Gestapo

views updated

GESTAPO.

ORIGINS AND DEVELOPMENT
GESTAPO WORK
BIBLIOGRAPHY

The Gestapo (abbreviation for Geheime Staatspolizei; secret state police) was the political police force of the Third Reich and the major organ of persecution and mass murder under National Socialism.

ORIGINS AND DEVELOPMENT

The Gestapo was formed out of the political department of the Berlin police in April 1933 by the new Prussian prime minister, Hermann Goering. The personnel came from the Prussian criminal police, which during the Weimar Republic had also investigated political crimes, predominantly of communist origin. It took some time before the Gestapo became the unified political police of the German Reich. Already by 1933 a predecessor to the Gestapo, the Geheimes Staatspolizeiamt (Gestapa), had been established in Berlin, as had the Bavarian political police in Munich. All other German Laender formed similar Gestapo institutions by 1934. That year the SS (Schutzstaffel) leader, Heinrich Himmler, and Reinhard Heydrich, chief of the SS intelligence (Sicherheitsdienst) took over the police in Prussia, and in 1936 a unified SS and police system was installed. Hence, not only were the command of SS and police fully merged, but most Gestapo members were also incorporated into the SS.

The next year the Gestapo together with the criminal police formed the security police (Sicherheitspolizei). This buildup of new institutions culminated some weeks after the beginning of World War II with the creation of the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (Imperial Security Main Office; RSHA), the central persecution apparatus, which united the Gestapo, criminal police, and the security service of the SS (SD). The Gestapo now constituted Amt IV (Branch IV) of the RSHA. With the German territorial expansions from 1938 on, Gestapo members were integrated in the so-called Einsatzgruppen, which followed the German army. Gestapo offices were set up in all annexed territories as in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. In all other occupied territories it became part of the regional security police and SD structures, thus copying the RSHA on a small scale.

The Gestapo was headed from 1936 until the end of the war by Heinrich Müller, a functionary from the political police in Bavaria who never became a political-ideological planner but fully organized persecutions and mass murders all over occupied Europe. Until the mid-1930s the majority of the personnel consisted of career policemen, most of whom had worked there since the 1920s. From 1936 on, as the apparatus heavily expanded, it took over new personnel especially from the regular Schutzpolizei. Nevertheless, the Gestapo (including border police) never numbered more than thirty-two thousand functionaries, among them women, for the whole of Europe under Nazi rule. It took some time before most of the Gestapo men joined the SS, where they were assigned ranks equal to their position in the criminal police. The SD, which in its beginnings had served as an internal intelligence for the Nazi Party, more and more developed into a parallel structure to the Gestapo, thus laying the ideological grounds for the persecution of all alleged enemies. Especially from 1937 on, this ideological merging of both institutions was visible. They gradually developed schemes not only for persecuting political enemies and Jews but also for "purifying the German social body." But the Gestapo still exclusively consisted of state officials and had executive power. This changed during the war. SD-functionaries such as Adolf Eichmann were integrated into the Gestapo structures. In the occupied territories, the SD took over more and more executive power, especially on a local level.

The main task of the Gestapo consisted in "combatting enemies" (Feindbekämpfung), first inside the Reich, then all over occupied Europe. Thus the Gestapo was internally structured according to "enemy categories"; especially important were the offices concerned with communism, Jews, and eastern Europeans. But there were also departments dealing with the churches and other religious institutions, Freemasons, right-wing opposition like monarchists, and so on. The persecution of Gypsies and homosexuals fell under the responsibility of the criminal police.

GESTAPO WORK

The Gestapo work at first glance resembled regular police work—investigating, keeping card indexes, and making arrests. But the Gestapo did not react to criminal activity; rather, it targeted "enemy groups" as a whole. Because of the lack of personnel, the Gestapo depended on informers, both official (V-Leute) and unofficial. In the Reich it profited heavily from individual denunciations, to a lesser extent in the occupied areas. Most important was information provided by low-level Nazi Party functionaries and by other police and SS branches. From 1933 on, the most important instrument of Gestapo executive work was the Schutzhaftbefehl (protective custody order), which was the pseudolegal basis for all preventive arrests. The arrested were imprisoned either in jails or in the new concentration camps. Their basic rights had been lifted in February 1933. The state prosecutors, which traditionally controlled the police, were excluded from this procedure in 1934.

The Gestapo had at its disposal its own investigative prisons, where it interrogated and tortured prisoners—many were beaten to death. Inside each concentration camp the regional Gestapo had its own branch, the political department. Since 1939, Heydrich formally introduced the killing of Gestapo prisoners in concentration camps, officially called Sonderbehandlung (special treatment). With the beginning of the war, the Gestapo became involved in the forced population transfers, first in Poland, then in Yugoslavia. The same procedures applied to the deportation and killing of the Jews. During the war against the Soviet Union, the Gestapo constituted the central part of the Einsatzgruppen, which killed around six hundred thousand persons, most of them Jews. The stationary offices in the Soviet Union continued these crimes, such as the murder of selected groups of Soviet prisoners of war (POWs) in Poland and in the Reich. In all areas except the General Government in Poland, the deportation of the Jews to the killing sites was organized by the Gestapo Department IV B4 under Eichmann and put into action by the local Gestapo (inside the Reich) or security police (outside the Reich) structures. By 1943 the main focus of Gestapo work turned to a violent fight against the resistance in occupied Europe and the surveillance of foreign forced workers inside the Reich. A new camp system, the Arbeitserziehungslager (work education camps) was installed under Gestapo control, where criminalized foreign workers were imprisoned.

In sum, the Gestapo was responsible for millions of murders. It was declared a criminal organization by the International Military Tribunal in 1946. Its members were interned under allied occupation, and comparatively many were tried and sentenced after the war. Nevertheless, during the 1950s a part of the personnel was able to return to the (West) German police apparatus.