The founding of the Gestapo

On 26 April 1933 Hermann Göring – Prime Minister of Prussia for the past two weeks and its Minister of the Interior since January – signed a law creating the Secret State Police Office (Geheimes Staatspolizeiamt, abbreviated to Gestapa). The political department of the Berlin police headquarters, which for years had kept watch on communists and Nazis alike, was taken out of the ordinary police structure and placed directly under the minister. The new office was headed by Rudolf Diels, a thirty-two-year-old lawyer and a protégé of Göring. The Secret State Police, the Geheime Staatspolizei, soon known throughout the world by its abbreviation, the Gestapo, was for the time being a Prussian rather than a national institution. But Prussia covered three-fifths of Germany, and the office on Prinz-Albrecht-Straße in Berlin became the nucleus of a police force that within a few years extended across the whole Reich and, during the war, across occupied Europe. War chronologies usually speak simply of “the founding of the Gestapo”. It is a simplification, but an apt one: 26 April 1933 is generally regarded as the day the Gestapo was born.

The Republic’s political police

The Weimar Republic had its own political police. In Prussia, governed by the Social Democrats until 1932, this was Department IA of the Berlin police headquarters, along with similar departments in other cities. Their task was to monitor groups seeking to overthrow the Republic – above all the communists and the Nazis. Their officials gathered intelligence, kept card indexes and prepared material for bans on assemblies and for trials. They operated within the law, under the supervision of the courts and of ministers answerable to parliament.

This order began to break down on 20 July 1932, when Chancellor Franz von Papen, acting on a decree of President Paul von Hindenburg, removed the Prussian government of Prime Minister Otto Braun and took over power in Prussia as Reich Commissioner. Part of the pretext was supplied by information about a conversation between State Secretary Wilhelm Abegg (PL) and the communists, passed to Papen’s people in distorted form by Diels, then an official of the Prussian Interior Ministry responsible for combating the communist movement. Six months before Adolf Hitler came to power, the police of Germany’s largest state had ceased to answer to a democratic government.

Göring takes over the police

When Hitler became Chancellor, Göring, as commissioner in charge of the Prussian Interior Ministry, began with a purge: he dismissed police presidents and officials regarded as republicans and replaced them with Nazis and right-wingers. He appointed Diels head of the political police in Berlin. On 17 February 1933 he ordered policemen to use their weapons ruthlessly against “enemies of the state” and promised to cover for them. A few days later he enrolled tens of thousands of members of the SA, the SS and the Stahlhelm in an auxiliary police. After the Reichstag fire, the police and the SA arrested thousands of communists and Social Democrats from lists drawn up in advance by the political police, and the Reichstag Fire Decree allowed them to be held in “protective custody” without trial. Diels conducted the first interrogations of the arsonist, Marinus van der Lubbe. On 3 March a Prussian decree lifted the existing restrictions on police powers.

Göring believed that the political police had to be his own instrument, independent of the ordinary police administration and of the Reich Minister of the Interior, Wilhelm Frick, with whom he was in rivalry. That was the purpose of the law of 26 April. The Secret State Police Office was charged with detecting and combating “all politically dangerous tendencies” throughout Prussia. Subordinate field offices, the so-called Staatspolizeistellen, were set up in the administrative districts. At the beginning of May the office moved into the building of the former School of Applied Arts at Prinz-Albrecht-Straße 8, which for twelve years would be the most dreaded address in Berlin. Its cellars were turned into a jail where detainees were interrogated and tortured. Today the site houses the Topography of Terror.

According to Diels, the abbreviation “Gestapo” was coined by the post office, which began stamping the office’s mail that way for convenience. It quickly caught on in official and everyday language, in Germany and abroad. A second law, of 30 November 1933, made the Gestapo an independent branch of the administration, subordinate no longer to the Minister of the Interior but directly to the Prime Minister of Prussia – that is, once again, to Göring.

The first months

The Gestapo of 1933 did not yet resemble the organisation known from the war years. Most of its officials were career policemen and lawyers from the republican era, not Nazi activists. The most brutal work was then done by the SA and the SS, which held and beat prisoners in hundreds of cellars and makeshift camps, often without the police’s knowledge. Diels and his men both cooperated and competed with them. The political police decided on “protective custody”, drew up lists of activists, Jewish activists among them, and helped to build the network of the first concentration camps. At the same time in Bavaria, Heinrich Himmler and Reinhard Heydrich were creating their own political police and the camp at Dachau.

In the autumn of 1933 Diels was caught in the crossfire of the struggle between Göring, Himmler and the SA leadership. He fled briefly to Czechoslovakia, and on his return Göring restored him to his post. Himmler, however, was growing ever stronger. By the spring of 1934 he had taken over, one after another, the political police forces of all the German states except Prussia. Göring, who needed an ally against Ernst Röhm and his SA, gave way. On 20 April 1934 he appointed Himmler inspector and deputy chief of the Prussian Gestapo, and two days later Heydrich took charge of the office on Prinz-Albrecht-Straße. Diels had to go. Two months later the Gestapo and the SS drew up the lists of victims for the Night of the Long Knives.

A police above the law

Under Himmler and Heydrich the Gestapo became fused with the SS and its security service, the Sicherheitsdienst. A Prussian law of 10 February 1936 removed its decisions from the review of the administrative courts: a citizen arrested by the Gestapo no longer had any legal means of defending himself. On 17 June 1936 Hitler appointed Himmler chief of all German police. The Gestapo became a national institution and, together with the criminal police, formed the Security Police (Sicherheitspolizei) under Heydrich’s command. From then on the Gestapo’s day-to-day work was directed by the Bavarian policeman Heinrich Müller, formally its chief from 1939. On 27 September 1939 the Gestapo became Office IV of the new Reich Security Main Office (RSHA).

The Gestapo grew with the state. In 1935 it employed about 4,200 people, in 1937 about 7,000, and by the end of the war more than 30,000. For a country of several tens of millions this was not many, which is why scholars such as the Canadian historian Robert Gellately have challenged the image of an omnipresent police with spies in every home. The Gestapo relied to a great extent on denunciations by ordinary citizens. In many of the local offices studied, most cases began with a denunciation by a neighbour, a workmate or a family member, and the motive was often a personal grudge. The Gestapo did not need to be everywhere: it was enough that people believed it was.

Its victims were first communists and Social Democrats, then clergy and church activists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, homosexuals and people deemed “asocial”, and above all Jews. The Gestapo could send anyone to a concentration camp under “protective custody”, even a person a court had just acquitted. Interrogations involved beatings and torture, referred to in official language as “enhanced interrogation”.

The Gestapo in Poland

In September 1939 the Einsatzgruppen – task forces made up of Gestapo, criminal police and SD officers – followed the Wehrmacht into Poland. Armed with proscription lists prepared before the war, they arrested and murdered members of the Polish intelligentsia, priests, teachers and community leaders in the Intelligenzaktion. On 6 November 1939 the Gestapo lured the professors of the Jagiellonian University to a supposed lecture and arrested them in Sonderaktion Krakau. In occupied Warsaw the Gestapo’s headquarters was the building at 25 Aleja Szucha, whose cells and interrogation rooms are now the Mausoleum of Struggle and Martyrdom. To Poles the word “Gestapo” still means arrests at dawn, interrogations, Pawiak prison, executions and camps. The Jewish affairs section of Office IV of the RSHA, headed by Adolf Eichmann, organised the deportation of Jews from all over Europe to the extermination camps.

Significance

The law of 26 April 1933 looked like an ordinary administrative reform: one police department was placed under the direct supervision of the minister. In reality it opened the way for a political police answerable to no one but the party leaders. Combined with “protective custody” and the concentration camps, the Gestapo enabled the regime to destroy all organised opposition within a few years. By the time Hitler began leading Germany towards war, there was no one left in the country who could stop him from within. During the war the Gestapo became one of the chief instruments of occupation terror and of the Holocaust. In 1946 the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg declared it a criminal organisation and sentenced its creator, Göring, to death.