Gestapo

Gestapo

Geheime Staatspolizei
The Gestapo was administered by officers of the SS.
Plainclothes Gestapo agents during the White Buses operations in 1945.
Agency overview
Formed	26 April 1933
Preceding agency	Prussian Secret Police Founded 1851.
Dissolved	8 May 1945
Type	Secret police
Jurisdiction	Nazi Germany Occupied Europe
Headquarters	Prinz-Albrecht-Straße, Berlin 52°30′26″N 13°22′57″E / 52.50722°N 13.38250°E / 52.50722; 13.38250
Employees	32,000 c. 1944
Ministers responsible	Hermann Göring 1933–1934, Minister President of Prussia Wilhelm Frick 1936–1943 (nominal authority), Interior Minister Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler, Chef der Deutschen Polizei, 1936–1945; Interior Minister, 1943–1945
Agency executives	Rudolf Diels 1933–1934, Commander, Prussian Secret Police Office SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich, Director, Gestapo, 1934–1936; Director, SiPo, 1936–1939; Director, RSHA 1939–1942 SS-Gruppenführer Heinrich Müller, Chief of Operations, Gestapo, 1936–1939; Director, Gestapo (RSHA Amt IV), 1939–1945
Parent agency	Allgemeine SS RSHA Sicherheitspolizei

The Gestapo (German pronunciation: [ɡeˈstaːpo, ɡəˈʃtaːpo]), abbreviation of Geheime Staatspolizei, or the Secret State Police, was the official secret police of Nazi Germany and German-occupied Europe.

The force was created by Hermann Göring in 1933 by combining the executive and the judicial branches into one power. Beginning on 20 April 1934, it was under the administration of Schutzstaffel (SS) national leader Heinrich Himmler, who in 1936 was appointed Chief of German Police (Chef der Deutschen Polizei) by Hitler. In 1936, Himmler made it a suboffice of the Sicherheitspolizei (SiPo) ("Security Police"). Then from 27 September 1939 forward, it was administered by the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (RSHA) ("Reich Main Security Office") and was considered a sister organization of the Sicherheitsdienst (SD) ("Security Service").

As part of the agreement in which Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany, Hermann Göring—future commander of the Luftwaffe and the number two man in the Nazi Party—was named Interior Minister of Prussia. This gave Göring command of the largest police force in Germany. Soon afterward, Göring detached the political and intelligence sections from the police and filled their ranks with Nazis. On 26 April 1933, Göring merged the two units as the Geheime Staatspolizei, which was abbreviated for a franking stamp and became known as the Gestapo. He originally wanted to name it the Secret Police Office (German: Geheimes Polizeiamt), but discovered the German initials "GPA" looked and sounded too much like those of the Russian GPU.