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Hitlers Gestapo
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00:17First they came for the Jews, and I was silent, for I was not a Jew.
00:23Then they came for the Communists.
00:26Again, I said nothing, for I was not a Communist.
00:29Then they came for the Roman Catholics, for the Trade Unionists, and for the Men of Industry.
00:36Once more I did not protest, for I was none of these.
00:40At last they came for me, and by then there was no one left to stand up on my behalf.
00:50Martin Niemöller, who wrote those words, was one amongst uncountable victims of a potent
00:56and hated instrument of Hitler's tyranny.
00:59The very name of the Gestapo has become enduringly synonymous with public terror and the police state.
01:08With the death of President Hindenburg in August 1934, Adolf Hitler ascends the final step towards absolute dictatorship.
01:17He abolishes the office of presidency and decrees that the armed forces must swear fealty no longer to the state,
01:25but to himself alone.
01:28Within Germany, all political power is now vested in Hitler, who is determined to tolerate no opposition.
01:36To keep his subjects in thrall, Hitler will rely heavily on a secret police force, the Gestapo.
02:07The Gestapo ran a vast network of spies and informers.
02:11Its clerks laboriously built up an extraordinary collection of files on all and sundry.
02:18Gestapo operations were marked by suddenness and secrecy.
02:22Its interrogators were notorious for their well-practiced brutality.
02:28Gestapo agents possessed arbitrary but unchallengeable powers of arrest, incarceration and execution.
02:37It was of this institution that Heinrich Himmler said,
02:41we do not expect to be loved by too many.
02:46Although the Gestapo achieved its greatest notoriety under Himmler, the chief of police,
02:52it was originally the creation of another of Hitler's lieutenants, Hermann Göring.
02:59In the elections of January 1933, the National Socialists won sufficient seats in the Reichstag, Germany's parliament,
03:08for Hitler to be voted chancellor, heading a coalition government.
03:13Goering became minister of Prussia, the largest German state, and moved rapidly to bring its police force under his own
03:20direct control.
03:22Large numbers of fanatical Hitler supporters were drafted in to swell its ranks.
03:32Goering was soon able to mount a furious campaign against the opposition parties.
03:38Following a second election in March 1933, Goering used his police to arrest some deputies
03:44and to prevent others from entering the parliament building.
03:49Under these intimidating constraints, the Reichstag passed the Enabling Act.
03:55By this momentous and irrevocable transfer of power, the fragile German democracy was extinguished,
04:02and Hitler unable to rule by decree alone.
04:07For the time being, Hitler still required the president's assent to any new laws,
04:12but Hindenburg was old, malleable, and nearly senile.
04:17Within months, all opposition political parties were outlawed,
04:21strict censorship imposed, and the trade unions dissolved.
04:27During this turbulent period, as a new order stamped itself upon Germany, the Gestapo came into being.
04:35The old Prussian police had had a small political section, responsible for monitoring agitators and extremists.
04:43Goering expanded this section and transferred it to extensive new premises at 8 Prince-Albrecht-Strasse,
04:51formerly an arts and crafts college.
05:00There, in April 1933, Goering established the headquarters of his specialised new police unit.
05:08It was a post office clerk, needing a word that could fit on a franking stamp,
05:12who suggested the name Secret State Police, or Geheimestatspolizei, conveniently shortened to Gestapo.
05:22Although it quickly gained a fearsome reputation,
05:26the infant Gestapo was itself rent by alarming schisms,
05:30stemming from the violent and frequently murderous contention between factions vying for control within it.
05:37These factions were drawn principally from the SS and the SA.
05:42The brown-shirted SA, for Sturmabteilung, or storm detachments,
05:48were a loosely organised unofficial private army led by Ernst Rohn,
05:53for many years a close associate of Hitler.
05:57During Hitler's long ascent to power,
05:59the ragged cohorts of the SA had provided crude but invaluable assistance on the streets of Germany.
06:06Their ranks were now swollen to well over three million men,
06:10and despite their previous support,
06:13Hitler viewed with concern the possibility of a challenge to his authority
06:17by so large and volatile a body of men.
06:22By contrast, the far smaller SS, Schutzstaffeln, or Guard Echelons,
06:28was tightly disciplined and commanded by Heinrich Himmler,
06:32valued by Hitler for his absolute unquestioning loyalty.
06:39Although having the appearance of a timid and hesitant bureaucrat,
06:43Himmler was in private intensely ambitious.
06:47He had grandiose plans for his SS organisation.
06:51In particular, he desired to bring the Gestapo within the undisputed province of the SS.
06:58This prospect was not one which Goering or the SA regarded with favour.
07:03But Himmler was an adept in the arts of backstairs intrigue,
07:07who never hesitated to use bribery, blackmail, intimidation, or even murder to gain his ends.
07:15Twice, Rudolf Diels, the unprincipled opportunist whom Goering had put in charge of the Gestapo,
07:22fled abroad in fear of his life.
07:25Meanwhile, the cowed and fearful German citizenry witnessed daily scenes of outrage.
07:32Jews and Jewish establishments were primary targets for violence.
07:36But the legalised thugs of the SA assaulted or wrested passersby at will, almost at random.
07:44Their victims were hauled off to makeshift torture chambers in old basements,
07:48or to one of the SA's improvised concentration camps.
07:56Hitler viewed the situation with mounting anger,
08:00for the popular support which he still needed was ebbing fast,
08:04partly because of Goering's failure to bring the SA to heel.
08:09In April 1934, Hitler appointed Himmler Inspector of Gestapo, with effective control,
08:17although Goering remained technically in overall command.
08:25Himmler in turn brought into the Gestapo one of his most dynamic and ruthless SS recruits, Reinhard Heydrich.
08:33Throughout his career, Heydrich was intermittently dogged by rumours of alleged part-Jewish ancestry.
08:41Perhaps Himmler knew of this, and used it as a means of ensuring the compliance of his vigorous young subordinate.
08:49By this time, the problem of the SA was becoming acute.
08:53The Braunschutz had helped Hitler to power, and were now increasingly impatient for their reward.
08:59They had expected to participate in a socialist revolution.
09:04Instead, Hitler had granted large concessions to industrialists.
09:09The fiercely radical Rome had asked for the army to be coalesced with the SA,
09:14and for himself to be made Armed Forces Minister.
09:18But Hitler had given secret pledges to the generals.
09:22Hitler had acted thus because his deep-laid projects for rearmament and war relied crucially on the support of industry
09:30and the army.
09:32Their purpose served, Rome and his followers were now a dangerous liability.
09:38Hitler therefore resolved to destroy the SA leadership at a stroke.
09:44He was warmly encouraged by Himmler and Goering, who forthwith began eagerly planning for a comprehensive purge.
09:51Their Gestapo and police prepared detailed lists of those to be murdered.
09:57The 30th of June 1934 passed into history as the Night of the Long Knives.
10:05Hundreds were seized and some were executed.
10:08The scale and ferocity of the action stunned the public,
10:12although bringing also a widespread sense of relief.
10:21The unflinching readiness with which the well-disciplined SS struck down their erstwhile comrades impressed and gratified Hitler.
10:31During the following year, 1935, Goering was happily installed as commander of the new German Air Force,
10:38and the Gestapo in its entirety was absorbed into Himmler's SS fiefdom.
10:44Calm and order returned to the streets.
10:48Between a crash programme of public works and a covert but large-scale programme of rearmament,
10:54unemployment disappeared.
10:57Spectacular, magnificently staged, managed parades and rallies convincingly presented the image of a contented, prosperous people,
11:06enthusiastically united behind the leader.
11:10The reality was otherwise.
11:13At the Great Rally of 1935, the first of the infamous Nuremberg Laws against those of Jewish blood were promulgated.
11:23Over the years, more than 200 further decrees would be announced,
11:27designed to eradicate every taint of Jewishness from German life.
11:33But the secret apparatus of terror would reach out not to Jews only, but to every German citizen.
11:40And it was expanding fast.
11:43By 1936, Himmler had achieved his long striven for goal of undivided command of all Germany's police forces, secret or
11:52uniformed.
11:55The Gestapo gained immunity from any challenge in the law courts.
11:59In future, any appeal against the Gestapo's action could only be heard by the Gestapo itself.
12:07As operational head of the Gestapo, though reporting to Heidrich, Himmler had appointed Heinrich Moeller.
12:14This Bavarian expert on surveillance and political police work would remain in office until the very end.
12:23Merler had visited the Soviet Union, where he'd been impressed by the method of Stalin's secret police,
12:29and particularly by the all-pervading system of informers.
12:37Under Merler, Gestapo recruitment was accelerated.
12:41Eventually, its agents numbered many tens of thousands.
12:45And soon, there was no street or block of flats, no office or workplace,
12:50where the eyes and ears of the Gestapo did not reach.
12:55Usually, the informers were unpaid.
12:57But they enjoyed the heady sense of power over their fellow men.
13:03The realization spread that a denunciation to the Gestapo
13:08was often an effective method of settling a personal grudge,
13:12or of opening the way to a promotion.
13:15Even children were, all unconsciously, brought in to serve the cause.
13:20The various National Socialist youth movements enjoyed immense popularity,
13:25whilst insidiously and persistently inculcating a loyalty beyond that of the family.
13:32Parents could no longer be sure they were not being spied on by their own offspring.
13:48In the summer of 1936, the Olympic Games were held in Berlin.
13:54And since Hitler wanted Germany to show an acceptable face to the world,
13:58the persecution of the Jews was temporarily eased.
14:01Nor did Hitler wish to be seen tampering directly with the German churches.
14:07Instead, many clerics were subjected to personal intimidation,
14:11and to smear campaigns conducted through the state-controlled press.
14:18Though keeping wherever possible outside the public eye,
14:22the leather-coated Gestapo officials waged a relentless war on dissidents.
14:28Over 250 members of a workers' resistance group in Stetten were arrested and jailed
14:34for circulating banned newspapers and for holding private meetings.
14:40Later, prominent visitors to Berlin were encouraged to patronize the Salon Kitty,
14:46a nightclub covertly run by the Gestapo.
14:49Amongst the discreet services on offer were concealed microphones in every bedroom.
14:56Year by year, the Gestapo files expanded.
15:01They abounded with compromising information of every kind.
15:05Adroitly used, almost anyone could be incriminated.
15:09In early 1938, Bloomberg and Fritsch,
15:13respectively War Minister and Army Commander-in-Chief,
15:16were forced out of office as a consequence of scandals fabricated using Gestapo material.
15:24By 1938, Hitler felt ready to embark upon the process of winning new lands for the Reich.
15:31His first step was the Anschluss,
15:34the absorption of Austria into an enlarged Greater Germany.
15:40Hitler's triumphal entry into his new dominions
15:43was attended by extravagant demonstrations of public rejoicing.
15:48But behind the scenes, well hidden from general view,
15:52the Gestapo and SS were busy disposing of the remnants of Austria's political opposition.
16:02Following the Anschluss, even more Jews were desperate to escape Hitler's oppression.
16:07The Gestapo opened an office in Vienna,
16:10which enjoyed a monopoly in the issuing of exit visas to Jews.
16:15This profitable enterprise was run by an Austrian SS officer, Karl Adolf Eichmann.
16:23Himmler made a tour of Vienna and its environs,
16:27and fixed upon the picturesque village of Mauthausen as a site for a new concentration camp.
16:35After Austria, Hitler's attention focused next on Czechoslovakia,
16:40where there lived three million Sudeten Germans.
16:44Many believed that any attempt of Hitler's to seize the Sudeten land would lead to a general European war.
16:51If so, Heydrich was resolved to take sinister advantage of the situation.
16:57That summer, intense diplomatic manoeuvring took place in Europe's capitals.
17:03Simultaneously, in deepest secrecy,
17:06Heydrich brought together Gestapo and other units to form what were termed special purpose groups.
17:12These would follow the German army into Czechoslovakia.
17:16Their function would be to deal with the Jews.
17:19Their method would be mass execution.
17:25Heydrich's plans were forestalled when, at the Munich conference in October,
17:30Britain and France capitulated in the face of Hitler's aggressive posturing and boldly calculated bluff.
17:37Czechoslovakia was abandoned by her allies in exchange for a worthless promise.
17:42Hitler gained the lands he'd coveted without a shot having been fired.
17:48Nevertheless, the special purpose groups remained in being.
17:53In the spring of 1939, German forces occupied Bohemia and Moravia,
17:59and the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia was completed.
18:04In London and Paris, the occupation was received as shocking confirmation of the emptiness of Hitler's pledged word.
18:13So far, an inspired blend of bluff and intimidation had served Hitler well.
18:19But he knew that his next objective, the annexation of large tracts of Polish territory,
18:25could not be achieved save through the force of arms.
18:30In August, the way was made clear by a non-aggression treaty with Stalin's Soviet Union.
18:36As the German armies prepared for invasion, Hitler cast a round for a pretext for war.
18:44Möller offered to supply some Gestapo prisoners for a mock attack on a German radio station at Gleiwitz, near the
18:51border.
18:52The intention was that listeners would hear what sounded like a Polish assault.
18:57For added authenticity, Möller's prisoners, dressed in Polish uniforms, would be taken to the scene and shot.
19:07Though few of the pleasure seekers in the capital can have known it,
19:11the evening of September the 2nd, 1939, was Berlin's last night of peace.
19:18Heydrich sat listening expectantly to his wireless.
19:22But no one had thought to check the strength of the Gleiwitz transmitter.
19:26Its signal faded after a few kilometers.
19:29And Europe heard nothing of the studiously rehearsed affray.
19:34Some photographs were published in newspapers the next day.
19:38But by then, German forces were thrusting deep into Poland.
19:44That stricken country was soon under attack on two fronts.
19:48For, by a secret protocol to the pact with Stalin, the Soviet Union was to receive a share of Polish
19:54territory.
19:55And the Red Army marched in from the east.
19:59German communists and other refugees from Hitler's rule were rounded up by Stalin's police
20:05and handed over to the custody of the Gestapo.
20:09The Gestapo reciprocated in kind.
20:13The military campaign was conducted throughout with exemplary efficiency.
20:18Hitler, visiting his new domain, had good reason to congratulate his troops.
20:25The special purpose detachments had gone in behind the army
20:28and set about their barbarous work almost directly.
20:32Yet, behind the German battle lines, a state of near anarchy obtained.
20:37For Hitler, ever wary of any subordinate becoming too powerful,
20:42deliberately kept his command structure muddled and ill-defined.
20:47As a result, the various SS organs, army commanders and civilian administrators
20:52quarreled acrimoniously between themselves over who exercised final authority.
21:00Faced with this unsatisfactory situation,
21:03the Gestapo decided a more orderly approach to the Jewish problem was required.
21:08The first step was segregation.
21:12Heydrich directed,
21:13The initial stage in implementing German measures against the Jews
21:17must be to isolate them from the rest of the population.
21:21They are to be put into ghettos, with men and women in separate quarters.
21:29Ghettoization proved an effective technique and was quickly adopted as standard practice.
21:37Meanwhile, inside Germany itself,
21:40Hitler had taken advantage of the turmoil of war to set in hand a sinister program
21:44to purge the racial stock of impure elements.
21:49Germans deemed unfit to breed were to be secretly eliminated through mercy killing.
22:11In the spring of 1940, Hitler resumed the trail of conquest with extraordinary success.
22:18First his armies overran Denmark and seized Norway in a lightning campaign.
22:24Immediately thereafter, he struck westwards at the Low Countries and France.
22:29A daring but masterfully executed plan threw the allied armies into hopeless disarray.
22:36And although the British managed to evacuate most of the men of their expeditionary force,
22:41France was rapidly driven to capitulation.
22:56The swiftness and completeness of the victory astonished the world.
23:01For Hitler and many others, it was a confirmation of the invincibility of German arms.
23:09Initially, the Gestapo were allowed into France in only minimal numbers.
23:14For Hitler was hoping to come to some accommodation with Britain
23:17and wished to show himself as forbearing and magnanimous.
23:22Moreover, the Gestapo were bitterly disliked and distrusted by the army who protested strongly against their presence.
23:30For the moment, Himmler had to be content with having a bridgehead merely.
23:39His SS organization was by now of enormous dimensions.
23:44It included the burgeoning concentration camp network,
23:48the uniformed police forces,
23:50large industrial enterprises,
23:52the fighting units of the Waffen SS,
23:55research institutes of various kinds and much else.
23:59Himmler exercised ultimate control through a huge, ever-proliferating bureaucracy.
24:06Despite attempts at rationalization,
24:09the SS organization was of intricate, bewildering complexity.
24:14In 1940, Himmler had grouped it into seven major branches.
24:19Heydrich was in charge of one of the most important of these,
24:22the RSHA or Reich Security Main Office.
24:28The RSHA was split into two principal segments.
24:32The Security Service, or SD, was the party's official intelligence-gathering unit,
24:38with domestic and overseas sections.
24:41The Security Police, or CIPO, comprised two separate forces.
24:46The first, the CIPO, was the plainclothes criminal police.
24:52The other was Heinrich Müller's Gestapo,
24:55whose function was officially defined as the suppression of opposition.
25:02Thus, the Gestapo's formal designation was Section 4 of RSHA.
25:08The Gestapo was itself subdivided into various departments.
25:12And it was amidst this tangle of officialdom and dryest bureaucracy,
25:17that some of the most horrific abominations of Hitler's regime were conceived and initiated.
25:24Thus, all cases of protective custody passed through a single department.
25:30Protective custody was the sending of suspected dissidents or potential resistors,
25:35usually without even the formality of a charge, to concentration camps.
25:43Another department, headed by Adolf Eichmann, bore special responsibility for Jews.
25:50With the acquisition by conquest of new lands to police, further Gestapo departments were formed.
25:57Yet, at first, it seemed there was little real need for the Gestapo in countries such as France.
26:03For, despite Churchill's defiant speeches, it was universally apparent that Britain, weakened and isolated,
26:11could never by herself hope to pry loose Hitler's grip on Western Europe.
26:16The occupying German troops, for the most part, observed decent propriety in their dealings with civilians.
26:24Many Frenchmen sullenly acquiesced in what appeared to be a permanent new order in Europe.
26:32Churchill emphatically did not, although for the moment his scope for direct action was severely limited.
26:39Small commando raids were launched against targets on the German-held coastline.
26:45Militarily, these had negligible effect, but were of significant nuisance value.
26:51Meanwhile, the first small resistance cells were forming, and agents were clandestinely parachuted in from Britain.
27:00Hoping to force Churchill to sue for peace, Hitler ordered Goering to mount a sustained bombing offensive against Britain.
27:08The failure of the bombing campaign left Hitler frustrated and angry,
27:12and more amenable to Himmler's insidious suggestion that the occupation army was too soft on commandos, spies and saboteurs.
27:21The Gestapo contingent in France increased steadily in strength.
27:26By now, Hitler was increasingly preoccupied with the preparations for his most awesome military adventure.
27:33A vast offensive in the east to destroy the Soviet Union and seize huge expanses of land for the thousand
27:40-year Reich.
27:42The code name for the projected surprise attack on his ally Stalin was Operation Barbarossa.
27:51First, Germany's southern flank was secured.
27:55In spring, German armies occupied the Balkans and Greece in a swift but bloody campaign.
28:01In Yugoslavia, many soldiers of the defeated army disappeared into the wooded mountainous terrain,
28:07from whence they repeatedly descended to harass the occupiers.
28:11The partisans were never defeated and tied down increasing numbers of Axis troops.
28:20The forces brought together for Barbarossa were of unprecedented magnitude.
28:25By June, three million men were assembled on the Reich's eastern borders.
28:41On June the 22nd, the attack began.
28:45The Soviet defenders were caught hopelessly ill-prepared.
28:49And in the months that followed, the Red Army sustained a calamitous succession of defeat.
29:01The German spearheads drove remorselessly on, striking deep into the Ukraine,
29:06towards Moscow in the center and Leningrad in the north.
29:12In the east, there were few constraints on the Gestapo's operations.
29:16For Hitler, the Slavic peoples were scarcely human.
29:20The fight against them, a war of annihilation.
29:25Following close behind the rapidly advancing battlefronts,
29:29Heydrich's special purpose groups set about their grisly work.
29:34A Gestapo department was responsible for the arrangements for Soviet prisoners of war,
29:39who were captured in enormous quantities.
29:42Hitler had issued a directive, the Commissar's order,
29:46providing for the screening out of Communist Party members.
29:49These men were to be accorded special treatment.
29:53More concisely, they were to be killed.
29:56City after city fell.
29:59Usually, the local populace was eager to deliver up any Communist officials,
30:04for Stalin's rule had been bitterly harsh.
30:08The Gestapo also recruited informers from amongst the hordes of prisoners
30:12to denounce commissars and Jews.
30:16These informers were themselves normally executed after a few months,
30:20for the Gestapo did not care that too many should know about its methods.
30:25In the event, these measures made little practical difference,
30:29since the common lot of the captured was either starvation, exposure or forced labour camp.
30:37In the course of the war, several million Soviet prisoners died,
30:42the majority from the neglect and indifference of their captors.
30:49In Germany, 1941 was remarkable as the last year in which Hitler allowed himself to be swayed by public protest.
30:59The euthanasia programme, introduced without even the sham of legality,
31:04had become quickly notorious.
31:07Widely voiced disquiet culminated in a series of sermons delivered by the Bishop of Münster.
31:13Though privately furious, Hitler was persuaded that the party would suffer if the Bishop were turned over to the Gestapo.
31:21In August, the programme was halted.
31:25Not all the euthanasia staff were made redundant.
31:29There developed techniques for killing patients using poison gases,
31:33of which Zyklon B was the most efficacious.
31:38For Heydrich's commanders, this offered a promising, more efficient alternative to mass shootings.
31:44In September, the first gassing of inmates of a concentration camp was carried out in Block 11 at Auschwitz.
31:54That same month, Heydrich was made protector of Bohemia and Moravia,
31:58but still retained overall responsibility for the Jewish question.
32:04In January 1942, Heydrich organised a conference in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee.
32:12Mueller and Eichmann were amongst those in attendance.
32:15At Wannsee, the extermination of the Jews was enshrined in official state policy.
32:24Although the Gestapo was heavily involved in the rounding up of victims and the recapture of escapees,
32:30the death camps themselves were largely run by other sections of the SS,
32:35and the Gestapo's duties therein were principally those of record keeping.
32:40However, the Gestapo's Economic Affairs Department, Office 4A, 3B,
32:46was active in the recovery of gold fillings and other valuables from the condemned.
33:01After the Japanese raid on Pearl Harbour, Hitler had declared war on the United States,
33:07even though his great eastern offensive had come to a halt in the freezing Russian winter.
33:13As the year 1942 began, Hitler was facing antagonists
33:19whose reserves of manpower and capacity for war production would eventually prove overwhelming.
33:26Meantime, however, Germany still disposed of formidable arms strength and held enormous territories.
33:33The power of the Gestapo was at its height.
33:37Heydrich, in high good humor, had told his men,
33:40there is no problem down to the smallest egotistical longing which the Gestapo cannot solve.
33:47Looked at in this light, we are, so to speak, something of a cross between an all-purpose maid and
33:53the dustbin of the Reich.
33:57In Czechoslovakia, a violent but brief spell of terror, followed by improvements in working and living conditions,
34:04had largely subdued the populace.
34:06And Heydrich felt sufficiently confident to drive to work unescorted, in an open car.
34:13It was his undoing.
34:15In May, he was fatally wounded by two agents parachuted in by the British.
34:21Enraged, the SS and Gestapo exacted hideous retribution.
34:26The inhabitants of two entire villages were deported or murdered, and hundreds further executed.
34:39Hitler delivered an oration in person at the funeral of his invaluable henchmen.
34:44As a tribute, the program to liquidate the Jews of Poland was renamed Action Reinhardt,
34:50and Heydrich was also subsequently commemorated on a postage stamp.
34:56He left behind an organization entrenched in notoriety.
35:01In their cinemas, Germans saw propaganda films depicting the Gestapo as kindly workers for the common good.
35:09Yet they could easily guess that the men of office 4B4, which dealt with passes and identification,
35:15had functions beyond that of a mere railway ticket inspector.
35:26Since there was no longer any reason to conciliate American opinion,
35:31the Gestapo could now operate without constraint even in Western Europe.
35:35They were not idle, for sabotage was becoming more frequent.
35:41With the formation of a global alliance against Germany,
35:44the conquered peoples, for the first time, saw the real possibility of ultimate liberation.
35:51The increasingly rampant brutality of the occupiers powerfully stiffened the will to resist.
36:00Denmark only remained long an exception,
36:03for the Germans considered the Nordics as akin to blood brothers.
36:07The feeling was little reciprocated,
36:09and in a single extraordinary operation,
36:12the courageous Danes succeeded in secretly evacuating
36:16virtually all of their 8,000 Jews to safety in Sweden.
36:21In general, the Gestapo's regime was of unremitting harshness.
36:26For one German killed,
36:2820, 50 or even 100 local people might be executed by way of reprisal.
36:34In France, some 30,000 civilians died under this policy.
36:40Hostages were also seized and held under threat of death,
36:44to compel the betrayal of a fugitive resistance worker or commando.
36:49The Gestapo made extensive use of the Night and Fog Decree,
36:54by which suspected persons were spirited away to Germany,
36:58and no information of any kind divulged either about their alleged crime or final fate.
37:05Throughout 1942, the British launched frequent raids against the coasts of Western Europe.
37:12Commandos and parachutists came under Office 4A 2.
37:17And after October of that year, the Gestapo instructions were very precise.
37:23For an exasperated Hitler directed that any court must be exterminated to the last man,
37:29regardless of their uniform.
37:33Later in the war, the bullet order allowed the Gestapo yet wider latitude.
37:39Various categories of prisoners of war could be stripped of their status and shot.
37:44The many victims of this decree included 50 RAF officers,
37:49who participated in a mass escape from the Camp Stalag Luft III.
37:59Inevitably, the Gestapo practiced torture, crudely but often effectively on a routine basis.
38:07It was used purely to extract information,
38:10though very often the interrogators were seeking information their hapless victims did not possess.
38:17Although no copy has ever been found,
38:21it is likely that the Gestapo had some sort of manual.
38:24For the vicious methods employed, which typically included beatings,
38:28water torture and the use of electrodes, were everywhere of remarkable similarity.
38:37The supremely resilient and heroic could withstand even these.
38:43But some of the bravest resistance fighters were broken
38:46when they heard or saw the same tortures applied to relatives.
38:52In January of 1943, Himmler appointed a successor to the murdered Heydrich.
38:58Ernst Kaltenbrunner had been leader of the SS in Austria,
39:02and police chief in Vienna since the Anschluss.
39:07Unusually tall, exceptionally cruel and a confirmed alcoholic,
39:12Kaltenbrunner was an intellectual mediocrity.
39:15He was promoted partly because Himmler felt confident
39:19he would never develop into a rival.
39:32The loss of an entire German army at Stalingrad in early 1943
39:37was both a catastrophe and a grim augury of events to come.
39:43The tide of war was palpably turning against Germany.
39:48Allied bombers were raining devastation on the cities.
39:51North Africa was lost, Italy collapsed, and, most crucially of all,
39:56the Red Army was steadily establishing an ascendancy on the Eastern Front.
40:02Several of the Gestapo's hitherto lesser roles
40:05now assumed a larger importance.
40:08Using its huge network of agents,
40:11the Gestapo had for years been compiling regular secret reports
40:15on the mood of the German public.
40:17The mood was no longer optimistic,
40:20but defeatism and rumour-mongering were punishable offences,
40:24and Office 4-1-B was not backward in enforcing the law.
40:31Listening to foreign radio broadcasts was also a serious matter.
40:35The Gestapo did not rely solely on detector vans.
40:40Innocuous-seeming advertisements for powerful wireless sets were placed in shop windows
40:44and in local newspapers.
40:47Those foolish enough to respond soon found themselves under interrogation.
40:54Counterintelligence was claimed as a Gestapo and SD speciality.
40:58But in this field, their record was mixed.
41:03One outstanding success was the penetration of a British spy ring in Holland in 1942,
41:10achieved through clever code-breaking and the skilful use of a double agent.
41:14A whole series of agents parachuted in by the British were captured on arrival by waiting Gestapo men,
41:21who also took delivery of quantities of stores and munitions.
41:27Concurrently, up to 14 transmitters were feeding false information back to Britain.
41:32The messages frequently lacked the proper coded security checks,
41:37but because of repeated blundering, this was overlooked in London.
41:41Not until March 1944 was the truth discovered.
41:54By this time, the Western Allies' preparations for a return to Europe were well in hand,
41:59and a huge cross-channel assault force was assembling.
42:03It would land in Normandy, but in order to persuade the Germans that the real objective was elsewhere,
42:09the Allies carried out several highly elaborate deception plans.
42:14None of the German intelligence services saw through the gigantic hoax.
42:20The various French resistance movements were not brought into the D-Day plans until a short space before.
42:27But on three occasions, the messages broadcast over the BBC to the resistance were picked up by an acute SD
42:35officer in Paris.
42:37On the 5th of June, he dispatched an urgent message warning of an invasion within 48 hours.
42:43But the army in Normandy was not alerted.
42:59The Allied landings of June 1944 sparked off an upsurge of resistance activity throughout France.
43:07The Gestapo and troops dealt fairly easily with the various small partisan groups that sprang up.
43:13But sabotage of the military's vital transport system was much more difficult to suppress.
43:25A bridgehead secured, there ensued a period of hard fighting as the Allies sought to wear down the German defenders
43:32in preparation for a breakout.
43:35The second front had been established, but within weeks, the Gestapo and Germany were convulsed by another momentous happening.
43:44A group of senior German officers led by Klaus von Stauffenberg had for long been plotting Hitler's overthrow.
43:51On the 20th of July, a bomb planted by Stauffenberg exploded at Hitler's headquarters in East Prussia.
43:59Though Stauffenberg did not realize it for several hours, he had succeeded only in wounding Hitler badly, not killing him.
44:07For a brief while, confusion prevailed.
44:10In Paris, officers backing the conspiracy temporarily arrested the entire Gestapo headquarters staff.
44:17The Gestapo building in Berlin was wholly unprotected.
44:20Mueller had only the vaguest awareness that anything was happening.
44:25But it soon emerged that Hitler had escaped and control was swiftly re-established.
44:31By midnight, Stauffenberg had been shot and the conspiracy was in ruins.
44:37Carlton Brunner threw himself with grim enthusiasm into the task of searching out the plotters and bringing them before a
44:45special people's court.
44:47The surviving ringleaders suffered agonizing deaths by slow strangulation.
44:54Prosecutions and executions continued to be carried out until the last days of the war.
45:01Although Hitler was bitter about the failure of Himmler's agencies to detect the plot beforehand,
45:07he entrusted Himmler with the raising and command of a large new reserve army,
45:12needed to reinforce the desperately hard-pressed defenders on the Eastern Front.
45:18Himmler's makeshift new army was well policed, with the Gestapo and SD informers in every unit.
45:26Over the next months, the military situation worsened almost daily.
45:31In the East, a series of vast offensives by the Red Army brought the fighting onto German soil.
45:37The first concentration camps were liberated.
45:51In the West, too, the march of liberation continued.
45:56By the spring of 1945, the British and Americans had crossed the Rhine
46:01and were progressing through the bomb-devastated cities of Germany itself.
46:07Although the Gestapo now operated only within a fast diminishing radius,
46:12its grip was still of the fiercest, partly because of the ever more draconian decrees sent out by Himmler.
46:20The German collapse was swift.
46:23Hitler saw out the last weeks, ensconced in his fortified bunker in Berlin,
46:28where Mueller was in frequent attendance.
46:33One of the Gestapo's last executions carried out on Hitler's direct orders took place on April the 27th.
46:41General Fagerlein's crime was to have abandoned the bunker for his Berlin flat.
46:47He was the brother-in-law of Hitler's mistress, Eva Braun.
46:52A few days thereafter, Hitler took his own life.
46:55The war formally ended in early May.
47:00Having destroyed all his files and every photograph of himself he could find,
47:06Heinrich Mueller vanished completely.
47:08Whether he died anonymously in Berlin or contrived to escape abroad has never been established.
47:15Heinrich Himmler was taken prisoner, but poisoned himself.
47:21This left Ernst Carltenbrunner as the most senior surviving member of the Gestapo organization.
47:28And as such, he was among the 17 accused who stood trial before the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg.
47:37The manifold crimes of Hitler's regime, in all their stupendous variety and plentitude of horror,
47:44were now revealed to a shocked and scarcely comprehending world.
47:49During the trial, the court was shown a film compilation of numerous atrocities,
47:54which left even some of the defendants sickened.
48:25Carltenbrunner passed much of his period of captivity in a state of craven fear.
48:30The examining doctors reported,
48:34He has a weak, vacillating will, and an emotionally unstable schizoid personality.
48:41Stripped of his power, he now cringes and complains that he was only a tool of Himmler,
48:46and an unimportant one at that.
48:50He weeps at the slightest provocation.
48:53He is the bully type.
48:55Strong and hard when on top, cringing and crying when not.
49:00Giving evidence, Carltenbrunner resorted desperately to bluster, evasion, and lying.
49:06Confronted with hundreds of documents bearing his signature,
49:10he vehemently denied having signed any.
49:13He even claimed to have believed that special treatment,
49:17the normal Gestapo euphemism for executing,
49:20really meant sending to an alpine resort.
49:29He was found guilty and went to the gallows on October the 16th, 1946.
49:35During the trial, the Gestapo in its entirety was adjudged a criminal organization.
49:43Its hideous apparatus of terror had been used by Hitler from first to last,
49:49against the very people to whom he had promised prosperity and salvation.
49:54In the occupied territories,
49:57Gestapo rule eventually proved counterproductive,
50:01engendering both hatred and a fierce determination to throw off the oppressors.
50:07The Gestapo operated through the use of uninhibited violence,
50:12and by appealing to the basest of human instincts.
50:17The majority of the men who carried out this sort of work
50:20were squalid and obtuse mediocrities,
50:23despised even by other Nazis.
50:27So long as Hitler's armies held the field,
50:30the Gestapo held firm to a perverted pride.
50:34But in defeat, many former agents, like their leader Carltenbrunner,
50:38were to display a civility and cravenness
50:41scarcely less amazing than the long and terrible catalogue of their crimes.
50:47.
50:49.