GESTAPO
The Geheime Staatspolizei (German
for "secret state police"), commonly
abbreviated as Gestapo, formed the official state secret
police force of Nazi Germany.
Recruited from professional police officers, its role and
organisation was quickly established by Hermann Goering
after Hitler gained power in March 1933. Rudolf Diels was
the first head of the organization, initially called
Department 1A of the Prussian State Police.
The role of the Gestapo was to investigate and combat "all tendencies dangerous to the State." They had the authority to investigate treason, espionage and sabotage cases, and cases of criminal attacks on the Party and State.
The Gestapo's actions were not restricted by the law or subject to judicial review. The Nazi jurist, Dr. Werner Best, stated, "As long as the [Gestapo]... carries out the will of the leadership, it is acting legally." The Gestapo was specifically exempted from being responsible to administrative courts, where citizens normally could sue the state to conform to laws.
The power of the Gestapo most open to misuse was Schutzhaft or "protective custody" - a euphemism for the power to imprison people without judicial proceedings, typically in concentration camps. The person imprisoned even had to sign their own Schutzhaftbefehl (the document declaring the person was to be imprisoned). Normally this signature was forced by torture.
In 1934, Goering, under pressure from Heinrich Himmler, agreed to grant control of the Gestapo to the SS. In 1936 Reinhard Heydrich became head of the Gestapo and Heinrich Muller chief of operations.
During World War II, the Gestapo was expanded to around 45,000 members. It helped control conquered areas of Europe and identify Jews, Socialists, homosexuals and others for transportation to camps.
Organization
When the Gestapo was founded, the organization was already a well-established bureaucratic mechanism, having been created out of the already existing Prussian Secret Police. In 1934, the Gestapo was transferred from the Prussian Interior Ministry to the authority of the SS, and for the next five years the Gestapo underwent a massive expansion.
In 1939, the entire Gestapo was placed under the
authority of the RSHA, a main office of the SS. Within
the RSHA, the Gestapo was known as "Amt IV".
The internal organization of the group was as follows:
Referat N: Central Intelligence Office
The Central Command Office of the Gestapo, formed in
1941. Before 1939, the Gestapo command was under the
authority of the office of the Sicherheitspolizei und SD,
to which answered the Commanding General of the Gestapo.
Between 1939 and 1941, the Gestapo was run directly
through the overall command of the
Reichsicherheitshauptamt (RSHA).
Department A (Enemies)
* Communists (A1)
* Countersabotage (A2)
* Reactionaries and Liberals (A3)
* Assassinations (A4)
Department B (Sects and Churches)
* Catholics (B1)
* Protestants (B2)
* Freemasons (B3)
* Jews (B4)
* Coloured People (B5)
Department C (Administration and Party Affairs)
The central administrative office of the Gestapo, responsible for card files of all personnel.
Department D (Occupied Territories)
* Opponents of the Regime (D1)
* Churches and Sects (D2)
* Records and Party Matters (D3)
* Western Territories (D4)
* Counter-espionage (D5)
Department E (Counter-Intelligence)
* 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 were known as Gestapostellen and Gestapoleitstellen. These offices answered to a local commander known as the Inspektor der Sicherheitspolizei und SD who, in turn, was under the dual command of Referat N of the Gestapo and also local SS and Police Leaders. The classic image of the Gestapo officer, dressed in trench coat and hat, can be attributed to Gestapo personnel assigned to local 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 Goering was asked by foreign correspondents to respond to a hot rumour that General von Schleicher had been murdered in his home. Goering stated that the Gestapo had attempted to arrest Schleicher, but that he had been “shot while attempting to resist arrest”.
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 on an
as-needed basis to such formations as the Einsatzgruppen.
Such personnel, assigned to these auxiliary duties, were
typically removed from the Gestapo chain of command and
fell under the authority of other branches of the SS.
The Daily Operations of the Gestapo
Contrary to popular belief, the Gestapo was not an omnipotent agency that had its agents in every nook and cranny of German society. So-called “V-men” as undercover Gestapo agents were known only to be used to infiltrate Social Democratic and Communist opposition groups, but these cases were the exception, not the rule.
As the analysis of the Gestapostellen done by the historian Robert Gellately has established, for the most part the Gestapo was made of bureaucrats and clerical workers who depended upon denunciations by ordinary Germans for their information. Indeed, the Gestapo was overwhelmed with denunciations and spent most of its time sorting out the credible denunciations from less credible ones. 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 offices that struggled with the paper-load caused by so many denunciations. The ratio of Gestapo officers to the general public was extremely lop-sided; for example, in the region of Lower Franconia, which had about one million people in the 1930s, there was only one Gestapo office for the entire region, which had 28 people attached to it, of whom half were clerical workers.
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.
At the Nuremberg Trials the entire organisation was charged with crimes against humanity.