Gestapo
게슈타포
The official secret police of Nazi Germany and German-occupied Europe. Hermann Göring created it in 1933 by combining Prussia’s political police agencies; in 1934 it passed under Himmler’s SS, and from 1939 it was Department IV of the Reich Security Main Office.
In depth
On 26 April 1933 Göring split the political and intelligence sections off the Prussian police and merged them as the Secret State Police, whose abbreviation, coined by a post office clerk for a franking stamp, became its name. In April 1934 oversight passed to Himmler and operational control to Heydrich, and from 1936 it became a national agency as a branch of the Security Police. Under Heinrich Müller the Gestapo could send people to concentration camps by “protective custody” without judicial review, and it persecuted Communists, Social Democrats, clergy, Jehovah’s Witnesses, homosexuals, Sinti and Roma, and Jews. Adolf Eichmann’s Jewish affairs office sat within it, and in occupied countries it crushed resistance with torture and executions. The Nuremberg tribunal declared it a criminal organisation.