First they came for the Jews, and I was silent, for I was not a Jew. Then they came for the Communists. Again, I said nothing, for I was not a Communist. Then they came for the Roman Catholics, for the trade unionists, and for the men of industry. Once more I did not protest, for I was none of these.
At last they came for me, and by then there was no one left to stand up on my behalf. Martin Niemöller, who wrote those words, was one amongst uncountable victims of a potent and hated instrument of Hitler's tyranny. The very name of the Gestapo has become enduringly synonymous with public terror and the police state. With the death of President Hindenburg in August 1934, Adolf Hitler ascends the final step towards absolute dictatorship. He abolishes the office of presidency and decrees that the armed forces must swear fealty no longer to the state, but to himself alone.
Within Germany, all political power is now vested in Hitler, who is determined to tolerate no opposition. To keep his subjects in thrall, Hitler will rely heavily on a secret police force, the Gestapo. The Gestapo ran a vast network of spies and informers. Its clerks laboriously built up an extraordinary collection of files on all and sundry. Gestapo operations were marked by suddenness and secrecy.
Its interrogators were notorious for their well-practiced brutality. Gestapo agents possessed arbitrary but unchallengeable powers of arrest, incarceration and execution. It was of this institution that Heinrich Himmler said, We do not expect to be loved by too many. Although the Gestapo achieved its greatest notoriety under Himmler, the chief of police, it was originally the creation of another of Hitler's lieutenants, Hermann Göring. In the elections of January 1933, the National Socialists won sufficient seats in the Reichstag, Germany's parliament, for Hitler to be voted Chancellor, heading a coalition government.
Göring became Minister of Prussia, the largest German state, and moved rapidly to bring its police force under his own direct control. Large numbers of fanatical Hitler supporters were drafted in to swell its ranks. Goering was soon able to mount a furious campaign against the opposition parties. Following a second election in March 1933, Goering used his police to arrest some deputies and to prevent others from entering the Parliament building. Under these intimidating constraints, the Reichstag passed the Enabling Act.
By this momentous and irrevocable transfer of power, the fragile German democracy was extinguished, and Hitler unable to rule by decree alone. For the time being, Hitler still required the president's assent to any new laws. But Hindenburg was old, malleable, and nearly senile. Within months, all opposition political parties were outlawed, strict censorship imposed. and the trade unions dissolved.
During this turbulent period, as a new order stamped itself upon Germany, the Gestapo came into being. The old Prussian police had had a small political section responsible for monitoring agitators and extremists. Göring expanded this section and transferred it to extensive new premises at 8 Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse.
Formerly an Arts and Crafts College. There, in April 1933, Goering established the headquarters of his specialized new police unit. It was a post office clerk, needing a word that could fit on a franking stamp, who suggested the name Secret State Police, or Geheimstaatspolizei, conveniently shortened to Gestapo. Although it quickly gained a fearsome reputation, the infant Gestapo was itself rent by alarming schisms, stemming from the violent and frequently murderous contention between factions vying for control within it.
These factions were drawn principally from the SS and the SA. The brown-shirted SA, for Sturmabteilung, or storm detachments, were a loosely organized, unofficial private army led by Ernst Röhm, for many years a close associate of Hitler. During Hitler's long ascent to power, the ragged cohorts of the SA had provided crude but invaluable assistance on the streets of Germany.
Their ranks were now swollen to well over three million men, and despite their previous support, Hitler viewed with concern the possibility of a challenge to his authority by so large and volatile a body of men. By contrast, the far smaller SS, Schutzstaffeln, or guard echelons, was tightly disciplined and commanded by Heinrich Himmler. valued by Hitler for his absolute unquestioning loyalty. Although having the appearance of a timid and hesitant bureaucrat, Himmler was in private intensely ambitious.
He had grandiose plans for his SS organization. In particular, he desired to bring the Gestapo within the undisputed province of the SS. This prospect was not one which Goering or the SA regarded with favour. But Himmler was an adept in the arts of backstairs intrigue, who never hesitated to use bribery, blackmail, intimidation or even murder to gain his ends.
Twice, Rudolf Diels, the unprincipled opportunist, opportunist whom Goering had put in charge of the Gestapo, fled abroad in fear of his life. Meanwhile, the cowed and fearful German citizenry witnessed daily scenes of outrage. Jews and Jewish establishments were primary targets for violence.
But the legalized thugs of the SA assaulted or arrested passers-by at will, almost at random. Their victims were hauled off to makeshift torture chambers in old basements, or to one of the SA's improvised concentration camps. Hitler viewed the situation with mounting anger, for the popular support which he still needed was ebbing fast, partly because of Göring's failure to bring the SA to heel. In April 1934, Hitler appointed Himmler Inspector of Gestapo with effective control, although Goering remained technically in overall command.
Himmler, in turn, brought into the Gestapo one of his most dynamic and ruthless SS recruits, Reinhard Heydrich. Throughout his career, Heydrich was intermittently dogged by rumors of alleged part-Jewish ancestry. Perhaps Himmler knew of this and used it as a means of ensuring the compliance of his vigorous young subordinate.
By this time, the problem of the SA was becoming acute. The brownshirts had helped Hitler to power and were now increasingly impatient for their reward. They had expected to participate in a socialist revolution.
Instead, Hitler had granted large concessions to industrialists. The fiercely radical Rome had asked for the army to be coalesced with the SA and for himself to be made armed forces minister. But Hitler had given secret pledges to the generals.
Hitler had acted thus because his deep-laid projects for rearmament and war relied crucially on the support of industry and the army. Their purpose served, Rome and his followers were now a dangerous liability. Hitler therefore resolved to destroy the SA leadership at a stroke. He was warmly encouraged by Himmler and Goering, who forthwith began eagerly planning for a comprehensive purge. Their Gestapo and police prepared detailed lists of those to be murdered.
The 30th of June, 1933. Four passed into history as the night of the long knives. Hundreds were seized and some were re-executed. The scale and ferocity of the action stunned the public, although bringing also a widespread sense of relief. The unflinching readiness with which the well-disciplined SS struck down their erstwhile comrades impressed and gratified Hitler. During the following year, 1935, Göring was happily installed as commander of the new German air force, and the Gestapo in its entirety was absorbed into Himmler's SS-Fieften.
Calm and order returned. to the streets. Between a crash program of public works and a covert but large scale program of rearmament, unemployment disappeared.
Spectacular, magnificently staged managed parades and rallies convincingly presented the image of a contented, prosperous people, enthusiastically united behind the leader. The reality was otherwise. At the great rally of 1935, the first of the infamous Nuremberg Laws against those of Jewish blood were promulgated.
Over the years, more than 200 further decrees would be announced, designed to eradicate every taint of Jewishness from German life. But the secret apparatus of terror would reach out not to Jews only, but to every German citizen. And it was expanding fast. By 1936, Himmler had achieved his long-striven-for goal of undivided command of all Germany's police forces, secret or uniformed. The Gestapo gained immunity from any challenge in the law courts.
In future, any appeal against the Gestapo's action could only be heard by the Gestapo itself. As operational head of the Gestapo, though reporting to Heydrich, Himmler had appointed Heinrich Moeller. This Bavarian expert on surveillance and political police work would remain in office until the very end.
Mueller had visited the Soviet Union, where he'd been impressed by the method of Stalin's secret police, and particularly by the all-pervading system of informers. Under Moeller, Gestapo recruitment was accelerated. Eventually, its agents numbered many tens of thousands. And soon, there was no street or block of flats, no office or workplace, where the eyes and ears of the Gestapo did not reach.
Usually, the informers were unpaid, but they enjoyed the heady sense of power over their fellow men. The realization spread that a denunciation to the Gestapo was often an effective method of settling a personal grudge or of opening the way to a promotion. Even children were all unconsciously brought into to serve the cause. The various national socialist youth movements enjoyed immense popularity, whilst insidiously and persistently inculcating a loyalty beyond that of the family. Parents could no longer be sure they were not being spied on by their own offspring.
In the summer of 1936, the Olympic Games were held in Berlin. And since Hitler wanted Germany to show an acceptable face to the world, the persecution of the Jews was temporarily eased. Nor did Hitler wish to be seen tampering directly with the German churches.
Instead, many clerics were subjected to personal intimidation and to smear campaigns conducted through the state-controlled press. Though keeping wherever possible outside the public eye, the leather-coated Gestapo officials waged a relentless war on dissidents. Over 250 members of a workers' resistance group in Stettin were arrested and jailed for circulating banned newspapers and for holding private meetings. Later, prominent visitors to Berlin were encouraged to patronize the Salon Kitty, a nightclub covertly run by the Gestapo. Amongst the discreet services on offer were concealed microphones in every bedroom.
Year by year, the Gestapo files expand. They abounded with compromising information of every kind, adroitly used, almost anyone could be incriminated. In early 1938, Bloomberg and Fritsch, respectively War Minister and Army Commander-in-Chief, were forced out of office as a consequence of scandals fabricated using Gestapo material.
By 1938, Hitler felt ready to embark upon the process of winning new lands for the Reich. His first step was the Anschluss, the absorption of Austria into an enlarged greater Germany. Hitler's triumphal entry into his new dominions was attended by extravagant demonstrations of public rejoicing. But behind the scenes, well hidden from general view, the Gestapo and SS were busy disposing of the remnants of Austria's political opposition.
Following the Anschluss, even more Jews were desperate to escape Hitler's oppression. The Gestapo opened an office in Vienna, which enjoyed a monopoly in the issuing of exit visas to Jews. This profitable enterprise was run by an Austrian SS officer, Karl Adolf Eichmann. Himmler made a tour of Vienna and its environs, and fixed upon the picturesque village of Mauthausen as a site for a new concentration camp.
After Austria, Hitler's attention focused next on Czechoslovakia, where there lived three million Sudeten Germans. Many believed that any attempt of Hitler's to seize the Sudetenland would lead to a general European war. If so, Heydrich was resolved to take sinister advantage of the situation. That summer, intense diplomatic maneuvering took place in Europe's capitals. Simultaneously, in deepest secrecy, Heydrich brought together Gestapo and other units to form what were termed special purpose groups.
These would follow the German army into Czechoslovakia. Their function would be to deal with the Jews. Their method would be mass execution.
Heydrich's plans were forestalled when, at the Munich conference in October, Britain and France capitulated in the face of Hitler's aggressive posturing and boldly calculated bluff. Czechoslovakia was abandoned by her allies in exchange for a worthless promise. Hitler gained the lands he'd coveted without a shot having been fired. Nevertheless, the special purpose groups remained in being.
In the spring of 1939, German forces occupied Bohemia and Moravia, and the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia was completed. In London and Paris, the occupation was received as shocking confirmation of the emptiness of Hitler's pledged word. So far, an inspired blend of bluff and intimidation had served Hitler well. But he knew that his next objective, the annexation of large tracts of Polish territory, could not be achieved save through the force of arms.
In August, the way was made clear by a non-aggression treaty with Stalin's Soviet Union. As the German armies prepared for invasion, Hitler cast a round for a pretext for war. Murla offered to supply some Gestapo prisoners for a mock attack on a German radio station at Gleiwitz, near the border. The intention was that listeners would hear what sounded like a Polish assault. For added authenticity, Murla's prisoners, dressed in Polish uniforms, would be taken to the scene and shot.
Though few of the pleasure-seekers in the capital can have known it, The evening of September 2nd, 1939 was Berlin's last night of peace. Heydrich sat listening expectantly to his Wallace, but no one had thought to check the strength of the Gleiwitz transmitter. Its signal faded after a few kilometers, and Europe heard nothing of the studiously rehearsed affray. Some photographs were published in newspapers the next day, but by then...
German forces were thrusting deep into Poland. That stricken country was soon under attack on two fronts. For, by a secret protocol to the pact with Stalin, the Soviet Union was to receive a share of Polish territory. And the Red Army marched in from the east.
German forces were also on the front lines. Communists and other refugees from Hitler's rule were rounded up by Stalin's police and handed over to the custody of the Gestapo. The Gestapo reciprocated in kind.
The military campaign was conducted throughout with exemplary efficiency. Hitler, visiting his new domain, had good reason to congratulate his troops. The special purpose detachments had gone in behind the army and set about their barbarous work almost directly. Yet behind the German battle lines a state of near anarchy obtained. For Hitler, ever wary of any subordinate becoming too powerful, deliberately kept his command structure muddled and ill-defined.
As a result, the various SS organs, army commanders and civilian administrators quarreled acrimoniously between themselves over who exercised final authority. Faced with this unsatisfactory situation, the Gestapo decided a more orderly approach to the Jewish problem was required. The first step was segregation. Heydrich directed... The initial stage in implementing German measures against the Jews must be to isolate them from the rest of the population.
They are to be put into ghettos, with men and women in separate quarters. Ghettoization proved an effective technique and was quickly adopted as standard practice. Meanwhile, inside Germany itself, Hitler had taken advantage of the turmoil of war to set in hand a sinister program to purge the racial stock of impure elements.
Germans deemed unfit to breed were to be secretly eliminated through mercy killing. In the spring of 1940, Hitler resumed the trail of conquest with extraordinary success. First, his armies overran Denmark and seized Norway in a lightning campaign. Immediately thereafter, he struck westwards at the Low Countries and France.
A daring but masterfully executed plan threw the Allied armies into hopeless disarray. And although the British managed to evacuate most of the men of their expeditionary force, France was rapidly driven to capitulation. The swiftness and completeness of the victory astonished the world. For Hitler and many others, it was a confirmation of the invincibility of German arms. Initially, the Gestapo were allowed into France in only minimal numbers, for Hitler was hoping to come to some accommodation with Britain and wished to show himself as forbearing and magnanimous.
Moreover, the Gestapo were bitterly disliked and distrusted by the army, who protested strongly against their presence. For the moment, Himmler had to be content with having a bridgehead merely. His SS organization was by now of enormous dimensions.
It included the burgeoning concentration camp network, the uniformed police forces, large industrial enterprises, the fighting units of the Waffen-SS, research institutes of various kinds, and much else. Himmler exercised ultimate control through a huge, ever-proliferating bureaucracy. Despite attempts at rationalization, the SS organization was of intricate, bewildering complexity.
In 1940, Himmler had grouped it into seven major branches. Heydrich was in charge of one of the most important of these, the RSHA, or Reich Security Main Office. The RSHA was the first to be established in the Soviet Union. The RSHA was split into two principal segments. The Security Service, or SD, was the party's official intelligence gathering unit, with domestic and overseas sections.
The Security Police, or SIPO, comprised two separate forces. The first, the KRIPO, was the plainclothes criminal police. The other was Heinrich Müller's Gestapo, whose function was officially defined as the suppression of of opposition.
Thus, the Gestapo's formal designation was Section 4 of RSHA. The Gestapo was itself subdivided into various departments. And it was amidst this tangle of officialdom and dryest bureaucracy that some of the most horrific abominations of Hitler's regime were conceived and initiated. Thus, all cases of protective custody passed through a single department.
Protective custody was the sending of suspected dissidents or potential resistors, usually without even the formality of a charge, to concentration camps. Another department, headed by Adolf Eichmann, bore special responsibility for Jews. With the acquisition by conquest of new lands to police, further Gestapo departments were formed. Yet, at first, it seemed there was little real need for the Gestapo in countries such as France. For, despite Churchill's defiant speeches, it was universally apparent that Britain, weakened and isolated, could never by herself hope to pry Luke out.
Hitler's grip on Western Europe. The occupying German troops, for the most part, observed decent propriety in their dealings with civilians. Many Frenchmen sullenly acquiesced in what appeared to be a permanent new order in Europe. Churchill emphatically did not, although for the moment his scope for direct action was severely limited.
Small commando raids were launched against targets on the German-held coastline. Militarily, these had negligible effect, but were of significant nuisance value. Meanwhile, the first small resistance cells were forming, and agents were clandestinely parachuted in from Britain.
Hoping to force Churchill to sue for peace, Hitler ordered Goering to mount a sustained bombing offensive against Britain. The failure of the bombing campaign left Hitler frustrated and angry, and more amenable to Himmler's insidious suggestion that the occupation army was too soft on commandos, spies and saboteurs. The Gestapo contingent in France increased steadily in strength. By now, Hitler was increasingly preoccupied with the preparations for his most awesome military adventure.
A vast offensive in the east to destroy the Soviet Union and seize huge expanses of land for the Thousand Year Reich. The code name for the projected surprise attack on his ally Stalin was Operation Barbarossa. First, Germany's southern flank was secured. In spring, German armies occupied the Balkans and Greece in a swift but bloody campaign.
In Yugoslavia, many soldiers of the defeated army disappeared into the wooded mountainous terrain, from whence they repeatedly descended to harass the occupiers. The partisans were never defeated, and tied down increasing numbers of Axis troops. The forces brought together for Barbarossa were of unprecedented magnitude. By June, three million men were assembled on the Reich's eastern borders.
On June the 22nd, the attack began. The Soviet defenders were caught hopelessly ill-prepared. And in the months that followed, the Red Army sustained a calamitous succession of defeats.
The German spearheads drove remorselessly on, striking deep into the Ukraine, towards Moscow in the center and Leningrad in the north. In the east, there were few constraints on the Gestapo's operations. For Hitler, the Slavic peoples were scarcely human.
The fight against them, a war of annihilation. Following close behind the rapidly advancing battlefronts, Heydrich's special purpose groups set about their grisly work. A Gestapo department was responsible for the arrangements for Soviet prisoners of war, who were captured in enormous quantities. Hitler had issued a directive, the Commissar's Order, providing for the screening out of Communist Party members. These men were to be accorded special treatment.
More concisely, they were to be killed. City after city fell. Usually...
The local populace was eager to deliver up any communist officials, for Stalin's rule had been bitterly harsh. The Gestapo also recruited informers from amongst the hordes of prisoners to denounce commissars and Jews. These informers were themselves normally executed after a few months, for the Gestapo did not care that too many should know about its methods.
In the event, these measures made little practical difference. since the common lot of the captured was either starvation, exposure, or forced labor camp. In the course of the war, several million Soviet prisoners died, the majority from the neglect and indifference of their captors.
In Germany, 1941 was remarkable as the last year in which Hitler allowed himself to be swayed by public protest. The euthanasia program, introduced without even the sham of legality, had become quickly notorious. Widely voiced disquiet culminated in a series of sermons delivered by the Bishop of Münster. Though privately furious, Hitler was persuaded that the party would suffer if the bishop were turned over to the Gestapo. In August, the program was halted.
Not all the euthanasia staff were made redundant. They had developed techniques for killing patients using poison gases, of which Zyklon B was the most efficacious. For Heydrich's commanders, this offered a promising, more efficient alternative to mass shootings.
In September, the first gassing of inmates of a concentration camp was carried out in Block 11 at Auschwitz. That same month, Heydrich was made protector of Bohemia and Moravia, but still retained overall responsibility for the Jewish question. In January 1942, Heydrich organized a conference in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee.
Mueller and Eichmann were amongst those in attendance. At Wannsee, the extermination of the Jews was enshrined in official state policy. Although the Gestapo was heavily involved in the rounding up of victims and the recapture of escapees, the death camps themselves were largely run by other sections of the SS, and the Gestapo's duties therein were principally those of record-keeping.
However, the Gestapo's Economic Affairs Department, Office 4A, 3B, was active in the recovery of gold fillings and other valuables from the condemned. After the Japanese raid on Pearl Harbor, Hitler had declared war on the United States, even though his great eastern offensive had come to a halt in the freezing Russian winter. As the year 1942 began, Hitler was facing antagonists whose reserves of manpower and capacity for war production would eventually prove overwhelming. Meantime, however, Germany still disposed of foreign forces.
formidable armed strength and held enormous territories. The power of the Gestapo was at its height. Heydrich, in high good humour, had told his men, there is no problem down to the smallest egotistical longing which the Gestapo cannot solve.
Looked at in this light, we are, so to speak, something of a cross between an all-purpose maid and the dustbin of the Reich. In Czechoslovakia, a violent but brief spell of terror, followed by improvements in working and living conditions, had largely subdued the populace. And Heydrich felt sufficiently confident to drive to work unescorted, in an open car.
It was his undoing. In May, he was fatally wounded by two agents parachuted in by the British. Enraged, the SS and Gestapo exacted hideous retribution.
The inhabitants of two entire villages were deported or murdered, and hundreds further executed. Hitler delivered an oration in person at the funeral of his invaluable henchman. As a tribute, the program to liquidate the Jews of Poland was renamed Action Reinhardt, and Heydrich was also subsequently commemorated on a postage stamp. He left behind an organization entrenched in notoriety. party.
In their cinemas, Germans saw propaganda films depicting the Gestapo as kindly workers for the common good. Yet they could easily guess that the men of office 4B4, which dealt with passes and identification, had functions beyond that of a mere railway ticket inspector. Since there was no longer any reason to conciliate American opinion, the Gestapo could now operate without constraint even in Western Europe. They were not idle, for sabotage was becoming more frequent. With the formation of a global alliance against Germany, the conquered peoples, for the first time, saw the real possibility of ultimate liberation.
The increasingly rampant brutality of the occupiers powerfully stiffened the will to resist. Denmark only remained long an exception, for the Germans considered the Nordics as akin to blood brothers. The feeling was little reciprocated, and in a single extraordinary operation, the courageous Danes succeeded in secretly evacuating virtually all of their 8,000 Jews to safety in Sweden. In general, the Gestapo's regime was of unremitting harshness.
For one German killed, 20, 50 or even 100 local people might be executed by way of reprisal. In France, some 30,000 civilians died under this policy. Hostages were also seized and held under threat of death to compel the betrayal of a fugitive resistance worker or commander.
The Gestapo made extensive use of the Night and Fog Decree, by which suspected persons were spirited away to Germany, and no information of any kind divulged either about their alleged crime or final fate. Throughout 1942, the British launched frequent raids against the coasts of Western Europe. Commandos and parachutists came under office foray too, and after October of that year, The Gestapo instructions were very precise.
For an exasperated Hitler directed that any court must be exterminated to the last man, regardless of their uniform. Later in the war, the bullet order allowed the Gestapo yet wider latitude. Various categories of prisoners of war could be stripped of their status and shot. The many victims of this decree included 50 RAF officers who participated in a mass escape from the camp Stalag Luft III.
Inevitably, the Gestapo practiced torture, crudely but often effectively, on a routine basis. It was used purely to extract information, though very often the interrogators were seeking information their hapless victims did not possess. Although no copy has ever been found, it is likely that the Gestapo had some sort of manual, for the vicious methods employed, which typically included beatings, water torture, and the use of electrodes, were everywhere of remarkable similarity. The supremely resilient and heroic could withstand even these. But some of the bravest resistance fighters were broken when they heard or saw the same tortures applied to relatives.
In January of 1943, Himmler appointed a successor to the murdered Heydrich. Ernst Kaltenbrunner had been leader of the SS in Austria and police chief in Vienna since the Anschluss. Unusually tall, exceptionally cruel, and a confirmed alcoholic, Carlton Brunner was an intellectual mediocrity.
He was promoted partly because Himmler felt confident he would never develop into a rival. The loss of an entire German army at Stalingrad in early 1943 was both a catastrophe and a grim augury of events to come. The tide of war was palpably turning against Germany. Allied bombers were raining devastation on the cities.
North Africa was lost, Italy collapsed, and, most crucially of all, the Red Army was steadily establishing an ascendancy on the eastern side. front. Several of the Gestapo's hitherto lesser roles now assumed a larger importance. Using its huge network of agents, the Gestapo had for years been compiling regular secret reports on the mood of the German public.
The mood was no longer optimistic, but defeatism and rumor-mongering were punishable offenses, and Office 4-1-B was not backward in enforcing the law. Listening to foreign radio broadcasts was also a serious matter. The Gestapo did not rely solely on detector vans.
Innocuous-seeming advertisements for powerful wireless sets were placed in shop windows and in local newspapers. Those foolish enough to respond soon found themselves under interrogation. Counterintelligence was claimed as a Gestapo and SD speciality.
But in this field, their record was mixed. One outstanding success was the penetration of a British spy ring in Holland in 1942, achieved through clever code-breaking and the skilful use of a double agent. A whole series of agents parachuted in by the British, British were captured on arrival by waiting Gestapo men who also took delivery of quantities of stores and munitions concurrently up to 14 transmitters were feeding false information back to Britain the messages frequently lacked the proper coded security checks but because of repeated blundering this was overlooked in London not until March 1944 was the truth discovered. By this time, the Western Allies' preparations for a return to Europe were well in hand, and a huge cross-channel assault force was assembling. It would land in Normandy, but in order to persuade the Germans that the real objective was elsewhere, the Allies carried out several highly elaborate deception plans.
None of the German intelligence services saw through the gigantic hoax. The various French resistance movements were not brought into the D-Day plans until a short space before. But on three occasions, the messages broadcast over the BBC to the resistance were picked up by an acute SD officer in Paris.
On the 5th of June, he dispatched an urgent message warning of an invasion within 48 hours. But the army in Normandy was not alerted. The Allied landings of June 1944 sparked off an upsurge of resistance activity throughout France.
The Gestapo and troops dealt fairly easily with the various small partisan groups that sprang up, but sabotage of the military's vital transport system was much more difficult to suppress. A bridgehead secured, there ensued a period of hard fighting as the Allies sought to wear down the German defenders in preparation for a breakout. The second front had been established, but within weeks the Gestapo and Germany were convulsed by another momentous happening.
A group of senior German officers led by Klaus von Stauffenberg had for long been plotting Hitler's overthrow. On the 20th of July, a bomb planted by Stauffenberg exploded at Hitler's headquarters in East Prussia. Though Stauffenberg did not realize it for several hours, he had succeeded only in wounding Hitler badly, not killing him.
For a brief while, confusion prevailed. In Paris, officers backing the conspiracy temporarily arrested the entire Gestapo headquarters staff. The Gestapo building in Berlin was wholly unprotected.
Müller had only the vaguest awareness that anything was happening. But it soon emerged that Hitler had escaped and control was swiftly re-established. By midnight, Stauffenberg had been shot and the conspiracy was in ruins. Carlton Brunner threw himself with grim enthusiasm into the task of searching out the plotters and bringing them before a special people's court.
The surviving ringleaders suffered agonizing deaths by slow strangulation. Prosecutions and executions continued to be carried out until the last days of the war. Although Hitler was bitter about the failure of Himmler's agencies to detect the plot beforehand, he entrusted Himmler with the raising and command of a large new reserve army, needed to reinforce the desperately hard-pressed defenders on the Eastern Front.
Himmler's makeshift new army was well-policed, with Gestapo and SD informers in every unit. Over the next months, the military situation worsened almost daily. In the east, a series of vast offensives by the Red Army brought the fighting onto German soil.
The first concentration camps were liberated. In the west, too, the march of liberation continued. By the spring of 1945, the British and Americans had crossed the Rhine and were progressing through the bomb-devastated cities of Germany itself. Although the Gestapo now operated only within a fast-diminishing radius, its grip was still of the fiercest, partly because of the ever more draconian decrees sent out by Himmler. The German collapse was swift.
Hitler saw out the last weeks ensconced in his fortified bunker in Berlin, where Mueller was in frequent attendance. One of the Gestapo's last executions carried out on Hitler's direct orders took place on April the 27th. General Fagerlein's crime was to have abandoned the bunker for his Berlin flat. He was the brother-in-law of Hitler's mistress, Eva Braun.
A few days thereafter, Hitler took his own life. The war formally ended in early May. Having destroyed all his files and every photograph of himself he could find, Heinrich Müller vanished completely. Whether he died anonymously in Berlin or contrived to escape abroad has never been established.
Heinrich Himmler was taken prisoner, but poisoned himself. This left Ernst Kaltenbrunner as the most senior surviving member of the Gestapo organization. And as such, he was among the 17 accused who stood trial before the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg.
The manifold crimes of Hitler's regime, in all their stupendous variety and plentitude of horror, were now revealed to a shocked and scarcely comprehending world. During the trial, the court was shown a film compilation of numerous atrocities, which left even some of the defendants sickened. Carlton Brunner passed much of his period of captivity in a state of craven fear.
The examining doctors reported, he has a weak, vacillating will and an emotionally unstable schizoid personality. Stripped of his power, he now cringes and complains that he was only a tool of Himmler and an unimportant one at that. He weeps at the slightest provocation.
He is the bully type. Strong and hard when on top, cringing and crying when not. Giving evidence, Carlton Brunner resorted desperately to bluster, evasion and lying. Confronted with hundreds of documents bearing his signature, he vehemently denied having signed any.
He even claimed to have believed that special treatment, the normal Gestapo euphemism for executing, really meant sending to an alpine resort. He was found guilty and went to the gallows on October 16, 1946. During the trial, the Gestapo in its entirety was adjudged a criminal organization. Its hideous apparatus of terror had been used by Hitler from first to last against the very people to whom he had promised prosperity and salvation. In the occupied territories, Gestapo rule eventually proved counterproductive, engendering both hatred and a fierce determination to throw off the oppressors. The Gestapo operated through the use of uninhibited violence and by appealing to the basest of human instincts.
The majority of the men who carried out this sort of work were squalid and obtuse mediocrities, despised even by other Nazis. So long as Hitler's armies held the field, the Gestapo held firm to a perverted pride. But in defeat, many former agents, like their leader Kaltenbrunner, were to display a civility and cravenness scarcely less amazing than the long and terrible catalogue of their crimes. Yubi yubi dun, ah ah ah, oh