AQA 7042 · 2O · R14 - The 'Terror State': the police, including the SS and Gestapo
Terror in Nazi Germany did not operate through one secret organisation: police offices, SS agencies, courts, propaganda officials and members of the public interacted. This lesson follows how those mechanisms developed between 1933 and 1939, then tests the extent, effectiveness and limitations of opposition, non-conformity and propaganda. The central enquiry is whether totalitarian ambitions produced total control, or a more uneven dictatorship sustained by coercion, participation and persuasion.
Building a terror apparatus
A terror state uses the threat and practice of coercion to remove opponents and make other people calculate that resistance is too dangerous. In Nazi Germany, terror was real, but it was not the work of one institution following a finished plan from January 1933. Existing state police forces, Nazi Party organisations and new agencies were brought into an increasingly close relationship over several years.
The Reichstag Fire Decree of 28 February 1933 suspended protections for personal liberty, privacy, speech and assembly. Police and Nazi paramilitaries could therefore arrest Communists, Social Democrats and trade unionists while early detention sites held prisoners without normal legal safeguards. The SS opened Dachau concentration camp in March 1933. In Prussia, Hermann Göring created the Secret State Police Office in 1933; on 20 April 1934 he appointed Himmler deputy chief and Inspector of the Prussian Political Police. This enabled Himmler and Heydrich to centralise previously separate political-police forces, while the SS gained control of a centralised concentration-camp system.
The names of the organisations matter:
- The SS (Schutzstaffel, or Protection Squadron) was an elite Nazi Party organisation led by Himmler. It contained several branches and developed ideological, intelligence, security and concentration-camp functions. It was not simply another name for the German police.
- The Gestapo (Geheime Staatspolizei, or Secret State Police) was the political police. It investigated behaviour and groups that the regime labelled threats, used searches, informants and brutal interrogation, and could order detention in a concentration camp.
- The Kripo was the criminal police. Under Nazi rule, it also helped police groups classified as alleged racial, social or criminal enemies.
- The Order Police (Ordnungspolizei, or Orpo) comprised the uniformed police. Its continued existence is one reason not to use “Gestapo” as a label for every police officer.
- The SD (Sicherheitsdienst, or Security Service) was the SS intelligence service under Heydrich. It collected information about enemies and monitored opinion.
On 17 June 1936 Hitler appointed Himmler Chief of German Police while he remained Reichsführer-SS. Himmler now personally linked a state office to a Party office. Heydrich headed the new Security Police, which combined the Gestapo and Kripo, while the Order Police retained its own main office. By 1939 most senior police posts were held by SS officers, yet many lower-ranking police were not SS members and the organisations were never completely fused. Their connected leadership made repression more powerful without producing a perfectly tidy chain of command.
Police power, law and the courts
Terror did not replace law entirely. Instead, Nazi rulers changed law, aligned legal institutions with their aims and created ways for political police action to escape judicial restraint. This produced what has been called a dual state: routine courts and rules continued in many ordinary matters, while a prerogative sphere allowed Hitler and the police to act arbitrarily against people defined as enemies.
One crucial mechanism was protective custody (Schutzhaft).
Protective custody
The Nazi euphemism for police detention without a normal trial. It removed ordinary legal safeguards rather than protecting the detainee.
The Gestapo could send a person to a concentration camp, deny access to a lawyer or appeal, and sometimes continue detention even after a court outcome that it considered too mild. Fear therefore arose not only from the sentence a court might impose, but also from the possibility that political police power would bypass the court altogether.
The courts themselves also changed. Jewish and Socialist judges, lawyers and court officials were removed from their professions in 1933, legal organisations were coordinated under Nazi control, and judges were pressed to interpret law according to Nazi ideas of the racial “national community”. Special Courts handled politically sensitive cases from 1933. After four defendants in the Reichstag Fire trial were acquitted, Hitler created the People's Court in 1934 for treason and other major political cases. It used professional judges alongside politically selected lay judges, allowed no appeal and heard about 3,400 cases between 1934 and 1939, most involving Communists or Social Democrats.
The interaction of police and courts is visible in one contemporary law:
Source A: Prussian Law on the Secret State Police, 10 February 1936, section VII. Issued by the Prussian State Ministry and signed by Hermann Göring and Wilhelm Frick. Complete section in the public-domain US government translation of Document 2107-PS, Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression, volume IV (US Government Printing Office, 1946), hosted by Yale Law School's Avalon Project: https://avalon.law.yale.edu/imt/2107-ps.asp
“Orders in matters of the Secret State Police are not subject to the review of the Administrative Courts.”
For an enquiry into how the Gestapo escaped legal restraint, the content is valuable because it formally excludes one important type of judicial review. Its official legal form, date and signatories make it strong evidence for what the regime publicly authorised during police centralisation. Context increases that value: the Reichstag Fire Decree had suspended civil liberties, and protective custody allowed the Gestapo to bypass ordinary judicial procedure.
However, value is purpose-specific. This single section concerns administrative-court review; it does not reveal how often powers were used, how detainees experienced them, whether every official applied them in the same way or how society responded. An official source is therefore not “valuable because it is unbiased”. It is valuable for the formal power claimed and created by the state, while other evidence is needed to judge practice and impact.
Opposition and non-conformity
The survival of disagreement does not by itself reveal how dangerous it was to the regime. Non-conformity means refusing some expected behaviour or preserving an independent way of life. Opposition involves more deliberate criticism or obstruction, while resistance is often reserved for sustained action intended to weaken or remove the dictatorship. These categories could overlap, but they should not be treated as identical.
The earliest organised resistance came mainly from the workers' movement. Communists, Social Democrats, socialists and trade unionists circulated illegal leaflets, maintained courier and information networks, met secretly and supported prisoners' families. Such activity preserved alternative political loyalties and prevented complete ideological uniformity. Yet the KPD and SPD had entered 1933 deeply divided, and arrests, infiltration, imprisonment and exile repeatedly broke underground networks. Surviving groups could criticise and inform, but they could not coordinate a national challenge capable of removing the regime.
Church conflict also exposed limits to Nazi penetration. Protestant pastors formed the Pastors' Emergency League in 1933 and the Confessing Church in 1934 to resist the Nazi-aligned “German Christians” and state intrusion into church life. Martin Niemöller was placed under Gestapo surveillance, arrested in July 1937 and tried in February 1938. When the court treated his prison term as already served, he was nevertheless transferred to Sachsenhausen concentration camp the next day as Hitler's “personal prisoner”. The case demonstrates both religious opposition and the weakness of a court outcome against police prerogative. However, only a minority of clergy became fundamental opponents of National Socialism; much church protest defended doctrine and institutional autonomy rather than democracy or the removal of Hitler.
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