Talk:Prussian Secret Police

Ceased to exist vs. name change?
What this article says here is really wrong. All that changed in 1933 was a name of the organization. The same policemen who worked in Prussian police were the same policemen who served in the Gestapo. This article makes it sound like the Prussian secret police was disbanded in 1933 to be replaced with a brand new agency, which is completely wrong. The Canadian historian Robert Gellately in his seminal 1990 book The Gestapo and German Society: Enforcing Racial Policy, 1933-1945 (which is sadly located in a library that I don't have access to) states that in 1933 only 2% of the Prussian police force were fired by the Nazis, meaning the other 98% were acceptable to the Nazis. And it is also striking that almost nobody resigned from the Prussian police in 1933, indicating that almost everybody wanted to serve the new regime. Another problem with this article is the claim that the secret police "routinely engage in persecution" of people. That would have been news to Prussian Catholics who lived though the Kulturkampf or to Social Democrats during the period of the Anti-Socialist laws. At more basic level, this distorts the nature of Nazi terror. The biggest misconception about the Gestapo (which is exposed by Gellately in his book, which I strongly recommend to anyone interested in the Gestapo) is that it was an omnipotent agency with vast spy networks terrorizing everyone in Germany. First thing, the Gestapo left the vast majority of Germans alone. Gestapo terror was always directed against people who were in someway outsiders in German society; Jews, Romany, homosexuals, the "anti-socials" (i.e people who were eccentric and did fit in). The second is Gestapo did have not have spies everyone and instead depended upon ordinary people to denounce each other. To take an example office, in the region of Upper Franconia, which had about one million people in the 1930s, there was only one Gestapo office, which had only 28 people working in it, half of whom were clerical workers. This was the norm. So, how did 28 (or more correctly the 14 Gestapo detectives in Wurzburg) people terrorize one million into submission? The answer is that everybody in Germany was denouncing everybody else to the Gestapo. Everyday, the Gestapo offices would receive thousands of letters written by ordinary Germans denouncing each other. 80% of all Gestapo investigations were started in response to information provided by denunciations by ordinary Germans; while 10% were started in response in to information provided by other branches of the German government and another 10% started in response to information that the Gestapo itself unearthed It was not just Germany that was happening. In 1942, the Paris office of the Gestapo was getting an average of 2, 000 letters/per day from ordinary French people denouncing each other. Given that way in which ordinary people in Germany, France and elsewhere in Europe denounced each other to the Gestapo, it is questionable if the thesis that ordinary Europeans were victims of Gestapo terror in the way that it is traditionally presented has any merit. The people that Gestapo tended to take away were usually people who didn't fit in. A classic example of this was the tragic story of Ilse Totzke, an ordinary woman living in Wurzburg in the 1930s. Totzke was eccentric and she was single, and her neighbors decided to "get" her by denouncing her to the Gestapo. The good burgers of Wurzburg all seemed to very petty, narrow-minded, mean-spited people who hated everyone who did not totally conform to their values, which is why the eccentric individualist Totzke who refused to conform just had to go. From 1936 on, Totzke's neighbours took it upon themselves to write letters to the Gestapo accusing her of being a lesbian, a French spy, somebody who refused to return the Nazi salute, and as a friend to the Jews. Every single person who lived on the street with Totzke wrote a letter denouncing her to the Gestapo between 1936-41. During one of her visits to the Gestapo office in Wurzburg, Totzke was asked why did not denounce everybody's else as they denounced her, leading her to reply "Because I am decent". In July 1940, a 16 year old Maria Kraus greeted Totzke with the "German greeting" (i.e the Nazi salute), which Totzke refused to return. Kraus was so offended by this that she promptly went to the local Gestapo office to file out a complaint about her neighbor, adding in for a good measure her belief that Totzke was having an affair with a Jewish woman (that story may or may not be true). That is the real face of Gestapo terror; it was sweet 16 year old girls who get offended when people don't return the Nazi salute and take it upon themselves to denounce others. Finally, in 1941 after getting hundreds of such complaints, the Gestapo took Totzke away, sending her to a concentration camp where she died in 1943 of typhus. Totzke was single, she did not look very feminine and she liked to ride around on her motorcycle, which no doubt caused the rumors she was a lesbian, but there may be something to it. Totzke was very close to a Jewish woman whose name escapes me at present (I really wish I had Gellately's book right now), and in fall of 1941 her Jewish friend was scheduled to be "resettled in the East" (i.e exterminated). Totzke and her Jewish friend got on her motorcycle and tried to escape to Switzerland. Unfortunately, she emptied her bank account before fleeing and the bank teller called the Gestapo, saying something was up. The two women didn't make it, and after they were arrested Totzke cried out "I am with you" to her Jewish friend, and later on told the Gestapo "I am with her", asking to join her friend in "resettlement in the East". Totzke's Jewish friend was sent to Latvia where she was shot and Totzke went to Ravensburg concentration camp. The point about the Totzke story is that her neighbors who driving things on by denouncing her. That Maria Kraus later on presented herself as a victim of Gestapo terror, saying she was just an ordinary teenager who disapproved of the Nazis, but couldn't do anything because the Gestapo's spies were everywhere. Kraus was interviewed for the series The Nazis A Warning from History, where she was peddling that line about her about a victim of the Nazis when the interviewer showed her the complaint she had filed back in 1940 against Totzke, which made her very angry, screaming she was being framed. Oh yeah, the producers of a British TV series went to the trouble of framing some housewife from Wurzburg that nobody in Britain knows about. It is people like Kraus who made the Gestapo system work, of whom there were hundreds of thousands, and it is people like Totzke who were the victims of the Gestapo. This article is written by somebody who is in thrall of the popular misconceptions about the Gestapo. One of the biggest distortions about German history is the claim that Prussianism was anathema to Nazism despite evidence to the contrary. Hitler kept portraits of Frederick the Great in his bedroom and in his office, and always went out of his way to present himself as the heir to Prussian traditions. And there is much evidence that the defenders of the Prussian traditions accepted that claim. Note that hardly anybody resigned from the civil service, the diplomatic corps (only one diplomat resigned in 1933-the German ambassador to the United States who resigned in March 1933), the police, the judiciary or the officer corps in 1933. So in this article tries to make out that there is no connection between the Prussian political police and the Gestapo continues that nonsense. --A.S. Brown (talk) 14:38, 28 April 2017 (UTC)


 * This is original research. CheeseInTea (talk) 16:48, 28 April 2022 (UTC)