GESTAPO

Geheime Staatspolizei
.

INTRODUCTION
The Geheime Staatspolizei (German for Secret State Police,
abbreviated Gestapo) was the secret police of Nazi Germany, and
its main tool of oppression and destruction, which persecuted
Germans, opponents of the regime, and Jews. It later played a
central role in helping carry out the Nazi's "Final Solution."
The Gestapo was formally organized after the Nazis seized power
in 1933. Hermann Gring, the Prussian minister of the interior,
detached the espionage and political units of the Prussian police
and proceeded to staff them with thousands of Nazis. On April 26,
1933, Gring became the commander of this new force that was
given power to shadow, arrest, interrogate, and intern any
"enemies" of the state. At the same time that Goring was organzing
the Gestapo, Heinrich Himmler was directing the SS (Schutzstaffel,
German for Protective Echelon), Hitler's elite paramilitary corps. In
April 1936, he was given command of the Gestapo as well,
integrating all of Germany's police units under Himmler.
Later in 1936, the Gestapo was merged with the Kriminalpolizei (or
Kripo, German for Criminal Police). The newly integrated unit was

the called the Sicherheitspolizei (or Sipo, German for Secret

Police). In 1939, during the reorganization of the German armies,
the Sipo was joined with an intelligence branch of the military
known as the Sicherheitsdienst (SD, meaning Security Service).
After this merger, the Sipo became known as
the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (RSHA, meaning Reich Security
Central Office), and was headed by Reinhard Heydrich. Because of
these frequent changes, the functions of the Gestapo became
blurred, and often overlapped with those of the other branches of
the German forces.The Gestapo units excelled in their unabated and
premeditated cruelty, in their ability to delude its intended victims
as to the fate that awaited them, and in the use of barbaric threats
and torture to lead the victims to their death, all as part of the
"Final Solution." The units were taught many torture techniques,
and were also taught many of the practices that German doctors
in Dachautested on the inmates of concentration camps. During its
tenure, the Gestapo operated without any restrictions from the civil
authority, meaning that its members could not be tried for any of
their police practices. This unconditional authority added an elitist
element to the Gestapo; its members knew that whatever actions
they took, no consequences would arise.After the war, very few of
the important members of the Gestapo were caught and brought
to trial.

Gestapo
History:
As part of the deal in which Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of
Germany, Hermann Gringfuture commander of
the Luftwaffe and an influential Nazi Party officialwas
named Interior Minister of Prussia. This gave him command of the
largest police force in Germany. Soon afterward, Gring detached
the political and intelligence sections from the police and filled
their ranks with Nazis. On 26 April 1933, Gring 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.
Its first commander was Rudolf Diels, a protg of Gring. Diels
was best known as the primary interrogator of Marinus van der
Lubbe after the Reichstag fire. In late 1933, the Reich Interior
MinisterWilhelm Frick wanted to integrate all the police forces of
the German states under his control. Gring outflanked him by
removing the Prussian political and intelligence departments from
the state interior ministry. Gring himself took over the Gestapo in
1934 and urged Hitler to extend the agency's authority throughout
Germany. This represented a radical departure from German
tradition, which held that law enforcement was (mostly)

a Land(state) and local matter. In this, he ran into conflict

with Heinrich Himmler, who was police chief of the second most
powerful German state, Bavaria. Frick did not have the muscle to
take on Gring by himself so he allied with Himmler. With Frick's
support, Himmler (pushed on by his right hand man, Reinhard
Heydrich) took over the political police of state after state. Soon
only Prussia was left.
Gring, 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).
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 Reichsfhrer-SS,
answered only to Hitler. This move gave Himmler operational
control over Germany's entire detective force. 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. 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 Mller was at that time the
Gestapo operations chief. 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, summed up this policy
by saying, "As long as the police carries out the will of the
leadership, it is acting legally.
On 27 September 1939, the security and police agencies of Nazi
Germanywith the exception of the Orpowere consolidated into
the Reich Main Security Office (RSHA), headed by Heydrich. The
Gestapo became Amt IV (Department IV) of RSHA and Mller
became the Gestapo Chief, with Heydrich as his immediate

superior. After Heydrich's 1942 assassination, Himmler assumed the

leadership of the RSHA, but in January 1943 Ernst
Kaltenbrunner was appointed Chief of the RSHA. Mller remained
the Gestapo Chief, a position he occupied until the end of the
war. Adolf Eichmann headed the Gestapo's Office of Resettlement
and then its Office of Jewish Affairs (Referat IV B4 or SubDepartment IV, Section B4). He was Mller's direct subordinate.
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 imprisonmentpresumably out of fear of personal harm
(which, in a way, was true). In addition, thousands of political
prisoners throughout Germanyand from 1941, throughout the
occupied territories under the Night and Fog Decree
simply disappeared while in Gestapo custody.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, Mller's
power and the independence grew substantially. This trickled down
the chain of his subordinates. It led to much more independence of
action.
The Gestapos main purpose was to hunt out those considered a
threat to Nazi Germany. By the time World War Two started these

included Jews, Communists, Jehovah Witnesses, homosexuals

basically anyone who was thought to challenge the hegemony of
the Nazi Party within Germany. After the outbreak of World War
Two, the work of the Gestapo covered Occupied Europe where it
had two main tasks. The first was to hunt out Jews and other
Untermenschen while the second was to tackle the threat of
resistance movements.
The Gestapos greatest weapon was the fear that it created. Logic
said that the Gestapo simply could not be everywhere and it is now
accepted that in some places within Germany it was thinly spread
at best. However, the perception of the German population was
that it was everywhere and that you could trust no-one. There was
an acceptance that if you crossed the state, the Gestapo would get
you. Their methods of dealing with anyone in protective custody
were well publicised deliberately so, as this further enforced the
message that an individual should be totally loyal to the state. If
the Gestapo felt the need to give someone it had arrested some
semblance of going through the legal process, it used the feared
Peoples Court (the Volksgericht). Here a death sentence was
almost guaranteed especially if Roland Freisler was the presiding
judge.

As with so much that occurred within the hierarchy of Nazi

Germany, the Gestapo had a history of power struggles by those
who wanted to control it and the power it had. In his first
cabinet, Hitler had given Hermann Goering control of Prussia. In
this capacity Goering took control of the police in Prussia and
incorporated into it the small and recently formed Gestapo that up
to this point had been part of the SS led by Himmler. Goering
wanted to have control over a unified police force of Germany.
Himmler had an identical aspiration. Goering set up the Central
Security Office of the Third Reich in buildings on Prinz
Albrechtstrasse in Berlin. He made one of his protgs, Rudolf Diels,
head of the secret police. By doing this Goering hoped to have his
own man in a very important and potentially very powerful
position. At this time Diels had the official position of Chief of
Department 1A in the Prussian Secret Police attached to the
Ministry of the Interior. It was this department that grew into the
Gestapo.

Organisation:
On January 1933, Hermann Gring, Hitler's minister without
portfolio, was appointed the head of the Prussian Police and began
filling the political and intelligence units of the Prussian Secret
Police with Nazi Party members. On 26 April 1933, he reorganized
the force'sAmt III as the Gestapo, a secret state police intended to
serve the Nazi cause. In 1936, the Gestapo was moved from the
Prussian Interior Ministry to the Reich Interior Ministry and
combined with the Kripo (National criminal police) to form the
SiPo, Sicherheitspolizei(Security Police). Classed as a government
agency, it was nominally under the control of the Interior Minister
Wilhelm Frick. However Himmler, who had been appointed Chef

der Deutschen Polizei (Chief of German Police) by Hitler, controlled

the SS, the Gestapo, the Orpo (uniformed police) and all
investigation units. Although technically subordinate to Frick, he
answered only to Hitler.
The SiPo was placed under the direct command of Reinhard
Heydrich who was already chief of the Nazi Party's intelligence
service, theSicherheitsdienst (SD). 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.
In September 1939, the SiPo together with the SD were merged
into the newly-created Reichssicherheitshauptamt (RSHA: Reich
Main Security Office). Both the Gestapo and Kripo became distinct
departments within the RSHA. Although the Sicherheitspolizei was
officially disbanded, the term SiPo was figuratively used to describe
any RSHA personnel throughout the --remainder of the war.
The Gestapo became known as Amt IV ("Department or Office IV")
with Heinrich Mller as its chief. In 1942 Ernst
Kaltenbrunner became the RSHA chief after Heydrich
was assassinated in Prague. The specific internal departments
of Amt IV were as follows:
Department A (Political opponents)

Communists (A1)

Counter Sabotage (A2)

Reactionaries and Liberals (A3)

Assassinations (A4)

Department B (Sects and Churches)

Catholics (B1)

Protestants (B2)

Freemasons (B3)

Jews (B4)

Department C (Administration and Party Affairs)

The central administrative office of the Gestapo, responsible for
card files of all personnel including all officials.
Department D (Occupied Territories)
A repeat of departments A and B for use outside the Reich.

Opponents of the Regime (D1)

Churches and Sects (D2)

Department E (Counterintelligence)

In the Reich (E1)

Policy Formation (E2)

In the West (E3)

In Scandinavia (E4)

In the East (E5)

In the South (E6)

Local offices

The local offices of the Gestapo, known

as Stapostellen and Stapoleitstellen, answered to a local
commander known as the Inspekteur der Sicherheitspolizei und des

SD ("Inspector of the Security Police and Security Service") who, in

turn, was under the dual command of Referat N of the Gestapo
and also his local SS and Police Leader. The classic image of the
Gestapo officer, dressed in trench coat and hat, can be attributed
to Gestapo 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 Gring was asked by foreign correspondents to
respond to a hot rumour that General von Schleicher had been
murdered in his home. Gring stated that the Gestapo had
attempted to arrest Schleicher, but that he had been "shot while
attempting to escape".

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 as needed to formations such as

theEinsatzgruppen. Personnel assigned to these auxiliary duties
were often removed from the Gestapo chain of command and fell
under the authority of branches of the SS.
Membership of the Gestapo
In 1933, there was no purge of the German police forces. 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. In 1939, only 3,000 out of the total of 20,000
Gestapo men held SS ranks, and in most cases, these were
honorary. 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..."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. In Wrzburg, 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. 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.
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. Outside the central offices, Gestapo agents working out of
the Stapostellen andStapoleitstellen 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" (giftgrn). 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. 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. In Dsseldorf, the local Gestapo office
of only 281 men were responsible for the entire Lower Rhine
region, which comprised 4 million people. "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. The Gestapo office in Saarbrcken had
50 full-term informers in 1939. The District Office in Nuremberg,

which had the responsibility for all of northern Bavaria, employed a

total of 80100 full-term informers between 1943 and 1945. 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.
According to Canadian historian Robert Gellately's analysis of the
local offices established, the Gestapo wasfor the most part
made up of bureaucrats and clerical workers who depended upon
denunciations by citizens for their information. 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. Indeed, the Gestapoat
timeswas overwhelmed with denunciations and most of its time
was spent sorting out the credible from the less credible
denunciations. Many of the local offices were understaffed and
overworked, struggling with the paper load caused by so many
denunciations. 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".

Nuremberg Trials
Between 14 November 1945 and 3 October 1946, the Allies
established an International Military Tribunal (IMT) to try 22 of 24

major Nazi war criminals and six groups for crimes against
peace, war crimes and crimes against humanity. Nineteen of the 22
were convicted, and twelve of them (Bormann [in absentia], Frank,
Frick, Gring, Jodl, Kaltenbrunner, Keitel, Ribbentrop, Rosenberg,
Sauckel, Seyss-Inquart, Streicher), were given the death penalty; the
remaining three (Funk, Hess, Raeder) received life terms. At this
time, the Gestapo was condemned as a criminal organization with
the SS.
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.
At the trial of any individual member of any group or organisation,
the IMT was authorised to declare (in connection with any act of
which the individual was convicted) that the group or organisation
to which he belonged was a criminal organization. When a group
or organization was thus declared criminal, the competent national
authority of any signatory had the right to bring persons to trial for

membership in that organisation, with the criminal nature of the

group or organisation assumed proved.
These groupsthe Nazi party and government leadership, the
German General Staff and High Command (OKW);
the Sturmabteilung (SA); theSchutzstaffel (SS), including
the Sicherheitsdienst (SD); and the Gestapohad 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 Gring 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.

SUMMARY

 Was the secret police of Germany during the Nazi period and
was their main tool of oppression and destruction.

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.

On 27 September 1939, the security and police agencies of

Nazi Germanywith the exception of the Orpowere
consolidated into the Reich Main Security Office (RSHA),
headed by Heydrich. The Gestapo became Amt

IV (Department IV) of RSHA and Mller became the Gestapo

Chief, with Heydrich as his immediate superior.
The Gestapos main purpose was to hunt out those
considered a threat to Nazi Germany. By the time World War
Two started these included Jews, Communists, Jehovah
Witnesses, homosexuals basically anyone who was thought
to challenge the hegemony of the Nazi Party within Germany.
After the outbreak of World War Two, the work of the
Gestapo covered Occupied Europe where it had two main
tasks. The first was to hunt out Jews and other

Untermenschen while the second was to tackle the threat of

resistance movements.
In 1936, the Gestapo was moved from the Prussian Interior
Ministry to the Reich Interior Ministry and combined with the
Kripo (National criminal police) to form the
SiPo, Sicherheitspolizei(Security Police). Classed as a
government agency, it was nominally under the control of the
Interior Minister Wilhelm Frick. However Himmler, who had
been appointed Chef der Deutschen Polizei (Chief of German
Police) by Hitler, controlled the SS, the Gestapo, the Orpo
(uniformed police) and all investigation units. Although
technically subordinate to Frick, he answered only to Hitler.
Consisted of 5 Departments which had various functions and
target areas.
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 as needed to formations such
as theEinsatzgruppen. Personnel assigned to these auxiliary
duties were often removed from the Gestapo chain of
command and fell under the authority of branches of the SS.
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.
At the Nuremberg trial of any individual member of any group
or organisation, the IMT was authorised to declare (in
connection with any act of which the individual was convicted)
that the group or organisation to which he belonged was a
criminal organization. When a group or organization was thus
declared criminal, the competent national authority of any
signatory had the right to bring persons to trial for
membership in that organisation, with the criminal nature of
the group or organisation assumed proved.

SOURCES
www.historylearningsite.co.uk
www.wikipedia.org
www.google.co.in
www.historyplace.com
www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org

ABSTRACT
The Gestapo (Geheime Staatspolizei) was Nazi Germanys feared
secret police force. During World War Two the Gestapo was under

the direct control of Heinrich Himmler who controlled all the police
units within Nazi Germany. The first head of the Gestapo
was Rudolf Diels but for most of its existence, the Gestapo was led
by Heinrich Mller. The Gestapo acted outside of the normal
judicial process and it had its own courts and effectively acted as
judge, jury and frequently executioner.The Gestapos main purpose
was to hunt out those considered a threat to Nazi Germany. By the
time World War Two started these included Jews, Communists,
Jehovah Witnesses, homosexuals basically anyone who was
thought to challenge the hegemony of the Nazi Party within
Germany. After the outbreak of World War Two, the work of the
Gestapo covered Occupied Europe where it had two main tasks.
The first was to hunt out Jews and other Untermenschen while the
second was to tackle the threat of resistance movements.