In January 1933, Adolf Hitler was appointed head of government of the VHimar Democratic Republic.

German society was undermined by violence.

Political tensions were settled in the streets with fists or batons, and the communists represented the first enemy of the state.

The Nazi party also distinguished itself in the use of violence as a weapon of persuasion.

The whole Nazi scheme from the early 1930s was based on finding the right support, especially among conservatives, against those they considered their enemies.

Taking advantage of the disunityity of the German left, Hitler appeared to be a shield against the communists.

But the Nazis were a minority in the government at the time.

When the Nazis came to power in 1933, they had various opponents.

On one hand, those who were their enemies, namely those on the left or who were Democrats, and on the other hand, other opponents who embodied the hard right or the German far right to become a majority [music] and establish their power.

They did everything to win the legislative elections of March 1933.

Hitler then had free reign to take control of the state, destroy the republic, and establish the Third Reich, a dictatorship in his image, arbitrary and paranoid, the violence of which would strike all those he saw as enemies.

The hunt for communists began in great confusion, led by several organizations, including the various German police forces and the militia of the Nazi party.

something relatively unprecedented in history happened.

The state split.

There was the state with its agents, its civil servants, a Nazi state.

But at the same time, the Nazi party set up a whole set of structures that competed with or complemented the state.

The Nazi party relied on two complimentary and competing militias.

The SA was created in 1921 and its leader Ernst Rome was loyal from the beginning.

From 1930 on the SA grew from 100,000 to nearly 1 million workingclass men to whom Rome promised an anti- capitalist revolution.

On the other side were the recruits of the SS.

Having gone from 280 members in 1928 to approximately 52,000 in 1933.

These men were different from Romes [music] in that they were fewer in number, selected based on pseudoan criteria, and trained in Nazi ideology.

These were true fanatics led by Hinrich Himmler.

When the curtain raises on the Nazis rise [music] to power in 1933, he’s leader of the SX, which is still under [music] drone and the SA at this time.

But the Nazis were now at the head of a state.

Traditionally, states have a political police force whose role is to identify groups that are potential threats.

Just a few months [music] earlier, the political police of the VHimar Republic were investigating the communists and the Nazis, but they were now under direct Nazi jurisdiction.

All dictatorships have a political police force, instruments of suppression.

Otherwise, they wouldn’t be dictatorships.

April 26th, 1933 marked the launching of one of the largest criminal organizations in history.

Another of Hitler’s cronies, Herman Goring, placed the political police under his direct authority and created the Gestapo, the state’s secret police.

First of all, Guring didn’t set up a new police force.

He simply took over the political police of the VHimar Republic and made it independent.

But it was a pre-existing police force.

That was the first step.

He kept most of the teams made up of experienced, methodical policemen who had valuable knowhow and existing files on the communists.

Meanwhile, the Nazis transformed a provision of German law, making it possible to arbitrarily arrest anyone on mere suspicion.

This was the shutaft or protective [music] detention used indiscriminately [music] by the SA, the SS and the police.

It allowed for the arrest of thousands of political opponents.

Prisons overflowed.

Where would all these people be detained? The shaft went hand in hand with its logical compliment, the concentration camps.

The very first Dhaka opened on March 20th, [music] 1933, just weeks after Hitler’s rise to power.

At first, after the seizure of power by the National Socialists, the SA created its own sphere of power, so to speak.

Savage concentration camps to be used against its political opponents.

Praised by the regime’s propaganda, the official purpose of the camp was to rehabilitate the prisoners in conditions that were decent and respectful of them.

The aim was to make people believe that it wasn’t that bad.

You could go there and visit it.

[music] And that’s why the camp was presented as an exemplary one in which everyone had enough to eat, slept fabulously well, and didn’t work that hard after all.

The reality was entirely different.

In a few months, the camps were filled to the point where they could no longer accommodate all the inmates.

They had to constantly create new ones.

Despite the confusion, it proves very effective at crushing organized opposition.

200,000 people are cycled through the concentration camp system in Prussia alone by the end of summer 1933.

[music] Tensions between the SA and the SS intensified.

In 1933, they seized power and within that power, the SS took over, which was the second step.

This wasn’t something planned in advance.

Hitler wants to play a key [music] role in realizing Hitler’s vision of creating a people’s community.

The first task is quite simply he needs to centralize the power to be able to have any role within.

In 1931, Himmler entrusted his right-hand man, Reinard Hedrich, with the creation of his own spy service, the SD, or SS Security Service, which collected information on opponents of his organization, including their comrades in the SA.

In 1934, Himner took advantage of a long awaited opportunity.

To Hitler, Rome had become troublesome.

His brutal [music] methods embarrassed the conservatives and his ambitions hindered the vimach, the German army.

An alliance of these conservative forces would overthrow the government.

The chancellor had no choice but to get rid of his old friend.

Himler thus allied himself with Goring, relying on the SD files and the methods of the Gestapo to fabricate a plot by the head of the SA against Hitler.

On June 29th, 1934 began the night of the long knives, which lasted for several days.

Hundreds of SA members were arrested and put to death.

Ernst Rome was murdered in his cell.

The SS became more and more important and the SA was beheaded.

There were lists of potential opponents of national socialism.

It was most likely Hydrickch who finally decided who should or shouldn’t be shot.

Several witnesses claimed to have seen Hydrickch personally cross off names on those lists.

Rid of their rival, Hitler and Goring shared the profits.

Guring then focused entirely on the economic domain, the four-year plan, and the Air Force, which offered more promising prospects.

Himmler was the big winner of the confrontation.

He regained command of the Gestapo and what remained of the SA and in 1936 became the head of all German police forces.

It continued to centralize more and more power until the beginning of World War II.

Hydrickch became his right-hand man.

First appointed to effective leadership of the Gestapo before handling the operational command of this [music] administrative monster.

He was truly the best technocrat of the Third Reich or one of the best.

He was the one who formed the whole repressive structure of the SS.

The event sent a very clear message.

In a [music] state completing its Nazi transformation, death would be the fate of those who didn’t conform to the leading [music] ideology.

Hydrickch put an end to the confusion of the first few months.

As political police, it was up to the Gestapo to identify the enemies of the Nazi regime.

In 1934, it obtained the monopoly of the shoot.

Protective detention allowed the Gestapo, and from 1934 on, only the Gestapo, the secret state police, to take individuals into custody without any offense having been committed.

Suspicion was sufficient reason to act.

Above all, there was no [music] recourse possible before the courts.

This was the primary objective of national socialists and of Himmler in particular to put the Gestapo, the political police, out of reach of the control of the state apparatus, so wouldn’t be subjected to legal checks and balances.

Thanks to this prerogative of being able to arrest, torture, and imprison people, the power of the Gestapo increased beyond belief.

also offers.

In 1935, the first objective was achieved.

600,000 communists were arrested and 2,000 killed in concentration camps run by the SS.

By the end of 1935, of the 422 executives of the Communist Party in office in 1933, [music] 219 were in prison, 125 in exile, 24 had been killed, 42 had resigned, and only 12 [music] were on the run.

By this time, it was over.

In 1935, the communist resistance was virtually crushed, leaving hardly any other.

After that, at this point, the real question was what? Now it was decided that it wasn’t only the political opponents but everyone who deviated from the image of the desired German citizen aran in good health and with national socialist convictions.

[music] From then on the Gustapo hunted down Jews, gypsies, the disabled, Jehovah’s Witnesses, homosexuals, and the marginalized.

It organized its sections according [music] to the nature of the individuals.

The internal organization of the Gestapo reflects the way that it sees German society.

The goal was for the Gestapo to become a kind of doctor for the German people as a whole.

They had to be freed from all the elements that bothered them politically, but also Biologically, this was a whole new mission, a considerable one, as the Gestapo only had a small number of [music] personnel.

At the beginning of the seizure of power, the Gestapo had 50 employees in Prussia.

That’s almost nothing.

But soon the numbers reached one or 2,000 people.

If you do the math, in a city like Hamburg with over a million people, there [music] were maybe 10 Gestapo agents.

But thanks to the shoot, arrests and detentions in the camps multiplied.

At this point, the Gestapo’s most effective tool was put into place.

Fear.

[music] That was pretty logical.

When you have such a small organization that has to monitor an entire country, it’s impossible to terrorize or imprison everyone.

The important thing is that others hear about it and get scared.

Such is the principle of terror.

The Gestapo cleverly orchestrated its power.

Far from the image evoked by its name, the secret police acted in a very public way with offices that were visible to all in almost every city of the country.

Everyone knew where their offices were.

They were listed in the phone book.

People were aware that this institution existed and everyone knew how to reach it if necessary.

In the beginning, several reports came out in German newspapers commissioned by the Gestapo or written by journalists.

They told of the perfection and infallibility of the Gestapo, its modernity, and to what point it knew everything that happened.

It saw everything.

Nothing escaped [music] it.

This was a self-created myth.

It won the support of German society being presented as the ally of the good citizen, the good German.

The propaganda around political policing makes sure that people understand why enforcement [music] is happening and why the people who are being targeted are being repressed.

That allows most [music] Germans to see themselves as immune from the terror.

Only 5% experienced constant fear of arrest and [music] 17% felt an occasional fear.

First against the communists, then against Jews and homosexuals.

Letters of denunciation [music] and anonymous tips to the Gestapo multiplied.

If the crime is something that involves social interaction, like criticism of the regime or friendship [music] to Jews, then denunciations from the public are absolutely key.

When we look at cases [music] of criticism and defeatism, 58% of cases are being reported by the public.

A system of generalized surveillance [music] was established in Germany in which the key role was played by the citizens themselves.

The political police were mostly reactive.

The bulk of their interventions were the result of denunciations.

The Gustapo case load was overwhelming.

A backlog somewhere between 30 [music] to 60% was standard.

There was really only time to devote to processing information related to the latest priorities from Berlin.

Officers were overwhelmed with letters of denunciation.

Faced with the omnipotence of the Gestapo, people denounced much more than necessary.

This is the case of a 19-year-old man who was denounced by his mother to the Gestapo.

As a so-called educational measure, he was sent to the special SS camp of the Hinsert concentration camp.

This is a certified copy of the letter that the mother sent to the Gestapo in April 1940.

She denounced her son for supposedly being lazy and thought her last educational recourse was to hand him over to the Gestapo so he could learn to work properly.

She wrote, among other things, I feel compelled to point out to you that this one, she was talking about her son, has been absent from work for more than a week and that he’s hanging out with other slackers like himself.

I’m a widow, and all my lessons and warnings have gone unheeded.

I certainly can’t let things go on like this.

Having managed to escape, he sought refuge somewhere before inevitably returning to his mother, who didn’t want to report him to the Gestapo a second time.

[music] She asked the building supervisor where she lived, to kindly inform the Gustapo that her son was back home and that it was best to catch him early in the morning.

The Gestapo did just that, of course, arresting him a second time to send him back to a concentration camp.

It happened more often than we can imagine that the denunciations came from close members of the family, the mother or the husband, for example.

There were often personal reasons behind it.

They needed an iron willed organization to sort and process these denunciations.

As Reinard Hinrich gained power in the 1930s, he delegated [music] the operational management of the Gestapo to Hinrich Mueller, a former Bavarian policeman [music] who was entirely devoted to law and order.

Heddrich [music] finds common ground with Müller over their shared understanding of a threat from Judeo bullsheism.

And then Müller combines that with immense technical expertise [music] and and a fierce work ethic.

This rule and order fanatic started managing the Gestapo which codified the relations between services, procedures and investigations.

Everything under the AIS of Müller was meticulously organized.

A gigantic bureaucracy was set up.

There was originally a sense of German organization, a desire for normative administration, especially in all their repressive practices in the way they investigated, conducted interrogations, wrote summary reports, and so on.

It was extremely standardized with a lot of paperwork.

Many of the documents in such gestapo files featured precise colors.

Protective detention orders were bright pink.

Arrest notices were red.

From a very pragmatic point of view, it was a relatively simple way to find these files or elements within them.

Political policing by the Gestapo is fundamentally a matter of paperwork and deskbound officers.

The last step [music] in the professionalization of the Gestapo was recruitment.

Hydrich, the head of the organization, recruited young college graduates, nationalists and radicals who had a far more ideological vision.

They were often nationalists, all pretty much anti-communists and anti-semitic to varying degrees.

This inclination was carefully cultivated under the guise of courses and seminars given [music] in police schools.

Officer cadets underwent intense ideological training very similar to that of members of the SS.

That point they have to go a long 28month combination of classroom and practical training.

In his image, Hydrickch modeled this new generation that gradually supplanted the policemen inherited from Vimar.

This is the idea of a state protection court where the SS [music] will infuse their spirit of absolute loyalty and [music] hardness into all of the institutions of enforcement that will guard the new regime against [music] internal enemies of the people.

And the most important of them were the Jewish people.

The humiliations, mistreatments, and arrests of Jews increased exponentially.

November 1938 marked an infamous turning point.

an attack of unprecedented violence and scale.

What’s generally known in France as the night of broken glass is a Nazi term that’s been out of use for quite some time in Germany and now called the November Poggram of 1938.

It extended more than a single night.

In Berlin, for example, it went on for 3 days and three nights, which shows you why using that term makes you lose sight of reality.

On the night of November 9th, Muner sent a secret order to all Gustapo branches.

Measures must be taken for the arrest of 20 to 30,000 Jews in the territory.

On the night of November 10th, Hydrickch ordered the Gestapo to let German citizens take the law into their own hands.

At the same time, the state informed the population that [music] no one would be prosecuted for acts of violence committed against Jews.

[music] It’s obvious that the state controlled the violence, even if they wanted to give it a popular aspect, not even behind the scenes, but front and center, the police and various repressive forces conducted and channeled the operations, both in terms of violent acts and arrests.

In total, approximately 30,000 Jews were affected by the shoot and deported.

The racial role of the political police was official and only got worse.

Lena Hos shows us the mysteries behind a typical Gustapo case.

This file documents the fate of a Jewish man, Herbert Israel Kangut who was described by the Gestapo as a typical Jew.

I’ll read it out loud.

Kangut has the typical Jewish appearance.

His main characteristic is a misleading and elusive attitude.

That is, he was portrayed and I quote, as an incorraably asocial person for whom the only solution from the point of view of society was to be locked up in a concentration camp.

[music] This is the order of protective detention for Herbert Kangut which sealed his fate.

After his detention by the Gustavo in Trier, he was transferred to a concentration camp and ended up in Mount Hen where he died.

From then on, the Gestapo’s [music] reputation with regard to the Jews quickly spread beyond Germany’s borders.

The Jewish communities in Europe were warned.

Men were stalking them and would relentlessly hunt them down no matter where they were.

The term is common knowledge today, but as early as the 1930s, it was known all over the world.

This shows how quickly this police force gained a reputation, not only with the German borders, but abroad.

As Hitler turned to Europe, the Gestapo took on a whole new dimension.

In close cooperation with the secret services, it identified influential [music] elites abroad, drew up lists from the Soviet Union to England, and set up informants to infiltrate the countries targeted by the invasion.

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