From 1933, Hitler created a police state; a totalitarian state controlled by a political police force that secretly supervises the citizens' activities.
One reason why the Nazi Police state was successful between 1933-39 was through its use of the Gestapo. The Gestapo, also known as the ‘Secret State Police’, were perhaps the most feared force of terror by an ordinary German citizen. They were a branch of the legal system, directly under the command of Heinrich Himmler who controlled all the police units within Nazi Germany. The first head of the Gestapo was Rudolf Diels but for most of its existence, the Gestapo was led by Heinrich Müller. The Gestapo’s main purpose was to hunt out those considered a threat to Nazi Germany. The threats included Jews, Communists, Homosexuals,
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Another significant role of the Gestapo was to tackle the threat of resistance movements. This process gave them a huge amount of power to arrest citizens on suspicion and send them to concentration camps without trial or even explanation. Thus, many ordinary Germans informed on each other because the fear that the Gestapo would find out anyway. The Gestapo were successful in reinforcing terror on Nazi Germany, not because their initial power, but of the fear they created, which masked their low scattered numbers in certain areas of Germany. In fact, modern research has shown that there were only 40,000 Gestapo officers in total for the 70 million population in Germany in 1939. However, their numbers did increase gradually as the war progressed to around 150,000, though still not enough to tackle the whole of the German population. This led to the Nazi police state being successful by removing opposition because the Gestapo sent any potential rivals off to the concentration camps before they ignited a spark which would challenge Hitler. Furthermore, this regime ensured all of Hitler’s rivals