secret police: Nazi Germany

Nazi Germany

Although the secret police in Italy during Mussolini's rule were notorious, probably the most extreme and terrible example was that in Germany under Adolf Hitler. Under National Socialism, Germany became a police state, a state where the power of the police, and especially the secret police, over security and justice was tyrannically applied with virtually no procedural checks.

The German secret police had its genesis in the SS, or Schutzstaffel [defense echelon], created as Hitler's bodyguard under the SA (the military arm of the Nazi party), and in the SD, or Sicherheitsdienst [security service], organized in 1931 as the intelligence branch of the SS. From 1929, Heinrich Himmler controlled the SS. The Gestapo (secret state police) originated in 1933 under Hermann Goering and was ultimately merged with the SD. Just as the Gestapo had its secret operatives among the mass of the population, the SD had agents, known only to the chief SD officers, in every department of the German government, in the armed forces, in the Nazi party, among chief industrial executives, and among the Gestapo itself. While the Gestapo was known and feared, the existence of the SD was known to few.

The powers of the Gestapo, the SS, and the SD were vast; virtually any person suspected of disloyalty to the regime or of social aberration could be summarily arrested, executed, or interred in a concentration camp. The SS, literally a separate army, was responsible to Himmler alone; thus, probably for the first time in history, a secret police wielded virtually absolute power. The crimes and atrocities of the Nazi authorities in Germany itself and throughout German-occupied Europe during World War II were largely carried out by the SS and the Gestapo, who controlled the concentration and extermination camps, and who set up their subsidiary agencies in every conquered country.

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