What do you think?
Rate this book
Gestapo
The Grim story of the most vicious Terror Agency of all time—its sinister power and barbaric acts, and the twisted men who led it—Hitler, Himmler, and Eichmann. This is the brutal expose of the rotten core of Nazi Germany. Here is revealed the true story of Hitler's terror police, the in-famous Gestapo-the madmen who headed it, the sadists who staffed it, the degenerate party that spawned it. Edward Crankshaw (1909—1984) was a British writer, translator and commentator on Soviet affairs. Born in London, Crankshaw was educated in the Nonconformist public school, Bishop's Stortford College in Hertfordshire. He started working as a journalist for a few months at The Times . In the 1930s he lived in Vienna, Austria, teaching English and learning German (his competent grasp of German caused him to become part of the British Intelligence service during World War II). On his return he went back to write for The Times and began to write reviews-mostly musical-for The Spectator , The Bookman , and other periodicals. Crankshaw wrote around 40 books on Austrian and Russian subjects and after the war began his research in much more depth. Crankshaw's book on Nazi terror, Gestapo (1956), was widely read and in 1963 he began to produce the ambitious literary works, often on historical or monumental moments in Russian Political history.
MP3 CD
Published July 5, 2016
6 people are currently reading
152 people want to read
About the author
Edward Crankshaw
70 books12 followersEdward Crankshaw (3 January 1909 – 30 November 1984), was a British writer, translator and commentator on Soviet affairs.
Born in London, Crankshaw was educated in the Nonconformist public school, Bishop's Stortford College, Hertfordshire, England. He started working as a journalist for a few months at The Times. In the 1930s he lived in Vienna, Austria, teaching English and learning German. He witnessed Adolf Hitler's Austro-German union in 1938, and predicted the Second World War while living there.
In 1940 Crankshaw was contacted by the Secret Intelligence Service because of his knowledge of German. During World War II Crankshaw served as a 'Y' (Signals Intelligence) officer in the British Army. From 1941 to 1943 he was assigned to the British Military Mission in Moscow, where he served initially as an Army 'Y' specialist and later as the accredited representative of the British 'Y' services, rising to the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel. Following a breakdown in 'Y' cooperation with the Soviet General Staff in December 1942, the British 'Y' Board recalled Crankshaw to London in February 1943. In May he was assigned to Bletchley Park, where he served as a liaison officer on matters pertaining to Russia.
From 1947 to 1968 he worked for the British newspaper The Observer. He died in 1984 in Hawkhurst, Kent.
Crankshaw wrote around 40 books on Austrian, (Vienna; Vienna, the Image of a Culture in Decline; Fall of the House of Habsburg; Gestapo. Instrument of Tyranny; Maria Theresa; Bismarck; The Habsburgs: a dynasty...) and Russian subjects, (Britain and Russia; Putting up with the Russians; Tolstoy: The making of a novelist; Russia without Stalin; The Shadow of the Winter Palace: Russia's Drift to Revolution, 1825–1917; Khrushchev; Khrushchev Remembers; The New Cold War, Moscow vs. Pekin; preface to Grigory Klimov's The Terror Machine).
(source: wikipedia)
Born in London, Crankshaw was educated in the Nonconformist public school, Bishop's Stortford College, Hertfordshire, England. He started working as a journalist for a few months at The Times. In the 1930s he lived in Vienna, Austria, teaching English and learning German. He witnessed Adolf Hitler's Austro-German union in 1938, and predicted the Second World War while living there.
In 1940 Crankshaw was contacted by the Secret Intelligence Service because of his knowledge of German. During World War II Crankshaw served as a 'Y' (Signals Intelligence) officer in the British Army. From 1941 to 1943 he was assigned to the British Military Mission in Moscow, where he served initially as an Army 'Y' specialist and later as the accredited representative of the British 'Y' services, rising to the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel. Following a breakdown in 'Y' cooperation with the Soviet General Staff in December 1942, the British 'Y' Board recalled Crankshaw to London in February 1943. In May he was assigned to Bletchley Park, where he served as a liaison officer on matters pertaining to Russia.
From 1947 to 1968 he worked for the British newspaper The Observer. He died in 1984 in Hawkhurst, Kent.
Crankshaw wrote around 40 books on Austrian, (Vienna; Vienna, the Image of a Culture in Decline; Fall of the House of Habsburg; Gestapo. Instrument of Tyranny; Maria Theresa; Bismarck; The Habsburgs: a dynasty...) and Russian subjects, (Britain and Russia; Putting up with the Russians; Tolstoy: The making of a novelist; Russia without Stalin; The Shadow of the Winter Palace: Russia's Drift to Revolution, 1825–1917; Khrushchev; Khrushchev Remembers; The New Cold War, Moscow vs. Pekin; preface to Grigory Klimov's The Terror Machine).
(source: wikipedia)
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews
March 1, 2017
I have read about half of this book, covering the years (1933-37) I am currently writing about in the sequel to my recently published historical novel A Flood of Evil. I find it to be a very workmanlike description of how the Gestapo was organized and led, and its objectives.
selected quotes ...
... There was to be no political life in Germany … parties were banned (except the Nazi party) … discipline would be provided by police terror
... It was the task of the Gestapo and SD to penetrate into every aspect of public and private life … and to create a legend of terror design to make them appear even more omniscient and ubiquitous that in fact they work
... a Prussian statute recognized the status of the Gestapo … Clause 7 stated that there was to be no appeal from the decision of the Gestapo … the judiciary was forbidden to re-examine Gestapo decisions … this meant, for example, a person could be acquitted by the court, or released from prison at the expiration of a court sentence, and immediately rearrested by the Gestapo and taken into protective custody, ie, sent to a concentration camp
... in 1936 ... Jews were not Heydrich's main priority … the German people as a whole had to be regimented … the army had to be put in its place … the churches have to be undermined
selected quotes ...
... There was to be no political life in Germany … parties were banned (except the Nazi party) … discipline would be provided by police terror
... It was the task of the Gestapo and SD to penetrate into every aspect of public and private life … and to create a legend of terror design to make them appear even more omniscient and ubiquitous that in fact they work
... a Prussian statute recognized the status of the Gestapo … Clause 7 stated that there was to be no appeal from the decision of the Gestapo … the judiciary was forbidden to re-examine Gestapo decisions … this meant, for example, a person could be acquitted by the court, or released from prison at the expiration of a court sentence, and immediately rearrested by the Gestapo and taken into protective custody, ie, sent to a concentration camp
... in 1936 ... Jews were not Heydrich's main priority … the German people as a whole had to be regimented … the army had to be put in its place … the churches have to be undermined
June 25, 2009
This is a very good work from 1956. EC writes a study of the rise, fall and organization of the Gestapo. He gives enough detail to horrify but not so much as to get lost in a cloud of prurience. The meticulous creation of evil gives one a sense of numbed unreality. The Gestapo is so placid and accountant-like in its workaday routine. Banality of evil indeed.
Crankshaw starts with the question “what is the worldview of people who could do this?” After describing the development of the Gestapo, EC takes every excuse for it in turn. He discards the Penguin Defense, Befehl ist Befehhl, and the “It's a German thing” defense. He concludes that the Gestapo arose from a mindset that refused to accept a non-ideal reality, a reality that includes others as they are. He spends time on the German educational system and on human nature in general. I think he ought to have paid more attention to the secularist, progressive politics that pervaded Germany after the 1880s. With no higher authority than the state, what stops you from deifying politics or science or reason or what have you? Did the modernist, secular, progressive destruction of all connections with the tangible past have the unintended consequence of dispensing with the need for civilization itself? This brought to mind Eric Hoffer's True Believer and Thomas Sowell's Vision of the Anointed. Both would be good books to pair with this one. All deal with the individual's surrender to the group in his search for ultimate meaning and how the believer/anointed regards those who stand over against his chosen ideal reality.
This is a deep and prescient book. EC takes a more personal stance towards his subject than is the fashion nowadays. He at one point referred to Kurt Daluege as looking like “an affronted duck.” I have 2 copies of this book. A modern edition with a shiny black and red picture of Heydrich on the cover. My other copy is a paperback from 1956. It has a softcore cover with a lovely blond, hands bound behind her, on her knees before a uniformed, nightstick wielding Nazi. Have fun analyzing that one for yourselves.
Crankshaw starts with the question “what is the worldview of people who could do this?” After describing the development of the Gestapo, EC takes every excuse for it in turn. He discards the Penguin Defense, Befehl ist Befehhl, and the “It's a German thing” defense. He concludes that the Gestapo arose from a mindset that refused to accept a non-ideal reality, a reality that includes others as they are. He spends time on the German educational system and on human nature in general. I think he ought to have paid more attention to the secularist, progressive politics that pervaded Germany after the 1880s. With no higher authority than the state, what stops you from deifying politics or science or reason or what have you? Did the modernist, secular, progressive destruction of all connections with the tangible past have the unintended consequence of dispensing with the need for civilization itself? This brought to mind Eric Hoffer's True Believer and Thomas Sowell's Vision of the Anointed. Both would be good books to pair with this one. All deal with the individual's surrender to the group in his search for ultimate meaning and how the believer/anointed regards those who stand over against his chosen ideal reality.
This is a deep and prescient book. EC takes a more personal stance towards his subject than is the fashion nowadays. He at one point referred to Kurt Daluege as looking like “an affronted duck.” I have 2 copies of this book. A modern edition with a shiny black and red picture of Heydrich on the cover. My other copy is a paperback from 1956. It has a softcore cover with a lovely blond, hands bound behind her, on her knees before a uniformed, nightstick wielding Nazi. Have fun analyzing that one for yourselves.
August 3, 2016
There is too much information to take in in one reading, but I was fascinated by it. It was written in 1956 and you can feel that the writer had serious questions about the Nuremberg trials. He pulls no punches when laying the blame for the Holocaust at the feet of the Germans as a whole as well as other nations who assisted in the atrocities.
May 10, 2022
When Edward Crankshaw wrote Gestapo: Instrument of Tyranny in 1956, he well understood the subject. A veteran of the British Foreign Office, Intelligence Services, and a journalist of note, he was fluent in both German and Russian, and knew both the Nazi and Soviet regimes more closely than most writers of the Cold War. The result is a Survey history of the organisation, an indictment of some of its major players, and an exploration of the cynical and casual nature of the Nazi security services. We see how the security services of the Nazi Party , essentially a group of political Gangsters with a fringe philosophy, came to control the security apparatus of first all the states of Germany, and then for a short but orgiastic atrocity explosion , in control of almost all of Continental Europe. Along the way, Crankshaw exposes and explains just some of the murderous insanity they loosed on the world, from the takeover of Germany with the fratricide of the SS organisation purging the leadership of the larger SA- and getting the German Army to stay out of their business- by any means necessary. Then as Nazism takes over more of Europe- how they ruled their occupied possessions with direct and indirect terror, stole work and workers from their empire, created the concentration camp system and then tried to end European Jewry, the LGBTQ Community, Ethnic Roma, and a myriad of other "Undesirable elements" with their "Final Solution" project. Crankshaw is there at every step- pointing out the cynical lack of principles behind this movement of "One People, One Reich, One Fuhrer" and its promise of a world based on traditional values.
At all times the Gestapo wanted it both ways. It was the greatest honour to serve the Reich as part of the Security forces- and yet almost all its work was to be done in secrecy. The Einsatzgruppen, the "Special Action" teams that travelled across Poland, Russia, the Ukraine and Belarus, as well as the Baltic states, shooting Communists, Roma and Jews were given special privileges for their work- but the Officers are always concerned about their morale. All sorts of officials deny participation or profess regret after the war- but the Author shows that most of them are on the record as knowing full well they were criminals when they were doing the crimes. The roll-call of methods employed for torture throughout the European Empire and a few other passages prove conclusively that this was totally policy and not a few overzealous actors. Then as the Holocaust project develops after 1941, we see how thorough and efficient the Nazis can be at their favourite project, the murder of my family. Crankshaw never lets up - and the book is always as much indictment and exposure of cynical lies as it is a straight history. You can see that he is still angry about this festival of criminality disguised as legitimate state actions.
This book can be quite graphic in describing malfeasance, and covers a lot of adult themes of all kinds, so this is best read by the Junior reader over about 13/14. For the Gamer/Modeler/Military Enthusiast, this book is an important read- without really being too useful. I suppose a few RPG -players who play espionage games might learn some of the Gestapo's SOPs that might add complexity to a scenario or two. Not many modelers model the Gestapo, so not much help there. For the Military Enthusiast, there is a lot to understand about the security underpinning of the European Occupations- and why the Resistances were so important to the regular Europeans. However any reader of this book is going to get a really good understanding of why Fascism is such a terrible form of government for any level of society, and why we need to keep gangsters out of government. This is a good book for the inveterate WWII reader and the casual reader alike, to keep alive the knowledge of the Criminality of the Nazi Third Reich. Sure, the uniforms were cool and the Tanks, Aircraft, and Weapons they developed were intriguing, but the Nazi state was firmly based in Theft, Slavery, Torture, and Mass Murder- and sometimes you have to read about the reality behind the slick veneer. This author picks up the proverbial rock- and then explains how the Nazi Insects beneath it scurried to their slimy tasks.
At all times the Gestapo wanted it both ways. It was the greatest honour to serve the Reich as part of the Security forces- and yet almost all its work was to be done in secrecy. The Einsatzgruppen, the "Special Action" teams that travelled across Poland, Russia, the Ukraine and Belarus, as well as the Baltic states, shooting Communists, Roma and Jews were given special privileges for their work- but the Officers are always concerned about their morale. All sorts of officials deny participation or profess regret after the war- but the Author shows that most of them are on the record as knowing full well they were criminals when they were doing the crimes. The roll-call of methods employed for torture throughout the European Empire and a few other passages prove conclusively that this was totally policy and not a few overzealous actors. Then as the Holocaust project develops after 1941, we see how thorough and efficient the Nazis can be at their favourite project, the murder of my family. Crankshaw never lets up - and the book is always as much indictment and exposure of cynical lies as it is a straight history. You can see that he is still angry about this festival of criminality disguised as legitimate state actions.
This book can be quite graphic in describing malfeasance, and covers a lot of adult themes of all kinds, so this is best read by the Junior reader over about 13/14. For the Gamer/Modeler/Military Enthusiast, this book is an important read- without really being too useful. I suppose a few RPG -players who play espionage games might learn some of the Gestapo's SOPs that might add complexity to a scenario or two. Not many modelers model the Gestapo, so not much help there. For the Military Enthusiast, there is a lot to understand about the security underpinning of the European Occupations- and why the Resistances were so important to the regular Europeans. However any reader of this book is going to get a really good understanding of why Fascism is such a terrible form of government for any level of society, and why we need to keep gangsters out of government. This is a good book for the inveterate WWII reader and the casual reader alike, to keep alive the knowledge of the Criminality of the Nazi Third Reich. Sure, the uniforms were cool and the Tanks, Aircraft, and Weapons they developed were intriguing, but the Nazi state was firmly based in Theft, Slavery, Torture, and Mass Murder- and sometimes you have to read about the reality behind the slick veneer. This author picks up the proverbial rock- and then explains how the Nazi Insects beneath it scurried to their slimy tasks.
June 17, 2013
When most people think of the Nazi regime, they think of the Gestapo as the source of all the horrible atrocities Germany is remembered for committing during WWII. This book shows that, although the Gestapo committed some of these terrible acts, it didn't commit them all--it shows the "other" groups within Nazi Germany that committed heinous acts of violence alongside, as well as above and beyond, the Gestapo. This book doesn't go as much into the actual descriptions of violence committed by Germany during this time frame as much as it tells the history of how these German groups and the Nazi machine came to be. It also takes a quick look at whether or not this could possibly happen again in another time and place. A great read for those interested in history, although it does read almost exactly like a dry history textbook at times.
July 10, 2013
Fascinating work on the nazi secret police, made more interesting by the fact that the author was a contemporary and is writing from very little time remove. Much of the early part of the book details rather arcane political and bureaucratic manoeuvrings in the nazi hierarchy, and the later part is hampered by the large-scale destruction of records, but it's an engrossing read as the author's disgust, contempt and cold rage with his subject matter shines through
October 29, 2008
unspeakably disturbing. even knowing that the holocaust was horrific this one still made me feel sick reading it.
however, its still a good book. at least if you like WWII history and are trying (in vain) to understand the nazis.
however, its still a good book. at least if you like WWII history and are trying (in vain) to understand the nazis.
March 21, 2025
readable, if a little dated in some of its stances. There might be something more recent on the topic, with more up to date information, but this is still good and valuable
April 1, 2017
Another grim but good book. Extensively researched and footnoted, this book relates the history of the Gestapo from its formation early in the Nazi regime through the end of the war, and some of the trials of senior Gestapo officials for crimes against humanity after the war.
A lot of it is matter-of-fact description of how the organization operated, from its structure to its policies. The unemotional accounts of the systematic, incredible, egregious cruelty of this psychopathic bureaucracy are more chilling for that very calm and unemotional telling.
In the history of this as with other brutal power systems - including past and present aspects of my own American government - there are important lessons. If it's true for individuals that the unexamined life is not worth living, it's even more true for groups and whole societies. We should always be questioning ourselves and keeping an eye on our shadows. Most of the greatest evils perpetrated by groups in human history have been carried out by people who were blandly sure that what they were doing was right.
A lot of it is matter-of-fact description of how the organization operated, from its structure to its policies. The unemotional accounts of the systematic, incredible, egregious cruelty of this psychopathic bureaucracy are more chilling for that very calm and unemotional telling.
In the history of this as with other brutal power systems - including past and present aspects of my own American government - there are important lessons. If it's true for individuals that the unexamined life is not worth living, it's even more true for groups and whole societies. We should always be questioning ourselves and keeping an eye on our shadows. Most of the greatest evils perpetrated by groups in human history have been carried out by people who were blandly sure that what they were doing was right.
February 2, 2014
Overall, a poorly written book. The content is there but the delivery is slow and disjointed.
June 11, 2025
A well read book audio concerning a difficult subject.
The book was written in 1956 and it does come across as dated. Still it is an interesting listen and at approximately 7.5 hours not too long.
The book was written in 1956 and it does come across as dated. Still it is an interesting listen and at approximately 7.5 hours not too long.
March 9, 2016
This book would be a useful reference source were someone undertaking research on the period. Halfway through, I remembered I was no longer doing 'Higher' history and decided I could stop reading. Along with a sense of relief I also know where to go if I ever have to write an essay on the Nazi's police forces.
January 23, 2018
This book is a bit of mess due to the power struggle between antagonists. No real surprises.
September 28, 2017
How the Gestapo fit into the fabric of Nazi Germany.
Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews