The Gestapo

[The SC]

The Gestapo Still Sets the Bar for Evil
Decades before the NSA mined its first scrap of data, Hitler’s Gestapo—the worst of the worst of the Nazis—perfected the dark art of domestic spying and intimidation.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/contributors/james-a--warren.html
Werner Best, the chief ideologist of the Nazi secret state police—the infamous Gestapo—described the organization he served loyally for many years as the “doctor to the German national body.” It was necessary, wrote Best, “to identify each symptom in good time and locate the destructive germs—whether they have arisen through internal corruption or have been carried in from the outside by deliberate poisoning—before using all appropriate means to get rid of them.” Like Best, the agency’s chief architect and overseer, Heinrich Himmler, Reichsfuhrer of the SS and chief of all German police forces, typically spoke of the Gestapo’s work in biological metaphors, and encouraged its agents to do the same, for the Gestapo, in the eyes of its leaders, was ultimately in the health business.

That they could think this way about what this organization did is appalling, to put it mildly, for one of the many revelations that authors Carsten Dams and Michael Stolle include in The Gestapo: Power and Terror in the Third Reich, is that the Gestapo in the contemporary popular imagination differs very little from the real thing, back when it was doing a great deal of extremely nasty work in the darkest days of the 20th century. The Geheime Staatspolizei—Gestapo, for short—was indeed a frighteningly efficient bureaucracy of thugs, killers, and very meticulous clerks. Its field agents were masters in the black arts of terror and mass murder, meted out not infrequently with a hefty dose of sadism.

First in Germany during Hitler’s ascendancy, then in Nazi-occupied Europe, everyone lived in fear of a visit from the cool, hard men in the leather overcoats and black fedoras. What made the Gestapo so feared, of course, was that it had a monopoly on the power to place real or imagined enemies of the state under “protective custody” in concentration camps, and keep them there as long as it pleased. Many thousands held in such custody did not survive. Gestapo decisions regarding protective custody were not subject to review in the criminal courts. Victims had neither voice nor redress. The director of the Gestapo answered only to Heinrich Himmler, and Himmler, only to the Fuhrer himself.

Eerily, the Gestapo performed a function that went well beyond the brief of the secret security services in most other totalitarian states. According to Dams and Stolle, it formed “the central core of a political administration that intended to shape every aspect of the population’s life.” As such, it investigated internal and external enemies of the state and persecuted them with great severity and violence—that’s the drill for secret police everywhere.

But it went considerably beyond that. The organization was given pretty much a free hand to define and categorize those enemies as to the severity of the threat they posed the German state, and persecute them as they saw fit. As “the spearhead of the terror apparatus of the Third Reich,” they also evaluated ordinary Germans’ loyalty by monitoring their level of commitment to Nazi ideology.

The Geheime Staatspolizei had been formed in the mid ’30s through a series of deft political power plays by Himmler and his protégé, the suave and ruthless Obergruppenfuhrer-SS (Lt. General) Reinhard Heydrich. They began by wresting Party control of the highly professional state police forces of Prussia and Bavaria from the interior ministry of the German state. By 1936 they had conflated these and other police institutions with several Party security organizations to form the nucleus of the wartime Gestapo. But the grasping ambitions and rapid conquests of the Reich from 1939 on constantly placed new demands on the agency, so in fact, write Dams and Stolle, it was “in a state of perpetual metamorphosis” until the closing days of the war.

Still, at its largest in 1944, the Gestapo had only 31,000 agents to fulfill its grim brief across all of occupied Europe. During and after the war, conventional wisdom had it that the Gestapo’s seeming omniscience was due to its having an agent in every bar, train station, and street corner. This was a myth widely encouraged by the Gestapo for obvious reasons. In fact, the organization’s protracted success was due to other, more subtle, factors.

Its notable esprit and aggressiveness was forged by a rigorous and demanding ideological indoctrination program developed under the watchful eye of Himmler himself. Ordinary policemen were transformed into ideological zealots, trained to root out communists, homosexuals, Slavs, gypsies, the work-shy, and most of all, the Jews, and persecute them without mercy, for mercy was nothing more than weakness.

In keeping with the Gestapo’s fondness for biological metaphors, all these people were described as “vermin” festering within the Reich, endangering the health of the Nazi state body. Victims were stripped of their names and identified only by a number in order to further dehumanize them in the eyes of the perpetrators.

In the ’90s, a number of scholars challenged the formidable reputation of the Gestapo as a ruthlessly effective intelligence-gathering and persecution machine, arguing that its effectiveness was only made possible by the collusion of millions of ordinary German citizens who chose to denounce their own neighbors to agents of the state. Dams and Stolle make a compelling case that these scholars have it wrong. Civilian denunciations, while an important source of information leading to prosecution, were hardly the telling factor in most arrests. Far more important were the Gestapo’s close, and surprisingly friction-free, relations with a welter of other state and party organizations also preoccupied with security in the Reich, particularly the Waffen-SS (the military wing of Hitler’s personal “Protective Squadron”) and the SS’s intelligence gathering unit, the SD, but also some two million Nazi Party block wardens, the railway security police, post office employees, and ordinary civil servants. For all these people, co-operating with the Gestapo by reporting rumors, deviant behavior, or even just loose talk, was invariably a good career move.

Chillingly, there can be no question that the Geheime Staatspolizei’s aura of omniscience was due in no small measure to its special competence in gathering and organizing huge quantities of data on resistance movements, potentially subversive individuals, informers, industrial firms, publications, even other security agencies, and making that information readily accessible to its field agents through an ingeniously contrived system of multi-colored index cards. One shudders to think what the Gestapo might have done with just a handful of the data-mining tools currently employed by the NSA.

As in any dynamic institution, and the Gestapo certainly was one, priorities changed considerably over time. First, it turned its hand to the elimination of organized resistance within Germany itself. Having dispensed with the leadership of all alternative political parties and resistance movements through imprisonment and execution, the Gestapo in 1938 turned its hand to racial persecution and the deportation of German Jews in particular. Although the agency played no role in the formulation of the Reich’s policy aims concerning the Jews, it quietly took the lead in systematizing their deportation.

A watershed event in the systemization process was the Gestapo’s brutal deportation of 26,000 Jews in the immediate aftermath of the “Night of Broken Glass,” November 9, 1938. In the wake of this operation, the Gestapo on its own initiative issued a series of public directives that, bit by bit, denied even the most basic human rights to Germans of the Jewish faith.

After World War II began, a very pro-active Gestapo under the directorship of Heinrich Muller began its reign of terror over the remaining Jews in Germany, breaking into homes, confiscating assets, and placing whomever it pleased in concentration camps, often without warrants on the flimsiest of charges.

As the Wehrmacht plunged ever deeper into both eastern and western Europe, the “doctor” of the Nazi state followed close behind, for disease, threats to the body from within and without, lurked everywhere within the conquered nations. It was in occupied Europe, after the implementation of the “final solution” in January 1942, that the Gestapo slid precipitously into a nightmarish world of depravity, atrocity, and criminality, insuring its future reputation as one of the vilest organizations ever devised by human beings.

In the conquered territories, write Dams and Stolle, the Gestapo operated with “unrestrained violence,” and “without the slightest legal foundation from the outset.” The only law there was Hitler’s mandate. The Fuhrer’s call for extermination of the enemies of the Nazi state within the occupied countries was a task to be fulfilled by many organizations, especially a new and malevolent instrument of police power—the “murder commandos” known as the Einsatzgruppen. The main function of these units was to “purify” a particular area of operations by rounding up enemies of the people, execute them, typically with small arms, and bury them in mass graves expeditiously.

Originally created and led by SS officers, the Einsatzgruppen soon morphed into multi-ethnic battalions, led by Gestapo field officers. The central office in Berlin strongly encouraged all agents to serve at least one tour of “foreign deployment” in order to familiarize themselves with cutting edge techniques of racial cleansing—and to make their own unique contribution to the cause. Many agents remained in occupied Europe indefinitely, for there was literally no end to the work that needed to be done.

In these operations, normal police work—gathering evidence, conducting interrogations, obtaining witness statements—was dispensed with for the sake of enhancing “efficiency.” Time was of the essence. Seven thousand Jews alone were murdered by the Einsatzgruppen in a matter of a few weeks after the Polish campaign in the fall of 1939. In the Baltic states, German records indicate that the Einsatzgruppen units killed 218,000 Jews by February 1, 1942. All over Europe, the Gestapo orchestrated mass killings on a daily basis.

In one of his most stark and revealing public utterances, Heinrich Himmler told a rapt audience of SS and Gestapo officers in 1943, “Most of you will know what it is like to see 100 corpses lying side by side, or 500 or 1,000 of them. To have coped with this and—except for cases of human weakness—to have remained decent, that has made us tough.” Incomprehensible though it might seem to contemporary readers, Himmler was telling the truth—at least as far as belief was concerned. By and large, the men and women who served in the Gestapo believed they were decent people engaged in difficult and ugly but entirely necessary work.

Though relatively few in number, the Gestapo’s activities on the frontiers of Nazi-occupied Europe were hardly restricted to work with the murder commandos. They bore primary responsibility for ferreting out the resistance movements in the occupied nations, and “formed the core of the terror and extermination network.” As such, it fell to its officers to organize local police forces, forced laborers, railroad officials, Jewish collaborators, as well as SS and Wehrmacht units, to clear ghettos, round up Jews, and ship them off to extermination camps all over Eastern Europe. In the closing months of the war, the Gestapo turned its wrath once again inward, against ordinary Germans who had come to see the insanity and futility of continuing to fight in a lost cause. An apocalyptic mood took hold inside the organization: “The more helplessly the regime was exposed to its internal enemies, the more blood thirsty its attacks on all those inside its borders whom it identified as enemies.”

The Gestapo: Power and Terror in the Third Reich draws on all the latest scholarship to offer readers a compelling overview of what the organization was, what it did, and how it changed over time. Like many other penetrating explorations of the Nazi killing machine, it raises some very disturbing and ultimately unanswerable questions about the nature evil and cruelty in the world. A fine book all around, but not a book for the faint of heart.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/07/13/the-gestapo-still-sets-the-bar-for-evil.html

 

[The SC]

The Gestapo is Born

Although the Gestapo is generally associated with SS Leader Heinrich Himmler, it was actually founded by Hermann Göring in April 1933.

Upon becoming Chancellor of Germany, Adolf Hitler had appointed Göring as Minister of the Interior for the State of Prussia, Germany's biggest and most important state, which controlled two thirds of the country, including the capital, Berlin, and the big industrial centers. As Minister of the Interior, Göring thereby had control of the police.

The first thing he did was to prohibit regular uniformed police from interfering with Nazi Brownshirts out in the streets. This meant that innocent German citizens had no one to turn to as they were being beaten up by rowdy young storm troopers drunk with their newfound power and quite often drunk on beer. These young Nazi toughs took full advantage of police leniency to loot shops at will and terrorize Jews or anyone else unfortunate enough to be caught in the wrong place at the wrong time.

German citizens are stopped and searched by plain-clothes and uniformed police in March 1933 under the pretext they might be concealing weapons. Below: Gestapo Headquarters in Berlin, located at No. 8 Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse - a frightful address from 1933 onward.

Below: The main hall inside Gestapo HQ - a building that had once been an art museum.

Below: Transition of power in April 1933 as Göring (right) yields control of the Gestapo to Himmler.

Below: Reinhard Heydrich hard at work in 1934. He displayed genius for creating the vast organization behind the Nazi police state.

Below: Journalist Carl von Ossietzky finds himself in the grips of Heydrich's police apparatus. As editor-in-chief of Die Weltbühne (The World Stage) newspaper Ossietzky spoke out against militarism and fascism. Arrested the day after the Reichstag fire, he remained in Gestapo custody for five years, despite receiving the 1935 Nobel Peace Prize. Although in poor health, he was subjected to harsh treatment in concentration camps and finally succumbed to tuberculosis in May 1938.

Next, Göring purged the Berlin police department of politically unreliable cops and had 50,000 storm troopers sworn in as special police auxiliaries (Hilfspolizei). Now the storm troopers had actual power of arrest and they relished its use. Jails were soon overflowing with people taken into "protective custody" resulting in the need for large outside prison camps, the birth of the concentration camp system.

Having compromised the uniformed divisions, Göring next turned his attention to the plain-clothes police. On April 26, 1933, a decree was issued creating the Secret Police Office (Geheime Polizei Amt) which quickly became known as the GPA. But this abbreviation was far too similar to the GPU abbreviation used by the Soviet Political Police in Russia. Thus, the name was changed to Secret State Police (Geheime Staats Polizei). The actual term 'Gestapo' was supposedly created by a Berlin postal official who wanted a name that would fit on a regulation-sized postal rubber stamp. Gestapo was derived from seven letters within the full name Geheime Staats Polizei. Unknowingly, the postal official had invented one of the most notorious names in history.

Göring promptly began using the Gestapo to silence Hitler's political opponents in Berlin and surrounding areas and also to enhance his own personal power. Much to his delight, Göring discovered that the old Prussian state police had kept many secret files on the private lives of top Nazis, which he studied with delight.

Göring appointed Rudolf Diels as the first Gestapo chief. Although Diels was not a Party member, he had been a member of the Prussian Ministry of the Interior since 1930 and had served as a senior adviser in the police. Göring took full advantage of Diels' knowledge on how to operate a political police force. He also encouraged Diels to maintain and expand the secret files on Nazi leaders. The cunning and ambitious Göring would use that information to help solidify his own position within the Nazi Party.

Another ambitious Nazi, SS-Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler, soon set his sights on the Gestapo. A fierce rivalry then developed between Himmler and Göring, with both men working against each other to curry favor with Hitler as to who would actually run the Gestapo. On April 20, 1934, after much infighting, Göring decided to cede the Gestapo to Himmler and his associate, Reinhard Heydrich, who took over as Gestapo chief two days later.

The ever-ambitious Göring had set his sights on something much bigger than being a policeman. The former World War I flying ace and recipient of the prestigious Pour le Mérite medal fancied himself as a military leader. He wanted to take charge of a rejuvenated German Air Force. His interest in police matters and the Gestapo had diminished as Hitler's plans for a huge military buildup became apparent.

Within a few years, Himmler became Chief of the German Police in addition to his duties as SS leader. Heydrich, his number two man, proved to be something of a genius in creating a hugely efficient national intelligence system that kept tabs on everyone. No one was exempt from Gestapo snooping, no matter how high up in the Nazi hierarchy.

On February 10, 1936, the Nazi Reichstag passed the 'Gestapo Law' which included the following paragraph: "Neither the instructions nor the affairs of the Gestapo will be open to review by the administrative courts." This meant the Gestapo was now above the law and there could be no legal appeal regarding anything it did.

Indeed, the Gestapo became a law unto itself. It was entirely possible for someone to be arrested, interrogated and sent to a concentration camp for incarceration or summary execution, without any outside legal procedure.

Justice in Hitler's Germany was completely arbitrary, depending on the whim of the man in power, the man who had you in his grip. The legal policy as proclaimed by Hitler in 1938 was: "All means, even if they are not in conformity with existing laws and precedents, are legal if they subserve the will of the Führer."

Surprisingly, the Gestapo was never actually a very big organization. At its peak it employed only about 40,000 individuals, including office personnel and the plain-clothes agents. But each Gestapo agent operated at the center of a large web of spies and informants. The problem for the average citizen was that no one ever knew for sure just who those informants were. It could be anyone, your milkman, the old lady across the street, a quiet co-worker, even a schoolboy. As a result, fear ruled the day. Most people realized the necessity of self-censorship and generally kept their mouths shut politically, unless they had something positive to say.

Anyone foolish enough to say something risky or tell an anti-Nazi joke in mixed company might get a knock on the door in the middle of the night or a tap on the shoulder while walking along the street. Letters were also sent out demanding an appearance at No. 8 Prinz Albrecht Strasse, the Gestapo headquarters in Berlin, to answer a few questions. The Gestapo prison center in Berlin (the Columbia-Haus) became notorious as a place where pedestrians strolling outside the building could hear screaming coming from inside.

Gestapo interrogation methods included: repeated near drownings of a prisoner in a bathtub filled with ice-cold water; electric shocks by attaching wires to hands, feet, ears and genitalia; crushing a man's testicles in a special vice; securing a prisoner's wrists behind his back then hanging him by the arms causing shoulder dislocation; beatings with rubber nightsticks and cow-hide whips; and burning flesh with matches or a soldering iron.

As the SS organization rapidly expanded in the late 1930s, the super-ambitious Heydrich acquired immense powers and responsibilities. One of his main accomplishments was the reorganization and bureaucratic streamlining of the entire Nazi police state. In September 1939, just after the outbreak of war, he created the Reich Main Security Office (RSHA). This new organization had seven main branches. The Gestapo was designated as the fourth branch and was now headed by Heinrich Müller (nicknamed as Gestapo Müller). Back in 1931, as a member of the Munich police, Müller had successfully hushed-up the scandal surrounding the suicide of Hitler's niece Geli Raubal. Thus he had proven himself to be a very dependable man.

Section B4 of the Gestapo dealt exclusively with the "Jewish question" and came under the permanent control of Adolf Eichmann. This energetic and efficient organizer would keep the trains running on time from all over Europe to Nazi death camps located in occupied Poland during the Final Solution of the Jewish question.

The Gestapo followed Hitler's armies into every country during the conquest of Europe. By pitting neighbor against neighbor, Gestapo agents established the same kind of terror mechanism in each occupied country that had worked so well back in Germany.

In 1942, the Gestapo took things a step further via Hitler's Night and Fog Decree. Suspected anti-Nazis would now vanish without a trace into the misty night never to be seen again. The desired effect as stated by Himmler was to "leave the family and the population uncertain as to the fate of the offender." The victims were mostly from France, Belgium and Holland. They were usually arrested in the middle of the night and whisked off to far away prisons for torture-interrogation, eventually arriving at a concentration camp in Germany if they survived.

From the very beginning of Hitler's regime, the ever-present threat of arrest and indefinite confinement in a concentration camp robbed the German people of their personal freedom and left them as inhibited, dutifully obedient subjects.

But even this was not enough. The Nazis wanted to change people's thinking. And so, just as they had purged their hated political enemies, they began a campaign to purge hated "unGerman" ideas. That effort started in May 1933 with the worst of all crimes against human thought and culture – the burning of books.

Reinhard Heydrich, Head of the Gestapo, Who Hitler Called
“The Man with the Iron Heart”

Few men in all of human history have been responsible for such monstrous acts as Reinhard Heydrich. The head of the Gestapo, the Nazi secret police, he oversaw the Kristallnacht attacks on Jews in Germany and Austria and was one of the architects of the Holocaust. His assassination by British-trained Czech agents provoked one more atrocity in the name of the Nazi Adolf Hitler called “the man with the iron heart”.

Early Years

Heydrich as Reichsmarine cadet in 1922 / PD-US
Born in Halle, Germany, on March 7th, 1904, Reinhard Heydrich’s life was affected early on by the anti-Semitism common in Europe at the time. A misunderstanding about his grandparents led people to assume that he had Jewish ancestry. As a result, he and his family faced anti-Semitic abuse despite not being Jewish. Heydrich’s response was to embrace that anti-Semitism, using hatred of Jews as a defence against the accusation that he was one.

Heydrich was too young to fight in the First World War, but in its aftermath, he joined the Märacker Freikorps, an anti-revolutionary right-wing militia, the Halle home defence volunteers, and then the Deutscher Schutz und Trutzbund, an anti-Semitic nationalist group. He had picked his side in a nation divided by the bitter fallout from the war.

A Troubled Career
In March 1922, Heydrich became an officer cadet in the German navy. Rumours of a Jewish connection followed him there, earning him the nickname “blond Moses”. But his skills overcame what many saw as a taint, and he received positive reports and promotions. By December 1930, he was a first lieutenant.

In April 1931, he was found guilty of breach of promise to an ex-girlfriend and discharged by a court under the navy’s strict rules of honour. The parents of his fiancée, Lina van Osten, refused to allow them to marry until he was employed again.

Rise Through the Nazi Party

1939 photograph; shown from left to right are Franz Josef Huber, Arthur Nebe, Heinrich Himmler, Reinhard Heydrich and Heinrich Müller, planning the investigation of the bomb assassination attempt on Adolf Hitler of 8 November 1939 in Munich. – Bundesarchiv CC-BY-SA 3.0

The van Ostens were Nazi party members, and Heydrich followed them into the party in June 1931. At the time, Himmler was planning a counter-intelligence division for the SS. After impressing Himmler in an interview, Heydrich got the job of running this service, starting on August 1st, 1931.

Heydrich once again did well in his work, and swiftly rose in rank. When he married Lina that December, he was made a Sturmbannführer (major) by Himmler as a wedding present. By June 1934, he had worked with Himmler to separate the SS from the SA and gone on to become head of the Gestapo. When internal party conflicts set the SA under Ernst Röhm against Hitler, Heydrich and Himmler forged evidence proving Röhm a traitor, leading to his death, along with that of other political opponents in the Night of the Long Knives.

By turning on Röhm, the godfather of his son, Heydrich ensured the gratitude of Hitler and the power of his own Gestapo.

By Bundesarchiv, Bild 146-1969-054-16 / Hoffmann, Heinrich / CC-BY-SA, CC BY-SA 3.0 de
Kristallnacht and the Final Solution
In 1936, the Gestapo Law came into force, allowing the Gestapo to imprison or kill anyone as long as they were carrying out Hitler’s will.

Heydrich played a prominent part in organising the Kristallnacht (Crystal Night) in 1938, in which Jewish buildings were attacked and 30,000 Jews seized and sent to concentration camps. He also helped plan Operation Himmler, the fake attacks on German buildings used to justify the 1939 invasion of Poland, the event that triggered the Second World War in Europe.

In January 1942, Heydrich outlined his plans for the most infamous of all Nazi actions – the “final solution to the Jewish question”, remembered as the Holocaust. Chairing the Wannsee Conference, he took charge of planning the death camps that would wipe out millions of innocent lives.


The Assassination

Heydrich’s Mercedes after the bombing. The damage to the rear wheel on the passenger side can be seen here. Bundesarchiv – CC-BY-SA 3.0
By now, Heydrich was Deputy Reich Protector of Bohemia and Moravia, effectively running this Nazi-occupied part of Czechoslovakia. The locals gave him nicknames such as “Hangman Heydrich” and “The Butcher of Prague” thanks to his brutal treatment of dissent, with hundreds killed and thousands sent to concentration camps.

The Czechs in exile wanted to punish the Nazis for their treatment of the country and to force the Allies to abandon the agreement giving Czech territory to Germany. To achieve this, two Czech agents trained by British special forces were sent to assassinate Heydrich – Jozef Gabčík and Jan Kubiš.

On May 27th, 1942, Gabčík and Kubiš ambushed Heydrich in his car, on the road from his château to Prague Castle. Heydrich was badly injured but initially survived.

Funeral in Berlin

Heydrich State Funeral Prague Castle 07.06.1942 source: heydrichiada.pardubice.eu
Despite the best available treatment, including care from Himmler’s personal physician, Heydrich became ill with an infection. On June 3rd, his fever seemed to drop, and he sat up to eat breakfast. Suddenly he collapsed, going into a coma. On June 4th at 4.30am, he died. The autopsy found that he had died of infection, with no evidence of poisoning or surgical error.

On June 6th, a torch-lit procession took Heydrich’s coffin to Prague Castle, where it was publicly displayed. Then he was taken to Berlin for a further ceremony on June 9th, at which Hitler placed Heydrich’s decorations on his funeral pillow. He was buried at the Invalidenfriedhof in Berlin.

The Aftermath
On the day of the attack on Heydrich, a state of emergency was declared in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. At least 5000 innocent Czechs were killed in reprisals, including 3000 Jews from Terezín.

The Allies praised the assassination of Heydrich. The reaction of the Czech population was different. Instead of rising in resistance as the Allies had hoped, they suffered guilt and recrimination over the heavy cost in lives for a single man.

On June 10th, a force of Nazis entered the mining village of Lidice, which they mistakenly believed had been linked to the attack. They killed all the men, sent the women and children away to camps, and wiped Lidice off the map, flattening it so thoroughly that there was nothing left to see.

This outraged people around the world, and particularly the miners of Staffordshire in England, who rallied to help in the village’s rebuilding. But as with Heydrich’s previous atrocities, the harm could not be undone. Even from beyond the grave, he had been responsible for the deaths of innocents.

https://www.warhistoryonline.com/wo...ead-gestapo-hitler-called-man-iron-heart.html

 

[Indika]

The Gestapo is Born

Although the Gestapo is generally associated with SS Leader Heinrich Himmler, it was actually founded by Hermann Göring in April 1933.

Upon becoming Chancellor of Germany, Adolf Hitler had appointed Göring as Minister of the Interior for the State of Prussia, Germany's biggest and most important state, which controlled two thirds of the country, including the capital, Berlin, and the big industrial centers. As Minister of the Interior, Göring thereby had control of the police.

The first thing he did was to prohibit regular uniformed police from interfering with Nazi Brownshirts out in the streets. This meant that innocent German citizens had no one to turn to as they were being beaten up by rowdy young storm troopers drunk with their newfound power and quite often drunk on beer. These young Nazi toughs took full advantage of police leniency to loot shops at will and terrorize Jews or anyone else unfortunate enough to be caught in the wrong place at the wrong time.

German citizens are stopped and searched by plain-clothes and uniformed police in March 1933 under the pretext they might be concealing weapons. Below: Gestapo Headquarters in Berlin, located at No. 8 Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse - a frightful address from 1933 onward.

Below: The main hall inside Gestapo HQ - a building that had once been an art museum.

Below: Transition of power in April 1933 as Göring (right) yields control of the Gestapo to Himmler.

Below: Reinhard Heydrich hard at work in 1934. He displayed genius for creating the vast organization behind the Nazi police state.

Below: Journalist Carl von Ossietzky finds himself in the grips of Heydrich's police apparatus. As editor-in-chief of Die Weltbühne (The World Stage) newspaper Ossietzky spoke out against militarism and fascism. Arrested the day after the Reichstag fire, he remained in Gestapo custody for five years, despite receiving the 1935 Nobel Peace Prize. Although in poor health, he was subjected to harsh treatment in concentration camps and finally succumbed to tuberculosis in May 1938.

Next, Göring purged the Berlin police department of politically unreliable cops and had 50,000 storm troopers sworn in as special police auxiliaries (Hilfspolizei). Now the storm troopers had actual power of arrest and they relished its use. Jails were soon overflowing with people taken into "protective custody" resulting in the need for large outside prison camps, the birth of the concentration camp system.

Having compromised the uniformed divisions, Göring next turned his attention to the plain-clothes police. On April 26, 1933, a decree was issued creating the Secret Police Office (Geheime Polizei Amt) which quickly became known as the GPA. But this abbreviation was far too similar to the GPU abbreviation used by the Soviet Political Police in Russia. Thus, the name was changed to Secret State Police (Geheime Staats Polizei). The actual term 'Gestapo' was supposedly created by a Berlin postal official who wanted a name that would fit on a regulation-sized postal rubber stamp. Gestapo was derived from seven letters within the full name Geheime Staats Polizei. Unknowingly, the postal official had invented one of the most notorious names in history.

Göring promptly began using the Gestapo to silence Hitler's political opponents in Berlin and surrounding areas and also to enhance his own personal power. Much to his delight, Göring discovered that the old Prussian state police had kept many secret files on the private lives of top Nazis, which he studied with delight.

Göring appointed Rudolf Diels as the first Gestapo chief. Although Diels was not a Party member, he had been a member of the Prussian Ministry of the Interior since 1930 and had served as a senior adviser in the police. Göring took full advantage of Diels' knowledge on how to operate a political police force. He also encouraged Diels to maintain and expand the secret files on Nazi leaders. The cunning and ambitious Göring would use that information to help solidify his own position within the Nazi Party.

Another ambitious Nazi, SS-Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler, soon set his sights on the Gestapo. A fierce rivalry then developed between Himmler and Göring, with both men working against each other to curry favor with Hitler as to who would actually run the Gestapo. On April 20, 1934, after much infighting, Göring decided to cede the Gestapo to Himmler and his associate, Reinhard Heydrich, who took over as Gestapo chief two days later.

The ever-ambitious Göring had set his sights on something much bigger than being a policeman. The former World War I flying ace and recipient of the prestigious Pour le Mérite medal fancied himself as a military leader. He wanted to take charge of a rejuvenated German Air Force. His interest in police matters and the Gestapo had diminished as Hitler's plans for a huge military buildup became apparent.

Within a few years, Himmler became Chief of the German Police in addition to his duties as SS leader. Heydrich, his number two man, proved to be something of a genius in creating a hugely efficient national intelligence system that kept tabs on everyone. No one was exempt from Gestapo snooping, no matter how high up in the Nazi hierarchy.

On February 10, 1936, the Nazi Reichstag passed the 'Gestapo Law' which included the following paragraph: "Neither the instructions nor the affairs of the Gestapo will be open to review by the administrative courts." This meant the Gestapo was now above the law and there could be no legal appeal regarding anything it did.

Indeed, the Gestapo became a law unto itself. It was entirely possible for someone to be arrested, interrogated and sent to a concentration camp for incarceration or summary execution, without any outside legal procedure.

Justice in Hitler's Germany was completely arbitrary, depending on the whim of the man in power, the man who had you in his grip. The legal policy as proclaimed by Hitler in 1938 was: "All means, even if they are not in conformity with existing laws and precedents, are legal if they subserve the will of the Führer."

Surprisingly, the Gestapo was never actually a very big organization. At its peak it employed only about 40,000 individuals, including office personnel and the plain-clothes agents. But each Gestapo agent operated at the center of a large web of spies and informants. The problem for the average citizen was that no one ever knew for sure just who those informants were. It could be anyone, your milkman, the old lady across the street, a quiet co-worker, even a schoolboy. As a result, fear ruled the day. Most people realized the necessity of self-censorship and generally kept their mouths shut politically, unless they had something positive to say.

Anyone foolish enough to say something risky or tell an anti-Nazi joke in mixed company might get a knock on the door in the middle of the night or a tap on the shoulder while walking along the street. Letters were also sent out demanding an appearance at No. 8 Prinz Albrecht Strasse, the Gestapo headquarters in Berlin, to answer a few questions. The Gestapo prison center in Berlin (the Columbia-Haus) became notorious as a place where pedestrians strolling outside the building could hear screaming coming from inside.

Gestapo interrogation methods included: repeated near drownings of a prisoner in a bathtub filled with ice-cold water; electric shocks by attaching wires to hands, feet, ears and genitalia; crushing a man's testicles in a special vice; securing a prisoner's wrists behind his back then hanging him by the arms causing shoulder dislocation; beatings with rubber nightsticks and cow-hide whips; and burning flesh with matches or a soldering iron.

As the SS organization rapidly expanded in the late 1930s, the super-ambitious Heydrich acquired immense powers and responsibilities. One of his main accomplishments was the reorganization and bureaucratic streamlining of the entire Nazi police state. In September 1939, just after the outbreak of war, he created the Reich Main Security Office (RSHA). This new organization had seven main branches. The Gestapo was designated as the fourth branch and was now headed by Heinrich Müller (nicknamed as Gestapo Müller). Back in 1931, as a member of the Munich police, Müller had successfully hushed-up the scandal surrounding the suicide of Hitler's niece Geli Raubal. Thus he had proven himself to be a very dependable man.

Section B4 of the Gestapo dealt exclusively with the "Jewish question" and came under the permanent control of Adolf Eichmann. This energetic and efficient organizer would keep the trains running on time from all over Europe to Nazi death camps located in occupied Poland during the Final Solution of the Jewish question.

The Gestapo followed Hitler's armies into every country during the conquest of Europe. By pitting neighbor against neighbor, Gestapo agents established the same kind of terror mechanism in each occupied country that had worked so well back in Germany.

In 1942, the Gestapo took things a step further via Hitler's Night and Fog Decree. Suspected anti-Nazis would now vanish without a trace into the misty night never to be seen again. The desired effect as stated by Himmler was to "leave the family and the population uncertain as to the fate of the offender." The victims were mostly from France, Belgium and Holland. They were usually arrested in the middle of the night and whisked off to far away prisons for torture-interrogation, eventually arriving at a concentration camp in Germany if they survived.

From the very beginning of Hitler's regime, the ever-present threat of arrest and indefinite confinement in a concentration camp robbed the German people of their personal freedom and left them as inhibited, dutifully obedient subjects.

But even this was not enough. The Nazis wanted to change people's thinking. And so, just as they had purged their hated political enemies, they began a campaign to purge hated "unGerman" ideas. That effort started in May 1933 with the worst of all crimes against human thought and culture – the burning of books.



Reinhard Heydrich, Head of the Gestapo, Who Hitler Called
“The Man with the Iron Heart”

Few men in all of human history have been responsible for such monstrous acts as Reinhard Heydrich. The head of the Gestapo, the Nazi secret police, he oversaw the Kristallnacht attacks on Jews in Germany and Austria and was one of the architects of the Holocaust. His assassination by British-trained Czech agents provoked one more atrocity in the name of the Nazi Adolf Hitler called “the man with the iron heart”.

Early Years

Heydrich as Reichsmarine cadet in 1922 / PD-US
Born in Halle, Germany, on March 7th, 1904, Reinhard Heydrich’s life was affected early on by the anti-Semitism common in Europe at the time. A misunderstanding about his grandparents led people to assume that he had Jewish ancestry. As a result, he and his family faced anti-Semitic abuse despite not being Jewish. Heydrich’s response was to embrace that anti-Semitism, using hatred of Jews as a defence against the accusation that he was one.

Heydrich was too young to fight in the First World War, but in its aftermath, he joined the Märacker Freikorps, an anti-revolutionary right-wing militia, the Halle home defence volunteers, and then the Deutscher Schutz und Trutzbund, an anti-Semitic nationalist group. He had picked his side in a nation divided by the bitter fallout from the war.

A Troubled Career
In March 1922, Heydrich became an officer cadet in the German navy. Rumours of a Jewish connection followed him there, earning him the nickname “blond Moses”. But his skills overcame what many saw as a taint, and he received positive reports and promotions. By December 1930, he was a first lieutenant.

In April 1931, he was found guilty of breach of promise to an ex-girlfriend and discharged by a court under the navy’s strict rules of honour. The parents of his fiancée, Lina van Osten, refused to allow them to marry until he was employed again.

Rise Through the Nazi Party

1939 photograph; shown from left to right are Franz Josef Huber, Arthur Nebe, Heinrich Himmler, Reinhard Heydrich and Heinrich Müller, planning the investigation of the bomb assassination attempt on Adolf Hitler of 8 November 1939 in Munich. – Bundesarchiv CC-BY-SA 3.0

The van Ostens were Nazi party members, and Heydrich followed them into the party in June 1931. At the time, Himmler was planning a counter-intelligence division for the SS. After impressing Himmler in an interview, Heydrich got the job of running this service, starting on August 1st, 1931.

Heydrich once again did well in his work, and swiftly rose in rank. When he married Lina that December, he was made a Sturmbannführer (major) by Himmler as a wedding present. By June 1934, he had worked with Himmler to separate the SS from the SA and gone on to become head of the Gestapo. When internal party conflicts set the SA under Ernst Röhm against Hitler, Heydrich and Himmler forged evidence proving Röhm a traitor, leading to his death, along with that of other political opponents in the Night of the Long Knives.

By turning on Röhm, the godfather of his son, Heydrich ensured the gratitude of Hitler and the power of his own Gestapo.

By Bundesarchiv, Bild 146-1969-054-16 / Hoffmann, Heinrich / CC-BY-SA, CC BY-SA 3.0 de
Kristallnacht and the Final Solution
In 1936, the Gestapo Law came into force, allowing the Gestapo to imprison or kill anyone as long as they were carrying out Hitler’s will.

Heydrich played a prominent part in organising the Kristallnacht (Crystal Night) in 1938, in which Jewish buildings were attacked and 30,000 Jews seized and sent to concentration camps. He also helped plan Operation Himmler, the fake attacks on German buildings used to justify the 1939 invasion of Poland, the event that triggered the Second World War in Europe.

In January 1942, Heydrich outlined his plans for the most infamous of all Nazi actions – the “final solution to the Jewish question”, remembered as the Holocaust. Chairing the Wannsee Conference, he took charge of planning the death camps that would wipe out millions of innocent lives.


The Assassination

Heydrich’s Mercedes after the bombing. The damage to the rear wheel on the passenger side can be seen here. Bundesarchiv – CC-BY-SA 3.0
By now, Heydrich was Deputy Reich Protector of Bohemia and Moravia, effectively running this Nazi-occupied part of Czechoslovakia. The locals gave him nicknames such as “Hangman Heydrich” and “The Butcher of Prague” thanks to his brutal treatment of dissent, with hundreds killed and thousands sent to concentration camps.

The Czechs in exile wanted to punish the Nazis for their treatment of the country and to force the Allies to abandon the agreement giving Czech territory to Germany. To achieve this, two Czech agents trained by British special forces were sent to assassinate Heydrich – Jozef Gabčík and Jan Kubiš.

On May 27th, 1942, Gabčík and Kubiš ambushed Heydrich in his car, on the road from his château to Prague Castle. Heydrich was badly injured but initially survived.

Funeral in Berlin

Heydrich State Funeral Prague Castle 07.06.1942 source: heydrichiada.pardubice.eu
Despite the best available treatment, including care from Himmler’s personal physician, Heydrich became ill with an infection. On June 3rd, his fever seemed to drop, and he sat up to eat breakfast. Suddenly he collapsed, going into a coma. On June 4th at 4.30am, he died. The autopsy found that he had died of infection, with no evidence of poisoning or surgical error.

On June 6th, a torch-lit procession took Heydrich’s coffin to Prague Castle, where it was publicly displayed. Then he was taken to Berlin for a further ceremony on June 9th, at which Hitler placed Heydrich’s decorations on his funeral pillow. He was buried at the Invalidenfriedhof in Berlin.

The Aftermath
On the day of the attack on Heydrich, a state of emergency was declared in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. At least 5000 innocent Czechs were killed in reprisals, including 3000 Jews from Terezín.

The Allies praised the assassination of Heydrich. The reaction of the Czech population was different. Instead of rising in resistance as the Allies had hoped, they suffered guilt and recrimination over the heavy cost in lives for a single man.

On June 10th, a force of Nazis entered the mining village of Lidice, which they mistakenly believed had been linked to the attack. They killed all the men, sent the women and children away to camps, and wiped Lidice off the map, flattening it so thoroughly that there was nothing left to see.

This outraged people around the world, and particularly the miners of Staffordshire in England, who rallied to help in the village’s rebuilding. But as with Heydrich’s previous atrocities, the harm could not be undone. Even from beyond the grave, he had been responsible for the deaths of innocents.

https://www.warhistoryonline.com/wo...ead-gestapo-hitler-called-man-iron-heart.html

Even thought there might some truths but it will have lot of false hood , most of the western articles are downright propaganda. Their sole aim is to send the message we are good and they are bad. This article for instance must be mostly from british & american authors not from any german. Just the brash title is good enuf to tell what the articles intention is.