The Gestapo: Power and Terror in the Third Reich

A New Study Of The Gestapo

Published in Germany in 2011, "The Gestapo: Power and Terror in the Third Reich" by Carsten Dams and Michael Stolle has been translated into English by Charlotte Ryland and is about to be published by Oxford University Press. The authors bring an informed, scholarly perspective to the book. Dams is Professor of Police Science at the School of Public Management, North-Rhine, Westphalia. Stolle Executive Director of the "House of Competence", Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, has written extensively on the Gestapo. The book makes use of extensive research on the Gestapo, much of which, as shown in the extensive bibliography, is in German and thus not readily available to non-specialist American readers.

This book is short but dense and difficult. The translation is good on the whole with some stylistic and grammatical eccentricities in English. The book is dry and academic. The advantage of the book's tone is that it avoids the temptation to sensationalism and stereotyping. Most readers likely know of the Gestapo primarily through broader studies of Nazi Germany or through representations in the media. This book presents a detailed, focused approach. The disadvantage of the academic writing on this work is that it may become dull and perhaps overly detached in tone for many readers. Thus, while the book is valuable, it is written for a reader with a serious interest in the subject.

The authors begin with the observation that the Gestapo, or the German Secret State Police, has become emblematic of the Third Reich for many people. It has an almost mythological character as an omnipotent terrorist organization which the leaders of the Gestapo themselves carefully cultivated. Dams and Stolle are far from minimizing the evil, terror, murder and lawlessness that followed in the Gestapo's wake. Their goal is to show how the Gestapo changed (they unhappily use the term "evolved") over the life of the Third Reich. They also want to show that the Gestapo formed part of a broad range of organizations and people that led to the Holocaust and to other terrors. They point to other parts of the German police establishment, to the Army, to collaborators and informants both within Germany and in places that came under the dominion of the Reich. They find a broad guilt in the crimes of the Reich not only in Gestapo leadership but in the Gestapo officers as well, who worked with a great deal of discretion, and with other components of German and European society. They conclude that many Gestapo participants essentially escaped without proper punishment in the years following WW II.

Drawing of the work of earlier scholars, Dams and Stolle distinguish between a "Normative" and a "Prerogative" state, both of which existed in the Third Reich. The "normative" state involves the laws and rules that apply to the non-persecuted portions of a society. The "prerogative" state is one which takes actions against outsiders -- those whom the state defines as "enemies". The Gestapo was empowered to take preemptive action against those defined as enemies and to do so "without legal obligation, in wholly arbitrary ways, and by means of brutal terror." The Gestapo was "the core institution of the National Socialist Prerogative State".

Readers looking for detailed accounts of the innumerable murders, tortures, and acts of sadism will not find it in this book. Dams and Stolle fully acknowledge the scope and enormity of the crimes but their focus lies in trying to identify the institutional structure that allowed the perpetuation of the crimes rather than in their description. Thus, the early chapters of the book describe the development of the Gestapo from the police forces that existed during the Weimar Republic, particularly as these forces combatted communism and the rising NSDAP itself. The book describes the recruitment of personnel and discusses the difficulty of attributing any one specific motivation to the many individuals that worked for the Gestapo. Many were committed to the NSDAP programme, while others were careerists seeking advancement, while still others were attracted by the possibilities of sadism and brutality. The authors then briefly examine the top leadership of the Gestapo, including figures such as Himmler, Heydrich, Muller, and the lawyer, Werner Best. The book examines the shifting relationships between the Gestapo leadership in Berlin (the Gestapa) and the field offices elsewhere in Germany and, eventually, in Europe.

The authors then describe the Gestapo's way of operating in Germany and the manner in which all the police organizations of the state worked together, even though they frequently were rivals. They discuss political persecutions, the persecutions of religious groups, foreign nationals, and others, leading to the beginnings of the implementation of the policy against Jews.

Then, Dams and Stolle discuss the expansion of the Gestapo's reach with the prosecution of the war, including the many enormities of the Holocaust. The discussions are brief, but focused as the book describes the Gestapo's differing role and the different types of collaborations in the many countries which the Third Reich controlled, for a time.

The final sections of the book offer an overview of attempts to prosecute members of the Gestapo following WW II. These efforts met with mixed success but had overall the effect of increasing knowledge of the Gestapo and the ways in which it operated. Finally, the authors try briefly to consider what lessons might be drawn from the structure of the Gestapo for contemporary issues. The authors are broadly skeptical of the proper scope of "preemptive" police work aimed at a group or a perceived enemy before a crime has been committed. They are reluctant to draw any specific conclusions because the enormities of the Third Reich have no easy analogies.

Dams and Stolle have written a scholarly and valuable history of the Gestapo and of the ways in which it operated. The book will be of interest to serious students of Nazi Germany and to readers with an interest in the organizational structure and functions of police forces.

Robin Friedman