It all began on one fateful afternoon i.e January 30, 1933. Adolf Hitler rose to power and was named Chancellor of Germany. Upon becoming the Chancellor of Germany, as promised by him, Hermann Goring was named the Interior Minister of Prussia. Prussia was the largest and the most vital German state, controlling more than two-thirds of the country including Berlin. As a result, Goring was the commander of the largest police force in all of Germany. This started the worst misuse of powers the world had ever witnessed.
Initially the police force consisted of officers who were loyal to the Republic and not in the league with the Nazis. But this was not what Goring had in mind. As soon as he gained control, he separated the espionage/intelligence and the political wings of the police forces and filled the various positions with Nazis. This was named the Gestapo, standing for Geheime Staatspolizei: “Secret State Police”.
In 1934, Goring urged Hitler to extend the powers of the Gestapo to all parts of the country. This did not go down well with SS Reichsfurher Heinrich Himmler, who was the commander of the second largest police force of Germany in Bavaria. Goring eventually named Himmler commander of the Gestapo and of all police forces outside of Prussia. This made the Gestapo the ultimate authority to report to after Hitler.
The resolution passed on February 10, 1936 was the final nail on the coffin of democracy. It included the following line – “Neither the instructions nor the affairs of the Gestapo will be open to review by the administrative courts.” This gave the permission to the Gestapo to be above law and any action by them could not be tried in court or lead to persecution.
It is said that “Power leads to corruption and absolute power leads to absolute corruption”. Gestapo took this to it’s heart and indulged in crimes which were heinous to say the least. Anyone in Germany could be arrested by the Gestapo, interrogated, tortured, sent to a concentration camp and even murdered. There was no legal procedure to be appealed to, no cases to be filed. All those within the radar of the Gestapo were doomed to a grisly end.
In reality, the Gestapo was never a big organization. At the most, it’s numbers were well within 40,000. But the main weapon with the Gestapo was it’s large web of informants and spies. It was not limited to the recruited informers and spies, but rather anyone who provided any type of information which could be termed “Anti-Germany”. It could be anyone from the milkman to the schoolboy who crossed the street everyday. This created a state of constant fear to the extent that a man would not speak anything without thinking about it’s implications.
In 1942, with Hitler’s Night and Fog decree, Gestapo got the power to send anyone who was termed Anti-Nazi to far away interrogation camps and eventually to concentration camps. The main victims of this were the Jews who were termed as risks to the society and to be exterminated. Millions of Jews died in these concentration camps.
The fall of the Gestapo came with the end of the war and it ceased to exist completely post the Nuremberg trials. Most of the Nazi leaders were executed, some like Heinrich Mueller managed to escape.
By: Sei Kal
