Gestapo

Shepperton , Surrey, UK: Ian Allan Publishing. Very Good/Very Good. 1992. Hard Cover. Sm 4to. 23 x 18.6 x 2.8 cm 0711020396 Dust jacket complete, unclipped. Original cloth boards with bright gilt titling on spine. No ownership marks. 256 pages clean and tight. THE GESTAPO! Within living memory of tens of thousands, the very mention of the Nazi Secret State Police is sufficient to evoke images of power and repression unparalleled in human history. AN ILLUSTRATED HISTORY OF THE GESTAPO demonstrates in absorbing detail how the Geheime Staats Polizei evolved from its beginnings as a small department of the Prussian State Police under Hermann Goring to become a tangled bureaucracy of terror, operating from the most feared address in the Third Reich-8 Prinz Albrechtstrasse. Within the Third Reich and ultimately the Nazi occupied countries, the Gestapo was controlled by the baleful figures of Heinrich Himmler, Reinhard Heydrich, and Heinrich Muller, vivid portraits of whom are drawn in this book. For his engrossing account, Rupert Butler has drawn on archives within Germany itself, unearthing original Gestapo documents. He has also consulted archives in Britain, Belgium, The Netherlands, and Czechoslovakia. One of the book's most engrossing chapters consists of interviews with survivors of Gestapo interrogation and torture, many of whom tell their remarkable stories for the first time. The twelve-year success of the Gestapo-it survived until the very death throes of the Third Reich-still points its potent moral: the very real danger of allowing those who should be the servants of the State to become its cruellest masters .