Berlin at War by Moorhouse Roger(Author)

Author:Moorhouse, Roger(Author)
Language: eng
Format: epub

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berlin at war

The Gestapo, or Geheime Staatspolizei – Secret State Police – stood at the very heart of the Nazi regime. Synonymous – along with the SS – with

the Nazi ‘terror’, its origins were rather more mundane. It had been

established in 1933, emerging out of the old Prussian political police, and

had subsequently taken its place among the constellation of acronyms

that populated the German police network. Along with the criminal

police, Kriminalpolizei (or Kripo), which investigated serious criminal cases, the Gestapo fell under the umbrella of the security police, the

Sicherheitspolizei (or Sipo). Regular, everyday policing, meanwhile, was

handled by the so-called order police, the Ordnungspolizei (or Orpo). By

1939, all of these organisations, which operated nationwide, were sub -

ordinated to the Reich Main Security Office, the Reichssicherheitshauptamt

(or RSHA), and ultimately, Heinrich Himmler’s SS.

But the Gestapo was not just another police unit. Its primary role was

to act as a political police force – to investigate and combat all activities

that were deemed dangerous or inimical to the Nazi state. It did not,

however, practise the same randomised persecution and killing that had

been witnessed in Stalin’s Soviet Union. The Gestapo ‘terror’ was not

random. It did not kill by quota, or terrorise its would-be victims by its

own unpredictability or caprice. It was very targeted, seeking to weed

out political criminals and focus very specifically on those whom the

regime decreed to be ‘undesirable’. A glance at its internal structure

illustrates very well the threats that it perceived. There were sections

devoted not only to the ‘usual suspects’ of socialists, communists, gypsies

and Jews, but also to liberalism, Freemasonry, ‘Political Catholicism’,

sabotage and forgery.

In combating these threats, the Gestapo was permitted to operate

outside the law if necessary. As a political police force, it served the

Nazi regime rather than the established judicial process, and in order

to function effectively it had to have free rein to arrest and imprison

suspects without recourse to the norms of law, which were seen to be

lagging behind the more immediate demands of the Nazi revolution.

The Gestapo, therefore, did not derive its authority from the grand

traditions of German justice, or even from the narrower requirements

of the administrative machine. Rather, its power came from Hitler

himself. It answered – ultimately – to no one but the Führer.

In order to better understand how the Gestapo worked, it is essential

to grasp the Nazi concept of justice. Unlike the Western legal tradition,

the watchers and the watched

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Nazi justice was not blind: prejudice, in the literal sense of the word, as

prior judgement, was one of the central tenets of the new legal thinking.

When investigating a crime, therefore, the Gestapo would minutely

examine not only the circumstances of the offence itself, but also the

racial and social background of the suspects. Nazi theory held that suppos-

edly inferior racial groups, such as Jews, gypsies and Slavs, had a natural

predilection towards crime. Whereas it was thought that Aryan crim-

inals might possibly be redeemed, rehabilitated or re-educated by a fine

or a spell in a concentration camp, non-Aryan suspects were accorded

no such leeway. Damned a priori by their racial status, they could expect heavier sentences than their Aryan neighbours would receive for the

same offence.

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