HOLOCAUST

• Gestapo and S.S.
• Garrett Cappo, John Molinar, and Destiny Jones
• April 25, 2014

The Gestapo was founded by Hermann Göring, in April 1933. The Gestapo was created to help solidify Nazi control by identifying and arresting anti-Nazi agents in Germany.

The SS is the short-term for Schutzstaffel which means “protection squad”. Hitler formed the SS for his own protection, personally picking members, and appointed Heinrich Himmler the leader. The SS lasted from 1929 until 1945 in the course of World War II. They had been consistently committing a great amount of crimes, humanity violations, and other evil deeds. The sole purpose supposedly of the SS was to protect the Nazi supreme commander Adolf Hitler.

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The Gestapo and S.S played a key role in the terror and control of German citizens by tracking down refugees in hiding and policed ghettos and concentration camps.

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THE GESTAPO PRISON AT BRAUWEILER.

Brauweiler functioned as a prison and torture site for the Gestapo. Brauweiler became the largest detention center. Holding 895 prisoners.

The S.S had rewards for the person with the most executions

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S.S. were the original bodyguard of the Nazis and swore allegiance only to Hitler. The Gestapo were the police of the party itself, first under Goering's command, but later given to Himmler as well. The S.S. and Gestapo membership did overlap, but they were two different bodies entirely.

Himmler was born into a middle-class, conservative Catholic family in Munich, Germany, on October 7, 1900. An intelligent kid with good capacity for organization, young Himmler was very patriotic. During World War I, he dreamed of service on the front as an officer. He left high school to begin training as an officer candidate on January 1, 1918. Himmler graduated from high school in July 1919.

In August 1923, he joined the Nazi party, to which he devoted his career after he quit his job one month later. On November 9, 1923, Himmler marched with Hitler, Röhm, Hermann Göring, and other Nazi leaders in the Beer Hall Putsch against the German government. Himmler also introduced two key functions to the SS that related to the Nazi party's long-term core goals for Germany: internal security and guardianship over racial purity.

In the five years after the Nazis seized power in January 1933, Himmler built a position for the SS by taking control of the German police forces. On March 9, 1933, he was appointed provisional president of police in Munich. Three weeks later, he was named Commander of the Bavarian Political Police. By late 1934, Himmler sought and obtained command of each of the state political police departments in Germany, and had centralized them within a single new agency in Berlin, the Secret State Police

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In early 1945 when it became clear that Germany would lose the war, members of the SS were given orders to destroy evidence of the camps' existence. Camps were destroyed and surviving inmates were taken on forced 'death marches'.
At the end of the war many leading members of the SS committed suicide. Those that were captured were tried and many of those found guilty were executed. Some members of the SS escaped Germany and fled to South America.

After the war, The Gestapo and SS were named the chief institutional perpetrators or the holocaust. The killed over 6 million Jews, including gypsies, homosexuals, and Russians. The Gestapo was dissolved with the fall of the third Reich in 1945.

WORK CITED

• Adenauer, Konrad. Memoirs 1945-1953. Chicago: Henry Reghery, 1965. Print.
• Encyclopedia of The Holocaust. N.p., 2014. Web. 17 Apr. 2014. .
• The Holocaust. N.p., n.d. Web. 17 Apr. 2014. .
• N.p., n.d. Web. 18 Apr. 2014. .
• The Rise and the Fall of the Third. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1960. 1-1143. Print.