The Great Gestapo
The Gestapo was Germany’s political police. The Gestapo eliminated opposition of the Nazis within Germany and its territories, with help from the Sicherheitsdientst who was responsible for the collecting of Jews throughout Europe for deportation to extermination camps.
The Gestapo had a history of power struggles. First Hitler had given Hermann Goering control of Prussia. In this capacity Goering took control of the police in Prussia.Goering set up the Central Security Office of the Third Reich in buildings on Prinz Albrechtstrasse in Berlin. He made his protégés, Rudolf Diels head of the secret police. At this time Diels had the official position of Chief of Department 1A in the Prussian Secret Police with the Ministry of
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He detached the political and espionage units from the Prussian police and then filled them with thousands of Nazis. Simultaneously command of the Gestapo was given to Heinrich Himmler in April 1934. Himmler who was already in control of the SS, the Nazi paramilitary corps, together with Reinhard Heydrich. They reorganized the police of Bavaria and the remaining German states in a way similar to the Gestapo. Himmler then took all of the German police forces and united them under his rule. In April 1934, Hitler put Himmler in control of a unified police force. As Diels was one of Goering’s ‘men’, Himmler dismissed him after accusing him of being too soft to do the job. Himmler replaced Diels with Heinrich Müller who had been one of Himmler’s assistants in Munich and was utterly loyal to him. Under Müller, the Gestapo gained its reputation for efficiency and brutality. Its brief was simple: to hunt down anyone who was suspected of treachery to Hitler. This included anyone who told jokes about Hitler or even celebrated the birthday of Wilhelm II as this was seen as evidence of someone sympathetic to monarchism and not National Socialism. the Gestapo was joined with the Kriminalpolize under a new organization, the Sicherheitspolizei (Sipo). The Sipo was joined with the Sicherheitsdienst, which is and SS intelligence department, to form the Reichssicherheitshauptamt which was controlled …show more content…
The members were included in the deployment groups, which were mobile death squads that followed the German army into Poland and Russia to kill Jews and other oposers. Adolf Eichmann who had control of Bureau IV B4 of the Gestapo organized the deportation of millions of Jews from other occupied countries to extermination camps.
In Occupied Europe, they used nationals sympathetic to Hitler and the Nazis to do their job. This was occupied mainly in Norway and France. The Milice worked with the Gestapo to hunt out resistance groups in France. Members of the murdered POW’s who were protected under the Geneva Convention. The Gestapo was responsible for millions of the deaths of Jews.
At the Nuremberg Trials, the Gestapo was declared a criminal organisation. The International Tribunal listed the atrocities the Gestapo was linked to. Heinrich Müller was never brought to justice. What happened to him is not known for sure. Some say he was killed in the final days of the Battle for Berlin while others believed that he was spirited away to South America once the war had ended where he lived
After he became chancellor, Adolf Hitler fought his way to become the “Fuhrer”, also known as Germany’s “supreme ruler” (History.com). This gave Hitler enough power to cause Germany to invade its neighboring territories, such as Poland and the Soviet Union. Several years later, the Nazi Party met in Berlin to discuss their plan about the murdering of the Jewish people. They named their plan the “Final Solution of the Jewish Question.” The Nazis carefully planned each stage of the “Final Solution” before it ever began. This plan also went over how the Jewish people were to be identified from the rest of the crowd (The Holocaust). To put this plan into action the SA, (Sturmabteilungen in German, or Storm Troopers) and the SS (Schutzstaffel in German, or Protection Squadrons) were made to create concentration camps for incarcerating political opponents of the Nazis (Concentration Camps). To get Germans into identifying the Jewish people in their community, the Nazis tricked them
The SS and Gestapo (secret police) acting under the orders of Himmler, made terror a regular occurrence and a matter of state policy. Any sort of opponents were beaten and regularly thrown
The Gestapo was created to help solidify Nazi control by identifying and arresting people with anti-nazi thoughts in Germany. The agency was restructured several times during its twelve year history and was very important in helping the Nazi deportation and destruction of Europes jews during the Holocaust
In Christopher Browning’s book, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland, he explains to us all about his study of German Order Police Reserve Unit 101 and their experiences during the Holocaust. During the time of the Holocaust, Reserve Unit 101 committed many massacres and round-ups of the Jewish population for deportation to the Nazi concentration camps occupied by Germany in Poland. These men of Unit 101 were normal middle-aged men, who were drafted to be Nazi soldiers, but found ineligible for regular military duty. Upon their return to Poland in 1942, they were ordered to terrorize the Jewish population in Poland and
B. Perpetrators were managed economy German Workers' Party leaders, bankers, professors, military officers, doctors, journalists, engineers, judges, authors, lawyers, salesmen, police, and civil servants.
The Gestapo was Nazi Germany’s feared secret police force. During World War Two the Gestapo was under the control of Heinrich Himmler who controlled all police units within Nazi Germany. The Gestapo had a first head who was Rudolf Diels but most of the time was led by Heinrich Muller. They acted outside of the judicial process and had its own courts and effectively acted a judge, jury and more frequently than most an executioner.
gestapo was a vital protection to Hitler's power, they helped maintain order and keep any opposers out of Germany that are trying to stop the natzi and their ultimate goal of exterminating the jews. The Gestapo was dissolved with the fall of the 3 Reich in 1945. Many of the personal bodyguards consisted of agents of former Gestapo prison officials they were highly respected authority and served good protection to Hitler's safety at public speeches. Gestapo also served as a natzi spi base and was used to find potential threats to the
The Judenrat led the resistance by assisting the rebels to escape from the ghettos. As a result to these resistances Nazi officers would just send attack dogs or perform search parties and eventually led to death.
The Holocaust war criminals consisted of any SS officer in a concentration camp, doctors that made experiments on the prisoners, and some of the Gestapo. These men were brutal and unrelenting they murdered hundreds some even thousands of civilians living in Europe. The men like Klaus Barbie, Adolf Eichman, and Ivan the Terrible were some of the worst SS in World War II.
They had also enlisted for help in the Polish military underground movement, they had obtained a large amount of firearms and flammable explosives from this organization. As the Nazis called for an operation to liquidate the Jews, the organizations were ready to fend off the German troops. However, they did not succeed. The Nazi troops started going through all of the Ghettos buildings to force all of the Jews out of hiding. As for in that period of time approximately three-hundred thousand Jews were murdered or deported to the Treblinka death
Germany in January 1933, believed that Germans were “racially superior” and that the Jews, were “inferior” and a threat. The Germans sent millions of Jews to concentration camps where they then exterminated them in cruel ways. However, there were resistance groups throughout Europe who fought against the Nazi’s rule in a variety of ways. Some people resisted the Nazi’s rule by helping Jews as well as attacking the Germans. During the Holocaust, there were many resistance groups that fought against the Nazi’s rule including the Bielski Group, White Rose Group, Polish Żegota Organization, and Jewish Defense Committee.
Jews were systematically murdered in the deadliest genocide in history, which was of part of a border aggregate of acts of oppression and killing of various ethnic and political groups in Europe and under the coordination of the Schutzstaffel, also known as SS. With the direction from the highest leadership of the Nazi party, and every arm Germany's bureaucracy was involved in the logistic and the carrying out of the mass murders.
Some people might not thinks the SS police and Gestapo had a very big job but when they had to find all the Jewish by Hitler's orders it was like a big game
The deportations and mass murders were not just carried out by random soldiers, they were selected individuals who the CUP felt would do their “job” without hesitation. The Special Organization, a covert special forces unit, is said to have been the primary instrument in the implementation of the plan of extermination. Those deportations were conducted in convoys by train and wagons and then attacked by the Special Organization, this group of people consisted of
Additionally, a significant factor in the role of the Wehrmacht was when the army’s Chief of Staff General Franz Halder ordered the Wehrmacht, that in the case of a surprise attack, German Wehrmacht were to carry out ‘collective measures of force’ by massacring whole villages. Another role that the Wehrmacht had in completing the Final Solution was that they cooperated with the SS and Einsatzgruppen and had helped in supplying the killing squads with all the essentials, such as; ammunition, weapons, transport and even housing accommodation. The Wehrmacht also helped the Einsatzgruppen by accompanying them on missions to hunt down and exterminate the partisan fighters and Jews which were a direct threat to them. According to Kuhne, ‘An estimated 300,000 – 500,000 people were killed during the Wehrmacht’s anti-partisan war in the Soviet Union’, showing the extreme scale of crimes being committed, whilst also showing the role that they played in implementing the Final Solution. Additionally, American officials found out about the atrocities committed by the Wehrmacht when they taped conversations of POWs and ‘how some of them voluntarily participated in mass executions’. Further to this, the Wehrmacht’s prisoner of war camps for