Everything about Gestapo totally explained
The (
contraction of
Geheime
Staats
polizei: "Secret State Police") was the official
secret police of
Nazi Germany. Under the overall administration of the
Schutzstaffel (SS), it was administered by the
Reichssicherheitshauptamt (RSHA) ("head office of the
Reich's security service") and was considered a dual
organization of the
Sicherheitsdienst (SD) ("security service") and also a suboffice of the
Sicherheitspolizei (SIPO) ("security police").
History
As part of the deal in which
Adolf Hitler became
chancellor of Germany,
Hermann Göring was named as
interior minister of
Prussia. This gave him command of the largest police force in Germany. Soon afterward, Göring detached the political and intelligence departments from the police and filled their ranks with Nazis. On
April 26, 1933; Göring merged the two units as the Gestapo. He originally wanted to name it the
Secret Police Office, but discovered the German initials "GPA" would be too similar to the
Soviet GPU.
Its first commander was
Rudolf Diels, a protégé of Göring. Diels was best known as the primary interrogator of
Marinus van der Lubbe after the
Reichstag fire. Göring 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 state and local matter. In this, he ran into conflict with
Heinrich Himmler, who was police president of the second most powerful German state,
Bavaria.
In April 1934, Göring and Himmler agreed to put aside their differences (due in large part to a combined hatred of the
Sturmabteilung) and Göring transferred full authority over the Gestapo to Himmler, who was also named chief of all German police forces outside Prussia. In
1936, most German police forces were united under Himmler's command. At that point, the Gestapo was incorporated into the Sicherheitspolizei and considered a sister organization of the Sicherheitsdienst.
The Gestapo had the authority to investigate
treason,
espionage and
sabotage cases, and cases of criminal attacks on the
Nazi Party and
Germany. A 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.. Indeed, the Gestapo was overwhelmed with denunciations and spent most of its time sorting out the credible from the less credible denunciations. 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 officers who struggled with the paper load caused by so many denunciations. The ratio of Gestapo officers to the population of the areas they were responsible for was extremely low; for example, for
Lower Franconia, with a population of about one million in the 1930s, there was only one Gestapo office with 28 staff, half of whom were clerical workers. 80% of all Gestapo investigations were started in response to information provided by denunciations by "ordinary" Germans; while 10% were started in response in to information provided by other branches of the German government and another 10% started in response to information that the Gestapo itself unearthed.
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.
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'd neutralized Polish intelligence activities.
Cooperation with the NKVD
In March 1941 representatives of the
Soviet secret police (NKVD) and Gestapo met for one week in
Zakopane, to coordinate the pacification of resistance in
Poland (see:
Gestapo-NKVD Conferences). The
Soviet Union delivered hundreds of German and Austrian communists to the 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 and tracked German military trains to the Eastern front and identified four
Ordnungspolizei ("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, concerned about the leakage of information to the Allies, set up a special unit called Sonderkommando Jerzy that was meant to root out the Polish intelligence network in western and southwestern Europe.
The first
gas van or "dushegubka" (literary - 'soul-destroyer') was used for mass executions in USSR by the
NKVD in 1936. It was invented by the Chief of the Administrative Department of the NKVD in the Moscow region
Berg Isay Davidovich. The
Gestapo learned about this method in about 1940, when close collaboration & information exchange with the NKVD was established. Starting in December 1941, the Nazis used gas vans for the execution of Jews.
Further Information
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