They didn’t wait until these countries were militarily occupied to set up those informants.

They had existed for quite a while.

As a result, the Gustapo was able to advance directly behind the vermach and carried out massive waves of arrests thanks to the collected information.

1938 brought the anus, the annexation of Austria by Germany.

To guarantee the effectiveness of the conquest, mixed units made up of agents from various services were put into place.

Their name the intervention groups or Einad group as their name says they were sort of a task force as we say today temporary units which were always composed of three branches.

a Gestapo branch for the political part, a crepo branch for the biocriminal part and an SD branch for intelligence which also had an ideological dimension.

The Gestapo was the most important organization.

In the absence of local concentration camps, [music] the sentence was brisk.

Opponents were taken to discrete locations, gathered and summarily shot.

From the point of view of the Nazis, it was quite logical to unceremoniously eliminate political opponents in the country you occupied and to neutralize those likely to form opposing forces and organize a resistance.

This couldn’t be the mission of the Vermach as it was tasked with fighting the military enemy and occupying the country.

1939 after the blistering elimination of political elites and opponents in Austria followed by the same in Czechoslovakia.

Hitler had even bigger goals in sight.

He targeted Poland and then all the territories in Eastern Europe drawn up before the invasion of the country.

The list of opponents to be murdered in Poland included about 61,000 names.

The Gestapo cast a wide net.

proven or suspected opponents, ever bigger groups of civilians and sometimes entire villages were massacred.

The Einstein were divided into commandos, each with a geographical area to be cleansed.

Their troops were deployed successively in Poland, Ukraine, Bellarus, and Serbia.

Along with assassinating their opponents, they also murdered Jews.

It was very easy for Germans to identify Jews since in Eastern Europe, west of Germany, Jews were a nationality.

There were Jewish quarters in all the cities and villages of Poland, Belarus, [music] and Ukraine.

So no special research was required.

In an extremely methodical way, Gestapo agents and their colleagues organized the industrialization of these shootings.

Individuals were grouped by the thousands in forests, huge pits and fields and shot in waves one after the other.

In order to keep pace with the invasions of Reich troops, the Nazis also sent similar commandos to Western Europe.

But in June 1941, Hitler broke the German Soviet pact.

The Gestapo had to take on the USSR, declared an enemy of Nazi Germany.

This was the confrontation with the worst threat against Germany, what they called Judeo Bulcheism.

This led to a wave of massacres during the summer of 1941.

Initially, only Jewish men were shot and of course communists, even if they weren’t Jews.

In August, Himmler, who visited the front, decided that Jewish women and children should also be murdered on the grounds that otherwise Germany would later have to deal with their revenge.

Eastern Europe became the scene of systematic massacres that would later take the name of Holocaust by bullets.

The numbers were dizzying.

In Ukraine, in just 2 days, Einas group executed 33,771 Jewish civilians in a fuselot.

This was the massacre of Bobby Yar in September 1941.

From July 1941 to December 1941, several hundred,000 Jews were murdered.

The role of the Gestapo in these massacres was paramount as its agents formed majority of Einaw’s group and officers.

It was above all the young auxiliaries.

These very young lawyers from universities who often had just a simple doctorate who took the lead of these intervention groups and were therefore responsible [music] for the mass executions that ensued.

There at the heart of barbarism, the importance of their ideological formation [music] was revealed.

These aren’t monsters.

They’re they’re a whole generation of Germany’s best [music] and brightest, but they’ve been brought into a particular worldview, put in a certain situation, and then [music] trained to think about it in a certain way.

So, this is really about how you create a system that produces [music] mass murderers from normal people.

And yet, even for these young fanatics, murdering men, women, and children [music] with impunity came at a certain cost.

The problem with this is the psychological toll that it takes on the executioner.

Depressive tendencies, generalized alcoholism, so many signs of trauma that in the eyes of the Nazis posed a real problem, they were detrimental to the agents efficiency.

Einaten commanders complained repeatedly that the mass execution of women and children could lead to the degradation of their men.

This term is important.

degradation.

That’s when they started thinking of alternatives.

In August 1941, Himmler made an inspection visit to Einaw’s group B.

He witnessed a mass execution of a 100 people.

According to witnesses, confronted for the first time with the execution of his own orders, even the boss of the SS felt overwhelmed.

When Himmler comes and views [music] an execution, he then begins to smoke as is described by one of the people who talks to him afterward like a neurotic.

The guy who comes up to him says, “What are we doing here? We’re either training fruits, brutes or neurotics for the next generation.

” That’s when you start to see the shift in the style of execution toward an industrial form of killing people.

It was then that the Vonyy conference was held [music] which elaborated the final solution.

It was really a meeting where a whole set of leaders were convened not political leaders of the regime but administrative officials.

These were members of the Hydrri administration including Hydrrich himself of course and Hinrich Müller the head of the Gestapo.

Hydri was certainly the architect of the Holocaust.

The Gestapo organized the deportations.

Aishman became the master contractor in Hydrich’s service for the murder of the European Jews.

He played a coordinating role.

He wasn’t the only one, but he coordinated the operation on the European level.

They were the ones who decided when and how many Jews to deport.

Lists were drawn up.

First 150,000, then another 50,000.

The deportations of Jews spread to all areas under Nazi control.

Ser Clarfeld was 6 years old in 1941.

Originally from Romania, his family took refuge in the south of France in the unoccupied zone, far from the threat of the Gestapo, at least until 1943.

The Germans immediately occupied Nice and began roundups that were among the most terrible in Western Europe.

The Gestapo worked by hand.

They arrested people and potentially carried out physical inspections.

They lowered the men’s pants to check whether or not they were circumcised.

Serge and his sister received very specific instructions to follow in case their parents were arrested.

We were told to go to a friend’s house in the event that our mother was arrested.

Being arrested was synonymous with death, and it could happen at any time.

That was the reality of Jewish children during the war.

Their father built a double bottom in a closet to hide the children in case of a Gestapo raid.

The Germans arrived.

We saw the search lights on the ceiling around midnight.

Immediately, we did what we had to do.

We took some clothes and went to the hiding place.

My mother and sister and I went while my father stayed in the apartment.

[snorts] The Germans went up floor by floor.

verifying apartment by apartment.

Someone must have ratted on us.

Our neighbors, for example, had fake documents.

We could hear the screaming and yelling.

The father shouted, “French police, help.

Save us.

We’re French.

” And when they rang, [music] my father opened and right away they asked the question.

We heard, “Where are your wife and children?” He said, “We were in the countryside.

” The Germans started searching.

One of them opened the closet door.

It was a deep closet that went into the wall and he pushed the clothes to the side, but he didn’t touch the partition.

He didn’t realize it wasn’t a wall.

We were silent.

My sister stuffed a handkerchief in her mouth so she wouldn’t cough.

And we stayed like that the whole time the Gestapo was there.

They told my father to get dressed.

I later found Gestapo search notices for my mother, my sister, and me marked unknown address.

I also found my father on the deportation list.

Unfortunately, when he arrived at Avitz, he hit a capo who had hit him.

He died 6 months later.

[music] He was sent to the gas chamber.

Unlike the Clarfeld children, many didn’t have the chance to escape the Gestapo’s sudden raids into their buildings.

1942 saw the genocide move into higher gear.

The political police filled the new extermination camps with disconcerting speed.

When the Germans killed a person, they tried to find the rest of the family or other Jews they might have known.

A lot of that investigative work was recovered using the logic of the archives such as IDs and photos.

We know for example that Alawar Bruner used physioists in the first sense of the term.

People who looked at photos remembered faces and then looked for them in stations, bus stops, businesses and so on.

This type of police investigation work continued.

By the end of the conflict 3 years later, approximately 6 million Jews had been exterminated.

In addition to hunting down Jews, [music] the Gestapo investigated the growing phenomenon of resistance networks.

Let’s go back to the West in the early 1940s.

After the military conquests, the Gestapo established itself in the occupied territories and managed to adapt its organization.

They didn’t occupy Holland the same way they occupied Ukraine and they didn’t occupy Ukraine as they occupied France.

What was characteristic of the organization was that it constantly changed.

Historians have long thought that this was a handicap, but it turned out to be an advantage because the national socialists were able to quickly adapt their structures to the new tasks before them.

In 1941, the Gestapo had close to 4,000 men posted in the occupied territories of Europe.

They were forced to adapt simply because they were short staffed.

In all of France, they only had 2,000 officers to manage a country of 40 million inhabitants.

It was completely insufficient.

For lack of more agents, the men of the Gustapo circumvented the problem by obtaining the support of the governments of the occupied countries.

Vichi fully cooperated with the German authorities and the French police made massive numbers of arrests in the occupied zone.

The French police worked with the Germans from 1940 to 1944.

When you’re a cop from Frankfurt or Stuttkart and you’re sent to Paris, breast or nant, you don’t speak French.

You don’t know the territory and you don’t know the population.

They didn’t have the means to operate in the occupied zone.

Just look at the roundup.

The Germans couldn’t organize it.

They had to ask the French police to set up the operation.

At first, Gestapo agents experienced a comfortable daily life.

This was the case of the units stationed in Mets in Moselle, an area annexed by the Germans.

Compared to their colleagues who were assigned to Eastern territories, those sent to Muzelle found themselves in a land of plenty.

They were quite happy to be there.

They were partying.

They had vacations and predetermined work schedules in the summer and winter, but repression was considerable in Moselle.

I estimate that approximately 20,000 people were arrested in the Moselle department alone.

That’s more than the number of people arrested in the entire region of Normandy.

In the occupied territories, a sudden event was a gamecher.

In June 1942, the brilliant Hydrickch, then at the height of his career, was killed in an ambush by Czechoslovakian resistance fighters.

Hydrich was a legend within the Gestapo and the SS Empire.

The regime and the SS organized huge national funerals, deploying unimaginable splendor.

Heddrich’s death highlighted a new Europewide phenomenon, the rise of resistance networks, which were becoming a priority target of the political police outside of Germany.

If they conducted an investigation on a resistance network engaged in espionage, it would carry out real effective standardized police work with agent infiltrations, surveillance, stakeouts, and analysis of material evidence.

Institutional collaboration quickly proved insufficient, particularly in France, and the many requests for reinforcement remained unanswered.

Once again, the Gestapo adapted and opted for an efficient solution, recruiting civilians.

Their motivations ranged from simple survival to political conviction to a taste for [music] power and violence.

For certain positions, it was common to have a mind-blowing proportion of one German to 10 French or even one German to 20 French.

You have to understand that the French ultra collaborators became full members of the German police, not auxiliaries.

These were German police officers who happened to be French.

We were dealing with people who were invested with a power that they used and abused abundantly.

Starting with her training in Berlin, the agents were taught to recruit those that Gustapo called trusted men or Vmen.

Agents both professional and amateur.

There were so-called occasional agents, people who had a certain expertise, a teacher to spy at school, a priest at church, a railroader to listen in on his colleagues at the warehouse.

They were trained and recruited from all walks of life.

Some came from the underworld, some were hoodlams, others had lost their bearings.

The last category were former resistant fighters, either because they couldn’t resist torture or they were promised immunity.

These often made for the most dramatic cases, for they tended to be the most evil undercover agents.

These were traitors who changed sides and who could only see their logic through.

Breaking and using resistance fighters against their own allies proved to be an effective method which led to one of the Gestapo’s great successes, the dismantling of the Alliance Network.

The Alliance Network was an intelligence network that gradually got closer to the British intelligence service.

It had a great success, was very well organized, and carried the nickname of Noah’s Ark since the agents use animal names as code names.

The group was eventually spotted by the Gustapo.

A young man was sent by the aliens to Strawburg to try to build the network there since it was an annex zone.

He was arrested in Strawburg.

When questioned by the Gustapo, he talked and explained that he knew a certain hedgehog and so on.

The Gestapo made the connection.

Approximately [snorts] 150 arrests were made mostly in the south of France.

A wave of trials took place from December 1943 to February 1944 and all those convicted were sentenced to death and shot.

It was against this organized resistance that the Gestapo deployed its most radical [music] methods using torture during the interrogations.

Not to be pjorative, but let’s not forget that many resistance fighters were amateurs, not professionals.

They had never been interrogated at all and were up against people with 25 years of work experience.

The fight was quite imbalanced.

These torture sessions [music] reinforce the legend of the Gestapo throughout the world.

Its agents, professionals in the manipulation and extraction of information, used a wide range of methods to break the interrogated from the most subtle to the most brutal.

Despite resounding successes in the battle against resistance [music] fighters, pressure was mounting on Gestapo agents and even more so in the heart of the Third Reich.

As the Germans had imported forced labor from all over Europe, this host of potential enemies needed to be watched.

In September 1944, there were nearly 6 million forced laborers, including more than 2 million Soviets who represented potential communist rebels.

In agriculture, nearly one in two workers was imported from abroad and one in three in the construction, mining, and metalwork [music] industries.

This constituted a new problem because the Nazis were also the most xenophobic party in German history.

This is a real issue for the Gestapo because they view [music] every Soviet citizen as a potential communist revolutionary.

People were arrested for arriving late, for being lazy, for not taking off their caps when passing a German engineer.

They were often arrested and hastily sent to concentration camps.

Workers from the east, considered subhumans in Nazi ideology, were particularly watched.

They also meticulously verified whether Polish and Russian forced laborers had contact with Germans.

If they had sexual relations with German women, they were publicly hanged.

As the war stalled, Hitler saw the situation turn against him.

For the Vimar, the Eastern Front had been a disaster since 1942.

Everywhere in Europe, underground forms of resistance were strengthening.

The allies were preparing to land in the west.

Many agents who had been [music] active in the east were redeployed to head new sections, including in Germany.

The objective was clear to tighten up the crackdown.

The good Germans, relatively spared until then, began to suffer the pressure and violence of the political [music] police.

Starting in the fall of 1944, the terror and general surveillance of the Gestapo turned to its own population again because it was feared rightly or wrongly that enthusiasm for the war had diminished and adherence to the regime had declined following the bombings and the prospect of defeat.

The terror suffered by the German population intensified.

The number of incarcerations and concentration camps increased.

New felonies were invented such as weakening the military force, an inexplicable concept.

The size of the Gestapo staff increased continuously until the end of the war.

I think they reached 30,000 or even more.

Faced with an increasingly difficult management of populations, the political police experienced a process of decentralization for the first time in its history.

Along the western border, the Gestapo decentralizes to maintain control as the allies arrive.

The allies were approaching.

They had no time to check if a person was really guilty or not.

Given the urgency to maintain order, the strict respect for hierarchy and bureaucracy began to crack.

The local branches of the Gestapo were allowed to resort to a procedure known as special treatment without having to wait for Berlin’s approval.

Special treatment usually meant summary execution.

In the spring of 1945, the Allies continued to advance toward Germany.

Hitler sent the Nero decree to all administrations.

Any compromising trace of the regime had to be destroyed.

The resulting systemic destruction of archives remains one of the causes for our lack of knowledge about the secret police.

[music] The Gestapo itself deliberately destroyed files.

So that its crimes couldn’t be documented.

May 1945 brought panic.

In Berlin, the leaders went allin.

Gestapo executives fled the capital.

Himmler himself secretly tried to negotiate with the allies.

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