THE INFAMOUS GESTAPO

SECRET POLICE ORGANIZATION

KENNY FLORES
HISTORY 300
RESEARCH QUESTION
HOW DID THE GESTAPO HELP THE NAZI PARTY MAINTAIN ITS CONTROL OVER ALL OF
GERMANY?
 FOUNDATIONS
Who were the Gestapo?
• A secret police during the reign of
Nazi Germany
THESIS

Thesis: The main reason why/how the Gestapo helped keep the Nazi Party in power was the success of the spy
system and their methods of interrogation.
SIGNIFICANCE OF RESEARCH

Significance: Understanding how the organization contributed to allowing Nazi Germany to maintain power over
a “cultured population”. This can help in preventing it from happening again.
 HISTORIOGRAPHY

1. Claire M. Hall’s journal “An Army of Spies?

2.Cartsten Dams’ book The Gestapo: Power and Terror in the
Third Reich
3. Eric A. Johnson’s “Criminal Justice, Coercion and Consent in
“Totalitarian” Society.
“
“What mattered most in the Nazi Jurisprudence was not what
the crime was but who committed the crime”

Eric A. Johnson
”
PRIMARY SOURCE #1
Photograph of a Gestapo agent interrogating
captured Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto uprising
PRIMARY SOURCE #2:
Nuremberg Trial collection of
documents, legal forms, and evidence
PRIMARY SOURCE #3
Direct account of a Norwegian citizen who was questioned, captured, imprisoned, and interrogated by the secret
police
PRIMARY SOURCE #4
Telegram from the head of the Gestapo Heinrich Mueller titled “actions against Jews”.
PRIMARY SOURCES

International Military Tribunal, Vol. XXV, 374-PS, pp. 376-378

HS 8/852, Catalogue ref: “Western Europe, 1939-1945: Occupation March 1941.” studylib.net,
1941. https://studylib.net/doc/11527172/western-europe-1939-1945--occupation-march-1941.

Office of United States Chief of Counsel for Prosecution of Axis Criminality. “Nazi Conspiracy
and Aggression: Opinion and Judgment.” 1946

Stroop, Juergen. An SS Sergeant (Oberscharfuehrer) Interrogates Religious Jews Captured

during the Suppression of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. The Original German Caption Reads:
"Jewish Rabbis.". n.d. Photograph. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
SECONDARY SOURCES

Dams, Carsten and Stolle, Michael. 2014. The Gestapo: Power and Terror in the Third Reich.
Oxford: OUP Oxford. https://search-ebscohostcom.unr.idm.oclc.org/login.aspx?
direct=true&db=e025xna&AN=711350&site=ehostlive&scope=site.

Hall, Claire M. “An Army of Spies? The Gestapo Spy Network 1933—45.” Journal of
Contemporary History 44, no. 2 (April 2009): 247–65.
https://doi.org/10.1177/0022009408101250.

Johnson, Eric A. 2011. "criminal justice, coercion and consent in 'totalitarian' society: The Case
of National Socialist Germany." British Journal of Criminology 51 (3): 599-614.
QUESTIONS OR COMMENTS?