Gestapo

The political police of Nazi Germany. The Gestapo ruthlessly eliminated opposition to the Nazis within Germany and its occupied territories and was responsible for the roundup of Jews throughout Europe for deportation to extermination camps.

When the Nazis came to power in 1933, Hermann Göring, then Prussian minister of the interior, detached the political and espionage units from the regular Prussian police, filled their ranks with thousands of Nazis, and, on April 26, 1933, reorganized them under his personal command as the Gestapo. Simultaneously, Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS, the Nazi paramilitary corps, together with his aide Reinhard Heydrich, similarly reorganized the police of Bavaria and the remaining German states. Himmler was given command over Göring's Gestapo in April 1934 and on June 17, 1936, was made German chief of police with the title of Reichsführer. Nominally under the Ministry of the Interior, Germany's police forces now were unified under Himmler as head of both the SS and the Gestapo.

In 1936 the Gestapo—led by Himmler's subordinate, Gruppenführer Heinrich Müller—was joined with the Kriminalpolizei (German: “Criminal Police”) under the umbrella of a new organization, the Sicherheitspolizei (Sipo; “Security Police”). Under a 1939 SS reorganization, the Sipo was joined with the Sicherheitsdienst (“Security Service”), an SS intelligence department, to form the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (“Reich Security Central Office”) under Heydrich. In this bureaucratic maze, the functions of the Gestapo often overlapped with those of other security departments, with which the Gestapo had both to cooperate and compete.

The Gestapo operated without civil restraints. It had the authority of “preventative arrest,” and its actions were not subject to judicial appeal. Thousands of leftists, intellectuals, Jews, trade unionists, political clergy, and homosexuals simply disappeared into concentration camps after being arrested by the Gestapo. The political section could order prisoners to be murdered, tortured, or released. Together with the SS, the Gestapo managed the treatment of “inferior races,” such as Jews and Roma (Gypsies). During World War II the Gestapo suppressed partisan activities in the occupied territories and carried out reprisals against civilians. Gestapo members were included in the Einsatzgruppen (“deployment groups”), which were mobile death squads that followed the German regular army into Poland and Russia to kill Jews and other “undesirables.” Bureau IV B4 of the Gestapo, under Adolf Eichmann, organized the deportation of millions of Jews from other occupied countries to the extermination camps in Poland.

Copyright © 1994-2011 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. For more information visit Britannica.com.