Sunday, December 8, 2019

The Gestapo

The Gestapo was a Secret Service Organization which acted as the police force for the Germany's Nazi party. The Gestapo was founded in 1933 by the Prussian minister Hermann Goering. He created the Gestapo by removing some very skilled political and espionage units from the Prussian police force, replaced these units with Nazi's, and then used these units to create a private police force for himself called the Gestapo. However, Goering's private police force did not last very long, because in 1934 Heinrich Himmler, leader of the SS (Schutzstaffel) was given full command of the Gestapo along with the other German police forces. Since Himmler was a very busy man, he allowed a man named Heinrich Mueller to take control of the Gestapo. Mueller merged the Gestapo with the Kriminal Polizei) Criminal Police to form the Sicherheitspolizei (Security Police). By the beginning of WWII during a SS reorganization, the Sicherheitspolizei and the SS merged to create the Reichshicherheitshauptamt (Reich Security Central Office) which was made to unify all the separate Nazi security forces into one.
The Gestapo were able to ignore all civil restraints which might stop them from doing their police work. This enabled the Gestapo to target certain groups of people like Jews, Leftists, and Intellectuals because they did not need a reason to arrest them. Many of these arrested people were thrown into concentration camps where they would often be sentenced to death. This behavior continued until the war ended in 1945.
After the war ended, many of the high ranking members of the Gestapo were tried at the Nuremberg trials for committing war crimes. Out of the 22 who were tried, 19 were convicted, 12 were given the death penalty, and the rest received jail sentences which varied in length. The only high ranking member of the Gestapo who wasn't tried at Nuremberg was Heinrich Mueller who went missing after the war ended, and while his date of death is unknown, many speculate he died in May 1945.

https://www.britannica.com/topic/Gestapo
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gestapo

3 comments:

  1. I enjoyed how you went more in depth about how the Gestapo was created and how many organizations combined to form it. Your post made me want to research how the Gestapo enforced its policies. I found out that many times, the Gestapo relied heavily on public support to detain people as they were severely lacking in officers. The Gestapo also used abused the idea of "protective custody" to jail people without judicial review. "Protective custody" in the minds of the Gestapo, was this idea that since enemies of the state were so hated, they needed to confine and protect them from German citizens. The Gestapo used this logic to arrest and detain many people without judicial review.

    https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/gestapo

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  2. I found this post interesting at describing the history around the creation and the control of power within the Gestapo force. Something I wanted to further find details on was the actual efforts by this force. One concept the Gestapo often used was "Protective Custody", which was a claim that public hate against an individual justifies their arrest without judicial review. This allowed Gestapo forces to arrest and hold people in concentration camps without any judicial process. An estimated 100,000 Germans were held in camps through this method. One of the worst offensives that the Gestapo had was the Einsatzgruppen offensive, that dictated the mobile killing of over 1.5 million Jewish people. This unit was extremely prevalent during the invasion of Poland, where many of such units were mobilized domestically in order to oppress scapegoat minorities said to be acting out during the conflict.


    https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/gestapo
    https://www.britannica.com/topic/Einsatzgruppen

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  3. I enjoyed reading this post and I like how you discussed how the Gestapo came to be and the variety of powers it exercised without restraint. Upon doing additional research, it was surprising to read how the Gestapo could arbitrarily order the release, torture, or murder from prisoners and how there was a sector of this secret police force called "deployment groups". These groups were essentially death squads that would accompany the army and kill Jews, among others, when they were in Russia and Poland.
    https://www.britannica.com/topic/Gestapo

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