Geheime Staatspolizei: Nazi Germany

Geheime Staatspolizei

“Freedom is when one hears the bell at seven o’clock in the morning and knows it is the milman and not the Gestapo” - Georges Bidault

Geheime Staatspolizei was German for “Secret State Police,” and was also called the Gestapo. It was started when the Nazi party seized control of Germany in 1933, and soon Reinhard Heydrich became the commander, a position he served in until September of 1942 through many changes of name and even duties that the Gestapo underwent. At first, it was a protective service for party leaders, and then later morphed into a full fledged police force.

Starting just months after Hitler was elected, the Gestapo began to arrest political opposition, and by the middle of 1933, all significant political

One of the most brutal arms of the Gestapo, a part that remained throughout World War II, was the “Einsatzgruppen” or Task Force, the group that arrested Jews and other undesirable people and sent them to concentration camps.

Along with other Nazi groups, the Gestapo would set up makeshift camps in abandoned warehouses in other buildings. Many turned into permanent camps, including Dachau which was a model camp for other Nazi prison and concentration

He was a German military officer infamous for his role in the creation of the Gestapo. He was a teenager when Germany lost World War I, and like his family and many Germans, he blamed the Jews for their loss. He eventually began work as a cadet in a naval dockyard, and by the age of 24 he was promoted to the position of first lieutenant in the naval intelligence division. He created and built the SD, or Sicherheitsdienst, a Nazi intelligence agency that monitored dissenters of the party and Jews’ activities. In 1934, he took control of the Gestapo, or security police, and acted with toughness and brutality saying that the Gestapo was “the state’s defensive force that could act against the legally identifiable enemy.” He maintained control of the Gestapo throughout Kristallnacht, and was credited in November of 1927 as saying that the Jewish people should be not just restricted but exterminated. In 1939, as mass killing began, Himmler assigned control of the killing forces to Heydrich and his police force. In early January of 1942, Heydrich presented a plan for the Final Solution to senior Nazi officials that involved combing Europe for Jews in an effort to exterminate them all, and then transporting them to killing centers. He acknowledged that many of them would die through, as he said, natural selection, but that those who survived would be