Word: gestapoed
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...generals or the official regimental histories and the reminiscences of Panzer generals, are embedded the true nature of Naziism and the cause of World War II. Of the many valuable historical works that have drawn on these sources in recent years the latest is Edward Crankshaw's Gestapo: Instrument of Tyranny, a chillingly felt, warmly told, and concise study of the main lever of Nazi power...
Twelve Years, Twelve Million. The word Gestapo was the creation of an anonymous postoffice clerk who used it as an abbreviation for Geheime Staatspolizei (Secret State Police), Hermann Goring's name for the gang of Luger-toting bully boys who accompanied him into...
Ministry of the Interior after Hitler's legal takeover of the German state in 1933. Next year the Gestapo, which never exceeded 40,000, became a part of Heinrich Himmler's black-uniformed SS (Schutz Staff el) and Reinhard ("The Hangman") Heydrich's intelligence branch of the same outfit, the dreaded SD (Sicherheitsdienst). Hitler deliberately confused the powers and duties of these services in order to divide and control Himmler, Heydrich and other aides who never ceased to intrigue against each other and frequently arrested and killed weaker rivals. But Gestapo remained the generic term...
...authority on Soviet affairs, Journalist (London Observer) and Author (Cracks in the Kremlin Wall) Crankshaw has had ample occasion to study political terror. But when he turned from the Communists' MVD to the Nazis' Gestapo, he found a vast difference in attitudes. There was a mechanical ingenuity to Gestapo methods of torture (a small machine for crushing testicles), and a pseudo-scientific slant to many of their regular duties (victims with perfect teeth were withheld from the incinerators in order to provide the Nazis with perfect skulls for paperweights; the heads of dead Jewish Communist commissars were pickled...
...Wehrmacht Knew. The majority of the Gestapo's victims were Jews. But obedience to Hitler's perverted racial laws did not prevent cynical Gestapo bosses from trading thousands of Jewish lives for money or political advantages. In Poland and the Ukraine, where there were not enough tank ditches, and natural ravines were used to pack in the naked bodies of millions of massacred men, women and children, the SD Action Groups were full of self-pity for their exacting task. Crankshaw notes that volunteer groups from Lithuania and the Ukraine were only too ready to help...