Gestapo stands for Geheime Staats Polizie, or Secret State Police. The term was approved by Goering in April, 1933, two months after he had taken over the Prussian Police and purged it, replacing many of its career officials by trusted Nazis. In its origins the Gestapo was simply Department IA of the old Prussian Political Police uprooted from its home in the Prussian Ministry of the Interior and transferred to a separate building, a commandeered art school in the Prinz Albrecht Strasse, which was to become notorious. This was done so that it could be more easily kept apart from the Prussian State apparatus as a whole, which still included many anti-Nazis and “lukewarms.”
Goering first thought of calling his new department the G.P.A. (Geheime Polizei Amt); but it occurred to him that this was too much like the G.P.U., as the Soviet Political Police was then called. He need not have bothered. The term Gestapo, which might have been made especially for Sir (then Mr.) Winston Churchill, was the invention of a clerk in the Berlin Post Office, who simply needed an abbreviation for one more Government department. He did not know what he was starting. Nor, probably, did Goering.
For although the Gestapo was born in Berlin in 1933 and at first limited to Prussia, its real history begins in Munich. Those who think of the Gestapo as the creation of Heinrich Himmler are closer to the mark than the pedants, in spite of the fact that Himmler did not take it over from Goering until April, 1934. For the Prussian Gestapo in the first year of its existence was, in effect, very little more than Goering’s personal terror squad, the real business of smashing popular opposition to the Hitler régime being left to the S.A. and the S.S. It was only when Himmler came to Berlin that the Gestapo developed into the elaborate and terrible machine which became the scourge of Germany and was then perfected as an instrument to terrorize the populations of conquered countries and to exterminate certain categories of human beings, above all Jews, who were considered unfit to live. The beginning of this transformation coincided with the effective absorption of the Gestapo, a department of State administration, into the S.S., a purely Party organization, and its union under Reinhard Heydrich with the S.S. Security Service, the Sicherheitsdienst, or S.D. The Gestapo, as it was to become known to the world, took its tone and meaning from the S.D.—so much so that throughout this narrative Gestapo and S.D. will be treated as being inextricably connected. This, indeed, they were, the protestations of the defense counsel at Nuremberg notwithstanding.
Here, then, is the first source of confusion. The Gestapo in its final form was a product of the S.S. The S.S. in the end was five million strong. But the Gestapo in its heyday, when its mastery extended from the Atlantic to the Volga, from the North Cape to the Mediterranean, was a strictly limited organization, never employing more than forty thousand individuals, including women and clerks. The S.D. had only three thousand and acted, insofar as its functions can be separated, as the long range Intelligence Service of the Gestapo.
These are facts which must be borne constantly in mind unless we are to lose ourselves in the confusion deliberately created by the Nazi leadership and so successfully exploited in the past.
Another relevant fact is the exceptional nature of the Gestapo. There had been a political police force in Prussia, as in other German states, during the days of the Weimar Republic, before Hitler came to power. Every government in the world relies in some degree on some kind of political police force to uncover conspiracy and protect the State from injury. The size and importance of such a force varies with the nature of the government: the wider the popular support for the government, the more insignificant the political police, and vice versa. In Victorian England, for example, the very idea of a political police force was remote from ordinary experience, and the majority of Englishmen would have said there was no such thing. Such a force did exist, nevertheless, its main duty being to keep an eye on the activities of exiles and refugees from less contented lands. In Russia, on the other hand, where most of the London exiles came from, the Government was neither popular nor democratic, and the political police, the Ochrana, as it was then called, was a highly developed arm, as, under a variety of names, it has remained to this day.
The Government of the United Kingdom is still more popular than most; but it has to counter dangers undreamed of a century ago: there are citizens who place loyalty to a foreign power above loyalty to their own land; there are spies and traitors seeking to discover those unhappy secrets of applied science which may win a war. Thus the apparatus of vigilance, the political police, has had to be enlarged and strengthened. It consists now, in effect, of the Special Branch of Scotland Yard and a branch of Intelligence known as M.I.5.
It is fashionable among apologists for the Nazis to pretend that in principle the Gestapo differed in no way from M.I.5 in Britain or the F.B.I. in America. Nothing could be more false. The political police of Britain and America and a number of other countries exercise a purely defensive function, designed to uphold a status quo sanctioned by the people as a whole. The German Gestapo, on the other hand, was an instrument not of defense but of attack. The Gestapo was created by Goering to impose the will of Hitler upon his political opponents and his rivals within the Party. A year later it was captured by Himmler to be used as the spearhead in his grandiose campaign to establish with his S.S. thugs what amounted to a State within the State, and later to subdue the occupied territories and turn them into German colonies. Throughout its career it was an instrument of aggression.
There is one last fact which is commonly overlooked but which has a very direct bearing on the nature of the Gestapo: the extreme youth of the men who first frightened the German people into abject submission, and then went on to trample the flower of European culture. Himmler himself was only thirty-three when Hitler became Chancellor. Heydrich was twenty-nine. And so it went on through the whole apparatus of the S.S. These were the men who succeeded in breaking the spirit of the proud Army tradition—embodied in gray-haired military leaders of proved courage and distinction. Schellenberg of the S.D., when he seized on behalf of Himmler the whole apparatus of Military Intelligence, was only thirty-five. It is impossible to obtain a clear image of the mood of those days unless it is borne constantly in mind that many of our heroes, men with resounding names and ranks, occupying positions of great responsibility and holding the power of life and death over millions, were in fact young toughs with fair hair of the kind that in England after the first world war gravitated naturally into the Black and Tans. In Germany they were called by Hitler to rule, and allowed by the nation to do so.