand Gestapo power out of Prussia to encompass all of Germany. To this, Göring was mostly successful except in
Bavaria, where
Heinrich Himmler , served as the Bavarian Police President and used local SS units as a political police force.
In April of 1934, Göring and Himmler agreed to put aside all differences and Göring handed over full command of the Gestapo to the authority of the SS. At that point, the Gestapo was combined into the
Sicherheitspolizei and considered a sister organization to the
Sicherheitsdienst was the intelligence service [i] of the SS [i]. ...
or SD.
The role of the Gestapo was to investigate and combat "all tendencies dangerous to the State." It had the authority to investigate treason, espionage and
sabotage cases, and cases of criminal attacks on the
Nazi Party and on
Germany.
The law had been changed in such a way that the Gestapo's actions were not subject to judicial review. Nazi jurist Dr.
Werner Best stated, "As long as the [Gestapo] ... carries out the will of the leadership, it is acting legally." The Gestapo was specifically exempted from responsibility to administrative courts, where citizens normally could sue the state to conform to laws.
The power of the Gestapo most open to misuse was "Schutzhaft" or "protective custody" — a euphemism for the power to imprison people without judicial proceedings, typically in
concentration camps. The person imprisoned even had to sign his or her own
Schutzhaftbefehl, the document declaring that the person desired to be imprisoned. Normally this signature was forced by beatings and
torture.
Increasing power under the SS
Laws passed in 1936 effectively gave the Gestapo
carte blanche to operate without judicial oversight. A further law passed in the same year declared the Gestapo to be responsible for the set-up and administration of
concentration camps. Also in 1936,
Reinhard Heydrich became head of the Gestapo and Heinrich Müller chief of operations .
Adolf Eichmann was Müller's direct subordinate and head of department IV, section B4, which dealt with
Jews.
During
World War II, the Gestapo was expanded to around 45,000 members.
Keeping Hitler in power
By February and March 1942, student protests were calling for an end to the Nazi regime. These protests included non-violent resistance of
Hans and
Sophie Scholl, two of the leaders of the
White Rose student group. Despite the significant popular support for the removal of Hitler, resistance groups and those who were in moral or political opposition to the Nazis were stalled into inaction by the fear of reprisals from the Gestapo. In fact, reprisals did come in response to the protests. Fearful of an internal overthrow, the forces of Himmler and the Gestapo were unleashed on the opposition. The first five months of 1943 witnessed thousands of arrests and executions as the Gestapo exercised a severity hitherto unseen by the German public. Student leaders were executed in late February, and a major opposition organization, the Oster Circle, was destroyed in April 1943.
The German opposition was in an unenviable position by the late spring and early summer of 1943. On one hand, it was next to impossible for them to overthrow Hitler and the party. On the other hand, because of the Allied demand of unconditional surrender, and therefore no opportunity for a compromise peace, there seemed to be no other option than continuing the military struggle.
Opposition from within Germany
Despite fear of the Gestapo, some German people did speak out and show signs of protest during the summer of 1943. Despite the mass arrests and executions of the spring, the opposition still plotted and planned. Some Germans were convinced that it was their duty to apply all possible expedients to end the war as quickly as possible, that is, to further the German defeat by all available means.
The fall of
Benito Mussolini gave the opposition plotters more hope to be able to achieve similar results in Germany and seemed to provide a propitious moment to assassinate Hitler and overthrow the Nazi regime. Several Hitler assassination plots were planned, albeit mostly in abject terms. The only serious attempt was carried out under the codename
Operation Valkyrie, in which several of Hitler's generals attempted a
coup d'état. On July 20 1944, Colonel
Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg brought a bomb-laden suitcase into a briefing room where Hitler was holding a meeting. The bomb went off and several were killed. Hitler, along with several others, was wounded, but his life was saved by the conference table, which absorbed the blast. 7,000 people were arrested and 5,000, including von Stauffenberg, were executed in connection with the coup, some within twenty-four hours.
During June, July, and August, Himmler's forces continued to move swiftly against the opposition, rendering any organized opposition impossible. Arrests and executions were common. Terror against the people had become a way of life. A second major reason was that the opposition's peace feelers to the western Allies did not meet with success.
This was in part due to the aftermath of the Venlo incident of 1939, when Gestapo agents posing as anti-Nazis in the
Netherlands kidnapped two British
Secret Intelligence Service officers lured to a meeting to discuss peace terms. That prompted
Winston Churchill to ban any further contact with the German opposition. In addition, the British and Americans did not want to deal with anti-Nazis because they were fearful that the
Soviet Union would believe they were attempting to make deals behind their backs.
Nuremberg Trials
Between 14 November, 1945, and 1 October, 1946, the allies also established an
International Military Tribunal to try 24 major Nazi war criminals and six groups. They were to be tried for crimes against peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity.
Leaders, organizers, instigators, and accomplices participating in the formulation or execution of a common plan or conspiracy to commit the crimes so specified were declared responsible for all acts performed by any persons in execution of such plan. The official positions of defendants as heads of state or holders of high government offices were not to free them from responsibility or mitigate their punishment; nor was the fact that a defendant acted pursuant to an order of a superior to excuse him from responsibility, although it might be considered by the IMT in mitigation of punishment.
At the trial of any individual member of any group or organization, the IMT was authorized to declare that the group or organization to which he belonged was a criminal organization. And where a group or organization was so declared criminal, the competent national authority of any signatory was given the right to bring individuals to trial for membership in that organization, in which trial the criminal nature of the group or organization was to be taken as proved.
These groups, the Nazi leadership corps, the Reich Cabinet, the
German General Staff and High Command, the
SA , the
SS , and the Gestapo , had an aggregate membership exceeding two million, and it was estimated that approximately half of them would be made liable for trial if the groups were convicted.
The trials began in November 1945, and on October 1, 1946, the IMT rendered its judgment on 21 top officials of the Third Reich. The IMT sentenced most of the accused to death or to extensive prison terms and acquitted three. The IMT also convicted three of the groups: the Nazi leadership corps, the SS , and the Gestapo. Gestapo members
Hermann Göring and
Arthur Seyss-Inquart were individually convicted by the IMT.
Three groups were acquitted of collective war crimes charges, but this did not relieve individual members of those groups from conviction and punishment under the Denazification program. Members of the three convicted groups were subject to apprehension and trial as war criminals by the national, military, and occupation courts of the four allied powers. And, even though individual members of the convicted groups might be acquitted of war crimes, they still remained subject to trial under the Denazification programme.
Today
After the
Nuremberg Trials, the Gestapo ceased to exist.
In 1997,
Cologne, Germany transformed the former regional Gestapo headquarters in that city, the
EL-DE Haus, into a museum to document the organization's past actions. Although the museum's purpose is historical and educational, it is sometimes considered vulgar and offensive, especially by those who were psychologically traumatized,
tortured, or otherwise hurt by the Gestapo.
Mention of the word "Gestapo", even when using the word as a reference to any sort of unrestricted
police, is widely considered to be improper or insulting. In various countries of
Central and
Eastern Europe, the term is used to denote in a derogatory manner all police forces, but particularly the communist-era
riot police, such as
ZOMO.
Organization
When the Gestapo was founded, the organization was already a well-established bureaucratic mechanism, having been created out of the already existing Prussian Secret Police. In 1934, the Gestapo was transferred from the Prussian Interior Ministry to the authority of the
SS, and for the next five years the Gestapo underwent a massive expansion.
In 1939, the entire Gestapo was placed under the authority of the
RSHA, a main office of the SS. Within the RSHA, the Gestapo was known as "Amt IV". The internal organization of the group was as follows:
Referat N: Central Intelligence Office
The Central Command Office of the Gestapo, formed in 1941. Before 1939, the Gestapo command was under the authority of the office of the
Sicherheitspolizei und SD, to which answered the Commanding General of the Gestapo. Between 1939 and 1941, the Gestapo was run directly through the overall command of the
Reichsicherheitshauptamt .
Department A
- Communists
- Countersabotage
- Reactionaries and Liberals
- Assassinations
Department B
- Catholics
- Protestants
- Freemasons
- Jews
- Coloured People
Department C
The central administrative office of the Gestapo, responsible for card files of all personnel.
Department D
- Opponents of the Regime
- Churches and Sects
- Records and Party Matters
- Western Territories
- Counter-espionage
Department E
- In the Reich
- Policy Formation
- In the West
- In Scandinavia
- In the East
- In the South
Local Offices
The local offices of the Gestapo were known as
Gestapostellen and
Gestapoleitstellen. These offices answered to a local commander known as the
Inspektor der Sicherheitspolizei und SD who, in turn, was under the dual command of
Referat N of the Gestapo and also local
SS and Police Leaders. The classic image of the Gestapo officer, dressed in
trench coat and
hat, can be attributed to Gestapo personnel assigned to local offices in German cities and larger towns. This image seems to have been popularized by the assassination of the former Chancellor General
Kurt von Schleicher in 1934. General von Schleicher and his wife were gunned down in their
Berlin home by three men dressed in black trench coats and wearing black fedoras. The killers of General von Schleicher were widely believed to have been Gestapo men. At a press conference held later the same day,
Hermann Göring was asked by foreign correspondents to respond to a hot rumour that General von Schleicher had been murdered in his home. Göring stated that the Gestapo had attempted to arrest Schleicher, but that he had been “shot while attempting to resist arrest”.
Auxiliary Duties
The Gestapo also maintained offices at all
Nazi concentration camps, held an office on the staff of the SS and Police Leaders, and supplied personnel on an as-needed basis to such formations as the
Einsatzgruppen. Such personnel, assigned to these auxiliary duties, were typically removed from the Gestapo chain of command and fell under the authority of other branches of the SS.
The Daily Operations of the Gestapo
Contrary to popular belief, the Gestapo was not an omnipotent agency that had its agents in every nook and cranny of German society. So-called “V-men” as undercover Gestapo agents were known only to be used to infiltrate
Social Democratic and
Communist opposition groups, but these cases were the exception, not the rule.
As the analysis of the
Gestapostellen done by the historian Robert Gellately has established, for the most part the Gestapo was made of bureaucrats and clerical workers who depended upon denunciations by ordinary Germans for their information. Indeed, the Gestapo was overwhelmed with denunciations and spent most of its time sorting out the credible denunciations from less credible ones. Far from being an all-powerful agency that knew everything about what was happening in German society, the local
Gestapostellen were under-staffed, over-worked offices that struggled with the paper-load caused by so many denunciations. The ratio of Gestapo officers to the general public was extremely lop-sided; for example, in the region of
Lower Franconia, which had about one million people in the 1930s, there was only one Gestapo office for the entire region, which had 28 people attached to it, of whom half were clerical workers.
Furthermore, for information about what was happening in German society, the
Gestapostellen were most part dependent upon these denunciations. Thus, it was ordinary Germans by their willingness to denounce one another who supplied the Gestapo with the information that determined who the Gestapo arrested. The popular picture of the Gestapo with its spies everywhere terrorizing German society has been firmly rejected by most historians.
Gestapo counterintelligence
The
Polish government in exile in
London during
World War II received sensitive military information about Nazi Germany from agents and informants throughout
Europe. After Germany conquered Poland in the fall of 1939, Gestapo officials believed that they had neutralized Polish intelligence activities.
Cooperation of
NKVD and Gestapo: In March 1940 representatives of NKVD and Gestapo met for one week in
Zakopane, for the coordination of the pacification of resistance in
Poland. The
Soviet Union delivered hundreds of German and Austrian communists to Gestapo, as unwanted foreigners, together with relevant documents.
However an advanced Polish intelligence network developed throughout Europe to provide information to the Allies.
Some of the Polish information about the movement of German police and SS units to the East during the
German invasion of the
Soviet Union in the fall of 1941 was similar to information British intelligence secretly got through intercepting and decoding German police and SS messages sent by radio telegraphy.
In 1942, the Gestapo discovered a cache of Polish intelligence documents in
Prague and were surprised to see that Polish agents and informants had been gathering detailed military information and smuggling it out to London, via
Budapest and
Istanbul. The Poles identified had tracked German military trains to the Eastern front and identified four
Order Police battalions sent to conquered areas of the Soviet Union in October 1941 and engaged in war crimes and mass murder.
Polish agents also gathered detailed information about the morale of German soldiers in the East. After uncovering a sample of the information the Poles had reported, Gestapo officials concluded that Polish intelligence activity represented a very serious danger to Germany. As late as June 6, 1944, Heinrich Müller, head of the Gestapo, concerned about the leakage of information to the allied forces, set up a special unit called Sonderkommando Jerzy, designed to root out the Polish intelligence network in western and southwestern Europe.
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Notable individuals
Agents and officers of the Gestapo
People executed by the Gestapo
- Marc Bloch, French historian
- Dietrich Bonhoeffer, German theologian
- Roger Bushell, leader of The Great Escape
- Wilhelm Canaris, Head of the Abwehr
- Constant Chevillon, Occultist
- Charles Delestraint, French Resistance member
- Jean Moulin, French Resistance leader
- Stanislaw Saks, Polish mathematician
- Juliusz Schauder, Polish mathematician
- Barthel Schink, Member of the Edelweiss Pirates
- Ernst Thälmann, German communist leader
In Popular Culture
Sometimes the word
Gestapo is used colloquially for other organizations which are felt to be tyrannical: see
Nazi/3rd Reich terms in popular culture. An example is in the book version of the Tron movie, where a character says "This kind of romp is going to annoy the local gestapo."
The Gestapo was parodied in the hit BBC
sitcom 'Allo 'Allo!, as stiff-as-board limping characters obsessed with protecting
Adolf Hitler from assassination by the German military or resistance. Usually wearing black
leather coats and hats, they were often seen
cross-dressing. Herr Flick and Herr von Smallhausen were the local agents in the village of Nouvion, obsessed entirely with the German war effort. They were constantly under siege by the
French Resistance.
References
Books
- The Gestapo and German society : enforcing racial policy 1935-1945, Robert Gellately, Oxford : Clarendon Press, 1990, ISBN 0-19-822869-4.
- German Resistance Against Hitler: The Search for Allies Abroad, 1938-1945, Klemens Von Klemperer, Oxford University Press, 1992, ISBN 0-19-820551-1
- Histoire de la Gestapo, Jacques Delarue, Paris, 1962
- An Illustrated History of the Gestapo, Rupert Butler, Motorbooks, 1993, ISBN 0-87938-801-3
- Pierre de Villemarest, Untouchable - Who protected Bormann & Gestapo Müller after 1945..., Aquilion, 2005, ISBN 1-904997-02-3
Suspected hoax works about the Gestapo include:- Gestapo Chief: The 1948 Interrogation of Heinrich Müller - Gregory Douglas. San Jose, CA 1995
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