7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
A good overview of the German State Secret Police., June 30, 2002
This review is from: An Illustrated History of the Gestapo (Hardcover)
If you are looking for a good summary of what the Gestapo were about, this is the book. It details the involvement of Goring, Himmiler, and Heydrich in the founding of this deadly device. It gives the most famous cases involving the the Gestapo such as the assisination of Heydrich and the plot against Hitler. One thing this book does poorly is portray events in chronological order, making it confusing for the beginner. Since this is a book for the beginner, it is liable to confuse him/her more. Also it is poor is distinguishing the difference between the SS and the Gestapo. The beginner would think they were one and the same, when in fact they were very different.
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7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Gestapo: Nazi Germany's Instrument of Terror, August 11, 2000
This review is from: An Illustrated History of the Gestapo (Hardcover)
Perhaps no single word conjures up such images of oppression and horror as 'Gestapo.' Rupert Butler's penetrating account of this organization tells exactly why that is. In addition to the history and evolution of the Gehime Staats Polizi, this book also covers the methods of terror the Gestapo used in carrying out it's policies of destruction and murder. Also included is a breakdown of the various departments and divisions within the organization. But perhaps most illuminating is the inclusion of several stories by those who came face to face with the dreaded secret police- from a leader in the Polish underground to an unexpected, and almost comical, meeting with Reinhard Heydrich, these stories fill in the gaps of human emotion that most historians often fail to convey. If you are interested in just how the Nazi's were able to silence their political opponents with the terror that came to be their trademark, Butler's book is must reading.
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4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
The Banality of Evil, March 16, 2003
This review is from: An Illustrated History of the Gestapo (Hardcover)
Throughout recorded history, all totalitarian regimes have needed their secret police to do their dirty work. The Catholic Church had its Inquisition in the Middle Ages, the Russian Communists had their NKVD/KGB during the mid-twentieth century, and the German Nazis had theirs in the Geheime Staatz Poliezi, the Gestapo. In AN ILLUSTRATED HISTORY OF THE GESTAPO, Rupert Butler provides both text and visuals to trace the evolution of a state sanctioned thuggery that was supposed to safeguard the existence of a thousand year Reich, that mercifully went out of business after only 12 years.
After the end of the Great War in 1918,Germany was a beaten nation that nevertheless did not learn that brute aggression must one day cause a bitter price to be paid. Butler suggests that an organization like the Nazi party could never have been allowed to exist were it not for both the political myopia of the victors who insisted on crushing a fragile post-war German economy with heavy reparations and a widespread tendency for an entire nation of Germans to rally around a flag that placed anti-semitism as its motivating force in re-establishing itself as a conquering world power.
To those not familiar with the overlapping structures of the Nazi party, Butler delineates how the Gestapo, the SA, the SS, the SD, and the many branches of the police all interwove to keep a tight lid on the lives of every German and every conquered national. Butler describes the early years of the formation of the Gestapo with Heinrich Himmler at the center. Then he analyzes how the other security organs like the SS and SD sometimes co-operated, sometimes competed for dominance. The infamous names of the leaders are, of course, well-documented both in this book, and in others: Goering, Heydrich, Kaltenbrunner, Borman, Goebbels. What stands out in Butler's mind is the ordinariness of most of the top echelon of the Nazi hierarchy. Most of them, before they became power players, had quite ordinary lives. Himmler himself looked like the pale shopkeeper that he was before he entered the SS. Heydrich was a womanizer who entered the SS only to avoid a scandal. The destruction that the various organs of the Nazi security apparatus were to wreak on both Jew and Slav were largely the result of weak, dull, and drab individuals who prefered to give their orders of death and genocide to a set of truly vicious underlings who were only to glad to carry them out. The world rarely gets a chance to put the originators of genocide in a docket of law to be charged as criminals, but in 1946 in Nuremberg, the collective leadership of the Nazi dream of world conquest was called to account. During their trials, their very ordinariness underscored the true nature of evil. The Gestapo, as the epitome of evil and horror, was run at the top by men who saw their lives through the eyes as the miserable low-ranking bureaucrats that they were once, and claimed to be as their defense from that docket. The dough-faced prisoners sitting in that Nuremberg court in 1946 were living reminders that evil can be spectacularly ordinary. Butler's book says that about as well as anyone can.
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