Control of the German people in Nazi Germany was in the hands of three Nazi Party institutions: the SS-SD-Gestapo. Heinrich Himmler was in overall control and his deputy was Reinhard Heydrich (Himmler was also made Chief of German Police). What follows is a brief explanation of how they worked, in their own right and as a coordinated bloc.
The SS was formed in 1925 as a personal bodyguard for Hitler (SS stands for Schutz-Staffel which means protection squad) but after the Night of the Long Knives, in which the SS played the leading role, and the demise of the SA, and with Heinrich Himmler its leader from 1929, it grew in scope and importance. With its black uniforms, it had a clear visible identity. Only Aryans could join, and they were expected to marry racially pure wives. Their loyalty to Hitler and the Nazi movement was total. Within the SS, the SD, the Security Service, was, as we have noted, responsible for intelligence gathering. The SS also had ultimate responsibility for carrying out the Nazis racial policies with Death’s Head Units responsible for the death camps. But the Waffen-SS also fought in the war. The SS was responsible only to Hitler, not to the Party nor to the state.
The SS was many things but in this context it oversaw all matters regarding security, from controlling their own party (as with the Night of the Long Knives, for example) to running the concentration camps and dealing with opposition in the occupied territories as well as dealing with the Jewish problem (which included running the slave economy as well as the death camps). The SD focused on intelligence gathering, whilst the Gestapo’s role was that of a secret police, to eliminate opposition and groups that the Nazis directly opposed.
As we have noted with Himmler, the police fell under the command of the SS too and did the party’s bidding, ignoring crimes committed by Nazis and stamping down on behaviour that would not be considered criminal in a free society. But it was the Gestapo which, although small in numbers, came to epitomise the Nazi totalitarian state. The Gestapo tapped telephones, opened mail and spied on people. They were helped in this by a vast network of informers.
Led by Reinhard Heydrich, the Gestapo had the power to arrest people and send them to a concentration camp, even to execute them without trial. Under what became known as Hitler’s ‘Nacht-und-Nebel’ decree of December, 1941 anyone arrested for suspected resistance activities were removed to Germany under the cover of ‘Night and Fog’ and held there or else executed without anything else being heard of them. As a result, the Gestapo was feared by the German people even more than the SS.