Gestapo
The Geheime Staatspolizei, was the official secret police of Nazi Germany and in German-occupied Europe.
The force was created by Hermann Göring in 1933 by combining the various political police agencies of Prussia into one organisation. On 20 April 1934, oversight of the Gestapo passed to the head of the Schutzstaffel, Heinrich Himmler, who was also appointed Chief of German Police by Hitler in 1936. Instead of being exclusively a Prussian state agency, the Gestapo became a national one as a sub-office of the Sicherheitspolizei. From 27 September 1939, it was administered by the Reich Security Main Office. It became known as Amt 4 of the RSHA and was considered a sister organisation to the Sicherheitsdienst.
The Gestapo committed widespread atrocities during its existence. The power of the Gestapo was used to focus upon political opponents, ideological dissenters, career criminals, the Sinti and Roma population, handicapped persons, homosexuals, and, above all, the Jews. Those arrested by the Gestapo were often held without judicial process, and political prisoners throughout Germany—and from 1941, throughout the occupied territories under the Night and Fog Decree —simply disappeared while in Gestapo custody. Contrary to popular perception, the Gestapo was actually a relatively small organization with limited surveillance capability; still it proved extremely effective due to the willingness of ordinary Germans to report on fellow citizens. During World War II, the Gestapo played a key role in the Holocaust. After the war ended, the Gestapo was declared a criminal organisation by the International Military Tribunal at the Nuremberg trials, and several top Gestapo members were sentenced to death.
History
After Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany, Hermann Göring—future commander of the Luftwaffe and the number-two man in the Nazi Party—was named Interior Minister of Prussia. This gave Göring 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 Geheime Staatspolizei, which was abbreviated by a post office clerk for a franking stamp and became known as the "Gestapo". He originally wanted to name it the Secret Police Office, but the German initials "GPA" looked and sounded too similar to those of the Soviet State Political Directorate.The first commander of the Gestapo was Rudolf Diels, a protégé of Göring, with the title of chief of Abteilung Ia of the Prussian Secret Police. Diels was best known as the primary interrogator of Marinus van der Lubbe after the Reichstag fire. In late 1933, the Reich Interior Minister Wilhelm Frick wanted to integrate all the police forces of the German states under his control. Göring outflanked him by removing the Prussian political and intelligence departments from the state interior ministry. Göring 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 a Land and local matter. In this, he ran into conflict with Schutzstaffel chief Heinrich Himmler who was police chief of the second most powerful German state, Bavaria. Frick did not have the political power to take on Göring by himself so he allied with Himmler. With Frick's support, Himmler took over the political police in state after state. Soon only Prussia was left.
File:Bundesarchiv Bild 183-R96954, Berlin, Hermann Göring ernennt Himmler zum Leiter der Gestapo.jpg|thumb|upright|left|Heinrich Himmler and Hermann Göring at the meeting to formally hand over control of the Gestapo
Concerned that Diels was not ruthless enough to effectively counteract the power of the Sturmabteilung, Göring handed over control of the Gestapo 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. Himmler and Heydrich both immediately began installing their own personnel in select positions, several of whom were directly from the Bavarian Political Police, such as Heinrich Müller, Franz Josef Huber, and Josef Meisinger. Many of the Gestapo employees in the newly established offices were young and highly educated in a wide variety of academic fields and moreover, represented a new generation of National Socialist adherents, who were hard-working, efficient, and prepared to carry the Nazi state forward through the persecution of their political opponents.
By the spring of 1934, Himmler's SS controlled the SD and the Gestapo, but for him, there was still a problem, as technically the SS was subordinated to the SA, which was under the command of Ernst Röhm. Himmler wanted to free himself entirely from Röhm, whom he viewed as an obstacle. Röhm's position was menacing as more than 4.5 million men fell under his command once the militias and veterans organisations were absorbed by the SA, a fact which fuelled Röhm's aspirations; his dream of fusing the SA and Reichswehr together was undermining Hitler's relationships with the leadership of Germany's armed forces. Several Nazi chieftains, among them Göring, Joseph Goebbels, Rudolf Hess, and Himmler, began a concerted campaign to convince Hitler to take action against Röhm. Both the SD and Gestapo released information concerning an imminent putsch by the SA. Once persuaded, Hitler acted by setting into action Himmler's SS, who then proceeded to murder over 100 of Hitler's identified antagonists. The Gestapo supplied the information which implicated the SA and ultimately enabled Himmler and Heydrich to emancipate themselves entirely from the organisation. For the Gestapo, the next two years following the Night of the Long Knives, a term describing the putsch against Röhm and the SA, were characterised by "behind-the-scenes political wrangling over policing".
On 17 June 1936, Hitler decreed the unification of all police forces in Germany and named Himmler as Chief of German Police. This action effectively merged the police into the SS and removed it from Frick's control. Himmler was nominally subordinate to Frick as police chief, but as Reichsführer-SS, he answered only to Hitler. This move also gave Himmler operational control over Germany's entire detective force. The Gestapo became a national state agency. Himmler also gained authority over all of Germany's uniformed law enforcement agencies, which were amalgamated into the new Ordnungspolizei, which became a national agency under SS general Kurt Daluege. Shortly thereafter, Himmler created the Kriminalpolizei, merging it with the Gestapo into the Sicherheitspolizei, under Heydrich's command. Heinrich Müller 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 blank cheque to operate without judicial review—in effect, putting it above the law. 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, a Prussian administrative court had ruled that the Gestapo's actions were not subject to judicial review. The SS officer Werner Best, one-time 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 Germany—with the exception of the Order Police—were consolidated into the Reich Security Main Office, headed by Heydrich. The Gestapo became Amt IV of RSHA and Müller became the Gestapo Chief, with Heydrich as his immediate superior. After Heydrich's 1942 assassination, Himmler assumed the leadership of the RSHA until January 1943, when Ernst Kaltenbrunner was appointed chief. Müller remained the Gestapo Chief. His direct subordinate Adolf Eichmann headed the Gestapo's Office of Resettlement and then its Office of Jewish Affairs. During the Holocaust, Eichmann's department within the Gestapo coordinated the mass deportation of European Jews to the Nazis' extermination camps.
The power of the Gestapo included the use of what was called Protective custody —"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. In addition, political prisoners throughout Germany—and from 1941, throughout the occupied territories under the Night and Fog Decree —simply disappeared while in Gestapo custody. Up to 30 April 1944, at least 6,639 persons were arrested under Nacht und Nebel orders. However, the total number of people who disappeared as a result of this decree is not known.
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, Gestapo officials believed that they had neutralised Polish intelligence activities. However, certain Polish information about the movement of German police and SS units to the East during 1941 German invasion of the Soviet Union was similar to information British intelligence secretly obtained 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 Order Police battalions sent to occupied areas of the Soviet Union in October 1941 that 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 6 June 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.
In Austria, there were groups still loyal to the Habsburgs, who unlike most across the Greater German Reich, remained determined to resist the Nazis. These groups became a special focus of the Gestapo because of their insurrectionist goals—the overthrow of the Nazi regime, the re-establishment of an independent Austria under Habsburg leadership—and Hitler's hatred of the Habsburg family. Hitler vehemently rejected the centuries' old Habsburg pluralist principles of "live and let live" with regard to ethnic groups, peoples, minorities, religions, cultures and languages. Habsburg loyalist Karl Burian's plan to blow up the Gestapo headquarters in Vienna represented a unique attempt to act aggressively against the Gestapo. Burian's group had also set up a secret courier service to Otto von Habsburg in Belgium. Individuals in Austrian resistance groups led by Heinrich Maier also managed to pass along the plans and the location of production facilities for V-1, V-2 rockets, Tiger tanks, and aircraft to the Allies. The Maier group informed very early about the mass murder of Jews. The resistance group, later discovered by the Gestapo because of a double agent of the Abwehr, was in contact with Allen Dulles, the head of the US Office of Strategic Services in Switzerland. Although Maier and the other group members were severely tortured, the Gestapo did not uncover the essential involvement of the resistance group in Operation Crossbow and Operation Hydra.