History
As part of the deal in which Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany, Hermann Göring—future commander of the Luftwaffe and an influential Nazi Party official—was named Interior Minister of Prussia. This gave him command of the largest police force in Germany. Soon afterward, Göring detached the political and intelligence sections from the police and filled their ranks with Nazis. On 26 April 1933, Göring merged the two units as the Gestapo. He originally wanted to name it the Secret Police Office (German: Geheimes Polizeiamt), but discovered the German initials "GPA" would be too similar to the Soviet GPU.[5]
Göring, concerned that Diels was not ruthless enough to use the Gestapo effectively to counteract the power of the Sturmabteilung (SA), handed over its control to Himmler on 20 April 1934. Also on that date, Hitler appointed Himmler chief of all German police outside Prussia. Heydrich, named chief of the Gestapo by Himmler on 22 April 1934, also continued as head of the SS Security Service (Sicherheitsdienst, SD).[8]
On 17 June 1936 Hitler appointed Himmler as Chief of all German police and decreed the unification of all police forces.[9] In this role, Himmler was still nominally subordinate to Frick, but the de facto power was now in the hands of Himmler, who as Reichsführer-SS, answered only to Hitler. This move gave Himmler operational control over Germany's entire detective force.[10] The Gestapo became a national state agency rather than a Prussian state agency. Himmler also gained authority over all of Germany's uniformed law enforcement agencies, which were amalgamated into the new Ordnungspolizei (Orpo: Order Police), which became a national agency under SS general Kurt Daluege.[9] Shortly thereafter, Himmler created the Kriminalpolizei (Kripo: Criminal Police), merging it with the Gestapo into the Sicherheitspolizei (SiPo: Security Police), under Heydrich's command. The SiPo was considered a complementary organization to the SD.[3] Heinrich Müller was at that time the Gestapo operations chief.[11] He answered to Heydrich; Heydrich answered only to Himmler and Himmler answered only to Hitler.
The Gestapo had the authority to investigate cases of treason, espionage, sabotage and criminal attacks on the Nazi Party and Germany. The basic Gestapo law passed by the government in 1936 gave the Gestapo carte blanche to operate without judicial oversight. The Gestapo was specifically exempted from responsibility to administrative courts, where citizens normally could sue the state to conform to laws. As early as 1935, however, a Prussian administrative court had ruled that the Gestapo's actions were not subject to judicial review. The SS officer Werner Best, onetime head of legal affairs in the Gestapo,[12] summed up this policy by saying, "As long as the police carries out the will of the leadership, it is acting legally."[5]
On 27 September 1939, the security and police agencies of Nazi Germany—with the exception of the Orpo—were consolidated into the Reich Main Security Office (RSHA), headed by Heydrich.[2] The Gestapo became Amt IV (Department IV) of RSHA and Müller became the Gestapo Chief, with Heydrich as his immediate superior.[13] After Heydrich's 1942 assassination, Himmler assumed the leadership of the RSHA, but in January 1943 Ernst Kaltenbrunner was appointed Chief of the RSHA. Müller remained the Gestapo Chief, a position he occupied until the end of the war.[13] Adolf Eichmann headed the Gestapo's Office of Resettlement and then its Office of Jewish Affairs (Referat IV B4 or Sub-Department IV, Section B4). He was Müller's direct subordinate.[14]
The power of the Gestapo most open to misuse was called Schutzhaft—"protective custody", a euphemism for the power to imprison people without judicial proceedings. An oddity of the system was that the prisoner had to sign his own Schutzhaftbefehl, an order declaring that the person had requested imprisonment—presumably out of fear of personal harm (which, in a way, was true). In addition, thousands of political prisoners throughout Germany—and from 1941, throughout the occupied territories under the Night and Fog Decree—simply disappeared while in Gestapo custody.[15] During World War II, the Gestapo was expanded to around 46,000 members. After Heydrich's death in June 1942, and as the war progressed, Müller's power and the independence grew substantially. This trickled down the chain of his subordinates. It led to much more independence of action.
Student opposition
Between June 1942 and March 1943, student protests were calling for an end to the Nazi regime. These included the non-violent resistance of Hans and Sophie Scholl, two leaders of the White Rose student group. However, resistance groups and those who were in moral or political opposition to the Nazis were stalled 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 their powers over the German public. Student opposition leaders were executed in late February, and a major opposition organization, the Oster Circle, was destroyed in April, 1943.
Nevertheless, some Germans did speak out and show signs of protest during the summer of 1943. Despite fear of the Gestapo after 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 Gestapo cracked down ruthlessly on the dissidents in Germany, just as they did everywhere else.
In June, July and August, the Gestapo 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 partly because of the aftermath of the Venlo incident of 1939, when SD and Gestapo agents posing as anti-Nazis in the Netherlands kidnapped two British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) 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 the Soviets' back.[citation needed]
Nuremberg Trials
Leaders, organisers, investigators and accomplices participating in the formulation or execution of a common plan or conspiracy to commit the crimes 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.
These groups—the Nazi party and government leadership, the German General Staff and High Command (OKW); the Sturmabteilung (SA); the Schutzstaffel (SS), including the Sicherheitsdienst (SD); and the Gestapo—had an aggregate membership exceeding two million, making a large number of their members liable to trial if the organisations were convicted.
The trials began in November 1945. On 1 October 1946, the IMT rendered its judgement on 21 top officials of the Third Reich: 18 were sentenced to death or to long prison terms, and three acquitted. The IMT also convicted three of the groups: the Nazi leadership corps, the SS (including the SD) and the Gestapo. Gestapo members Hermann Göring and Arthur Seyss-Inquart were individually convicted.
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 programme. Members of the three convicted groups were subject to apprehension by Britain, the United States, the Soviet Union and France.
Aftermath
In 1997, Cologne transformed the former regional Gestapo headquarters in Cologne—the EL-DE Haus—into a museum to document the Gestapo's actions.
Organization
The SiPo was placed under the direct command of Reinhard Heydrich who was already chief of the Nazi Party's intelligence service, the Sicherheitsdienst (SD).[9] The idea was to fully combine the party agency, the SD, with the SiPo, the state agency. SiPo members were encouraged to become members of the SS. However in practise, the SiPo and the SD came into jurisdictional and operational conflict. Gestapo and Kripo had many experienced, professional policemen and investigators, who considered the SD to be an incompetent agency run by amateurs.[3]
Membership of the Gestapo
In 1933, there was no purge of the German police forces.[26] The vast majority of Gestapo officers came from the police forces of the Weimar Republic, members of the SS, the SA, and the NSDAP also joined the Gestapo.[27] In 1939, only 3,000 out of the total of 20,000 Gestapo men held SS ranks, and in most cases, these were honorary.[28] One man who served in the Prussian Gestapo in 1933 recalled that most of his co-workers "were by no means Nazis. For the most part they were young professional civil service officers..."[28] The Nazis valued police competence more than politics, so in general in 1933, almost all of the men who served in the various state police forces under the Weimar Republic stayed on in their jobs.[29] In Würzburg, which is one of the few places in Germany where most of the Gestapo records survived, every member of the Gestapo was a career policeman or had a police background.[30] The Canadian historian Robert Gellately wrote that most Gestapo men were not Nazis, but at the same time were not opposed to the Nazi regime, which they were willing to serve, in whatever task they were called upon to perform.[30]
Uniforms
Before their 1939 amalgamation into the RSHA, the Gestapo and Kripo were plainclothes police agencies and had no uniforms. Although individual Gestapo officers could and did join the Allgemeine-SS or other Party organizations, those uniforms would not have been worn on duty.
From June 1936, a concerted effort was made to recruit policemen of the SiPo into the SS, and SS members into the Kripo and especially the Gestapo, but with limited success; by 1939 only a small percentage of Gestapo agents were SS members. With the formation of RSHA in September 1939, Gestapo officers who also held SS rank began to wear the wartime grey SS uniform when on duty in the Hauptamt or regional headquarters (Abschnitte). Hollywood notwithstanding, after 1939 the sinister black SS uniform was only worn by Allgemeine-SS reservists; it was abolished in 1942.[31] Outside the central offices, Gestapo agents working out of the Stapostellen and Stapoleitstellen continued to wear civilian suits in keeping with the secretive nature of their work.
There were in fact very strict protocols protecting the identity of Gestapo field personnel. In most cases, when asked for identification, an operative was only required to present his warrant disc. This identified the operative as Gestapo without revealing personal identity and agents, except when ordered to do so by an authorized official, were not required to show picture identification, something all non-Gestapo people were expected to do.
Beginning in 1940, the grey SS uniform was worn by Gestapo in occupied countries, even those who were not actually SS members, because agents in civilian clothes had been shot by members of the Wehrmacht thinking that they were partisans.
Unlike the rest of the SS, the right-side collar patch of the RSHA was plain black without insignia, as was the uniform cuffband. Gestapo agents in uniform did not wear SS shoulderboards, but rather police-pattern shoulderboards piped or underlaid in "poison green" (giftgrün). A diamond-shaped black patch with "SD" in white was worn on the lower left sleeve even by SiPo men who were not actually in the SD. Sometimes this Raute was piped in white; there is some debate over whether this may or may not have indicated Gestapo personnel.
Contrary to popular belief, the Gestapo was not the all-pervasive, omnipotent agency in German society.[32] In Germany proper, many towns and cities had fewer than 50 official Gestapo personnel. For example, in 1939 Stettin and Frankfurt am Main only had a total of 41 Gestapo men combined.[32] In Düsseldorf, the local Gestapo office of only 281 men were responsible for the entire Lower Rhine region, which comprised 4 million people.[33] "V-men", as undercover Gestapo agents were known, were used to infiltrate Social Democratic and Communist opposition groups, but this was more the exception, not the rule.[34] The Gestapo office in Saarbrücken had 50 full-term informers in 1939.[34] The District Office in Nuremberg, which had the responsibility for all of northern Bavaria, employed a total of 80–100 full-term informers between 1943 and 1945.[34] The vast majority of Gestapo informers were not full-term informers working undercover, but were rather ordinary citizens who for whatever reason chose to denounce those they knew to the Gestapo.[35]
According to Canadian historian Robert Gellately's analysis of the local offices established, the Gestapo was—for the most part—made up of bureaucrats and clerical workers who depended upon denunciations by citizens for their information.[36] Gellately argued that it was because of the widespread willingness of Germans to inform on each other to the Gestapo that Germany between 1933 and 1945 was a prime example of panopticism.[37] Indeed, the Gestapo—at times—was overwhelmed with denunciations and most of its time was spent sorting out the credible from the less credible denunciations.[38] Many of the local offices were understaffed and overworked, struggling with the paper load caused by so many denunciations.[39] Gellately has also suggested that the Gestapo was "a reactive organization" "...which was constructed within German society and whose functioning was structurally dependent on the continuing co-operation of German citizens".[40]
Thus, it was ordinary Germans by their willingness to denounce one another who supplied the Gestapo with the information that determined whom the Gestapo arrested.[41] The popular picture of the Gestapo with its spies everywhere terrorizing German society has been rejected by many historians as a myth invented after the war as a cover for German society's widespread complicity in allowing the Gestapo to work.[41][42] Work done by social historians such as Detlev Peukert, Robert Gellately, Reinhard Mann, Inge Marssolek, René Otto, Klaus-Michael Mallamann and Paul Gerhard, which by focusing on what the local offices were doing has shown the Gestapo's almost total dependence on denunciations from ordinary Germans, and very much discredited the older "Big Brother" picture with the Gestapo having its eyes and ears everywhere.[43] For example, of the 84 cases in Würzburg of Rassenschande (race defilement) as sex with Jews were known under the Nuremberg Laws, 45 (54%) were started in response to denunciations by ordinary people, two (2%) by information provided by other branches of the government, 20 (24%) via information gained during interrogations of people relating to other matters, four (5%) from information from (Nazi) NSDAP organizations, two (2%) during "political evaluations" and 11 (13%) have no source listed while none were started by Gestapo's own "observations" of the people of Würzburg.[44]
An examination of 213 denunciations in Düsseldorf showed that 37% were motivated by personal conflicts, no motive could be established in 39%, and 24% were motivated by support for the Nazi regime.[45] The Gestapo always showed a special interest in denunciations concerning sexual matters, especially cases concerning rassenschande with Jews or between Germans and Polish slave workers; Jews and Catholicism and homosexuality.[46] As time went by, anonymous denunciations to the Gestapo caused trouble to various NSDAP officials, who often found themselves being investigated by the Gestapo.[47]
Of the political cases, 61 people were investigated for suspicion of belonging to the KPD, 44 for the SPD and 69 for other political parties.[48] Most of the political investigations took place between 1933–35 with the all-time high of 57 cases in 1935.[48] After that year, political investigations declined with only 18 investigations in 1938, 13 in 1939, two in 1941, seven in 1942, four in 1943 and one in 1944.[48] The "other" category associated with non-conformity included everything from a man who drew a caricature of Hitler to a Catholic teacher suspected of being lukewarm about teaching National Socialism in his classroom.[48] The "administrative control" category concerned whose were breaking the law concerning residency in the city.[48] The "conventional criminality" category concerned economic crimes such as money laundering, smuggling and homosexuality.[49]
Notes
^ Robert Gellately (1992-01). The Gestapo and German Society. ISBN 978-0-19-820297-4. Retrieved 2 June 2009.
^ a b c Lumsden, Robin. A Collector's Guide To: The Allgemeine – SS, p 83.
^ a b c Lumsden, Robin. A Collector's Guide To: The Allgemeine – SS, pp 80–84.
^ Butler, Rupert (2004). Gestapo: A History of Hitler's Secret Police.[page needed]
^ a b Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
^ Flaherty, The SS. 2004, pp 64–66.
^ Flaherty, The SS. 2004, p 66.
^ Williams, Max. Reinhard Heydrich: The Biography: Volume 1. 2001, p 61.
^ a b c d Williams, Max. Reinhard Heydrich: The Biography: Volume 1. 2001, p 77.
^ a b Longerich, Peter. Heinrich Himmler: A Life, p 204.
^ Weale, Adrian. The SS: A New History. 2010, p 132.
^ McNab, Chris. The SS: 1923–1945, p 156.
^ a b c d Lumsden, Robin. A Collector's Guide To: The Allgemeine – SS, p 84.
^ Weale, Adrian. The SS: A New History. 2010, p 145.
^ Snyder, Louis. Encyclopedia of the Third Reich, p 242.
^ McNab, Chris. The SS: 1923–1945, p 150
^ McNab, Chris. The SS: 1923–1945, pp 150, 162.
^ Longerich, Peter. Heinrich Himmler: A Life, p 470.
^ Although an agent in uniform wore the collar insignia of the equivalent SS rank, he was still addressed as, e.g., Herr Kriminalrat, not Sturmbannführer. The stock character of the "Gestapo Major", usually dressed in the prewar black SS uniform, is a figment of Hollywood.
^ Der Reichsführer SS, Dich ruft die SS (Hermann Hillger KG, Berlin 1942).
^ Jens Banach, "Polizei im NS-System – Ausbildung und Rekrutierung in der Sicherheitspolizei", in: Hans Jürgen Lange (ed.), Die Polizei der Gesellschaft: Zur Soziologie der inneren Sicherheit, (VS Verlag, 2003), page 64.
^ Andrew Mollo, Uniforms of the SS, vol. 5: "Sicherheitsdienst und Sicherheitspolizei 1931–1945"
^ http://www.geschichte-reckenfeld.de/kapitel/entwicklung/00_pdf_dateien/buch_polizei_noethen_tab_dienstgrade.pdf 9 May 2009
^ Besoldung der Beamten http://www.lexikon-der-wehrmacht.de/Soldat/BBesoldung.htm
^ http://www.lexikon-der-wehrmacht.de/Soldat/Besoldung.htm
^ Gellately, Robert. The Gestapo and German Society, Clarendon Press: Oxford, 1990, p 50.
^ Gellately, Robert. The Gestapo and German Society, p 50.
^ a b Gellately, Robert. The Gestapo and German Society, p 51.
^ Gellately, Robert. The Gestapo and German Society, pp 54–55.
^ a b Gellately, Robert. The Gestapo and German Society, p 59.
^ Lumsden, Robin. A Collector's Guide To: The Allgemeine – SS, p 56.
^ a b McNab, Chris. The SS: 1923–1945, p 163.
^ Mallmann & Paul, quoted in Crew, p 174
^ a b c Mallmann & Paul, quoted in Crew, p 181
^ Gellately, Robert. The Gestapo and German Society, pp 132–150.
^ Rees, p 64-65
^ Gellately, Robert. The Gestapo and German Society, pp 11–12 & 22.
^ a b Rees, p 65
^ a b Mallmann & Paul, quoted in Crew, p 175
^ Gellately, Robert. The Gestapo and German Society, p 136.
^ a b c Rees, p 64
^ Mallmann & Paul, quoted in Crew, p 168-169
^ Mallmann & Paul, quoted in Crew, p 172-173
^ Gellately, Robert. The Gestapo and German Society, p 162.
^ Gellately, Robert. The Gestapo and German Society, p 146.
^ Gellately, Robert. The Gestapo and German Society, pp 49, 146.
^ Gellately, Robert. The Gestapo and German Society, pp 151–152.
^ a b c d e Gellately, Robert. The Gestapo and German Society, p 48.
^ Gellately, Robert. The Gestapo and German Society, p 49.
^ a b Gellately, Robert. The Gestapo and German Society, p 131.
^ Gellately, Robert. The Gestapo and German Society, p 132.
Taken from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gestapo [26.04.2013]
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