ss and the gestapo?

Question

i need to know what did the SS and the Gestapo have to do with each other. Anyone?

Answer 1

Actually, very little. The SS was the military/politcal arm of the Nazi party. Their main focus was as a politcally loyal, elite military force. Because of their political reliability, they also ran the death camps, since the average, non-Nazi German would have been undependable at such a task. Think of them as elite, fanatical military units.

The Gestapo was not a military force, but a law enforcement agency. They had two primary purposes. First, to ensure the loyalty and "political correctness" of the German people and army, and second, as an investigative/interrogation unit to suppress rebellion in conquered areas. Also fanatically loyal Nazi's, they suppressed any opposition to Nazi rule at home or abroad. They could call on the SS for muscle, of course, but also any other military unit or local police force. Think of them as the "secret police", with informers and interrogators, but no military role.

Answer 2

The SS replace into, among different issues, in charge for the indoors protection of the Reich. Its protection equipment risk-free the SD (intelligence accumulating), the Gestapo (arresting authority), crimial (examine) police, and regular police. So, the Gestapo replace into an SS business enterprise; even nevertheless club of the Gestapo (or the different Police business enterprise) wasn t limited to contributors of the SS. A Gestapo officer labored for an SS business enterprise, yet wasn t inevitably a member of the SS.

Answer 3

Of all the German organizations during WWII, the SS is by far the most infamous - and the least understood amongst average historians. The SS was in fact not a monolithic "Black Corps" of goose stepping Gestapo men, as is often depicted in popular media and in many third rate historical works. The SS was in reality a complex political and military organization made up of three separate and distinct branches, all related but equally unique in their functions and goals. The Allgemeine-SS (General SS) was the main branch of this overwhelmingly complex organization, and it served a politicial and administrative role. The SS-Totenkopfverbande (SS Deaths Head Organization) and later, the Waffen-SS (Armed SS), were the other two branches that made up the structure of the SS. The Waffen-SS, formed in 1940, was the true military formation of the larger SS, and as such, it is the main focus of this section. Formed from the SS-Verfungstruppe after the Campaign in France in 1940, the Waffen-SS would become an elite military formation of nearly 600,000 men by the time WWII was over. Its units would spearhead some of the most crucial battles of WWII while its men would shoulder some of the most difficult and daunting combat opertations of all the units in the German military. The Waffen-SS is sometimes thought of as the 4th branch of the German Wehrmacht (Heer, Luftwaffe, Kriegsmarine) as in the field it came under the direct tactical control of the OKW, although this notion is technically incorrect as strategic control remained within the hands of the SS. To this day the actions of the Waffen-SS and its former members are vilified for ultimately being a part of the larger structure of the political Allgemeine-SS, regardless of the fact that the Waffen-SS was a front line combat organization.

The Gestapo was established on April 26, 1933 in Prussia, from the existing organization of the Prussian Secret Police. The Gestapo was first simply a branch of the Prussian Police, known as "Department 1A of the Prussian State Police".

Its first commander was Rudolf Diels who recruited members from professional police departments and ran the Gestapo as a federal police agency, comparable to several modern examples such as the Federal Bureau of Investigation in the USA. The Gestapo's role as a political police force was only established after Hermann Göring was appointed to succeed Diels as the Gestapo Commander, in 1934. It was Göring who invented the term "Gestapo" (at first called Gestapa), which came from the suggestion of an obscure postal employee who suggested it be called the "Geheime Staatspolizei;" or "Secret State Police." Hence, GESTAPO. Göring urged the Nazi government to expand Gestapo power out of Prussia to encompass all of Germany. To this, Göring was mostly successful except in Bavaria, where Heinrich Himmler (head of the SS), served as the Bavarian Police President and used local SS units as a political police force.

In April of 1934, Göring and Himmler agreed to put aside all differences (due in large part to a combined hatred of the Sturmabteilung) and Göring handed over full command of the Gestapo to the authority of the SS. At that point, the Gestapo was combined into the Sicherheitspolizei and considered a sister organization to the Sicherheitsdienst or SD.

The role of the Gestapo was to investigate and combat "all tendencies dangerous to the State." It had the authority to investigate treason, espionage and sabotage cases, and cases of criminal attacks on the Nazi Party and on Germany.

The law had been changed in such a way that the Gestapo's actions were not subject to judicial review. Nazi jurist Dr. Werner Best stated, "As long as the [Gestapo] ... carries out the will of the leadership, it is acting legally." The Gestapo was specifically exempted from responsibility to administrative courts, where citizens normally could sue the state to conform to laws.

The power of the Gestapo most open to misuse was "Schutzhaft" or "protective custody" — a euphemism for the power to imprison people without judicial proceedings, typically in concentration camps. The person imprisoned even had to sign his or her own Schutzhaftbefehl, the document declaring that the person desired to be imprisoned. Normally this signature was forced by beatings and torture