David Cesarani

Men in Black

The Gestapo: Power and Terror in the Third Reich

By

Oxford University Press 234pp £18.99 order from our bookshop

Seventy years after the Third Reich was crushed, any mention of the Gestapo still conjures up the image of merciless leather-coated enforcers of Nazi rule pouncing on terrified civilians. In fact, those most likely to wear leather coats were young recruits who entered the service on the eve of the Second World War. During the first years of Nazi rule most Gestapo operatives were career policemen and the organisation was quite small. It acquired its reputation much later, and most of its victims were in fact foreign workers in wartime Germany.

Sign Up to our newsletter

Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.

Follow Literary Review on Twitter

  • Last Tweets

    • 'What in other hands could have been a dry, pedantic account of Christianity’s birth and evolution becomes in Holla… ,
    • RT : One of my favourite literary magazines is celebrating 40 years this year. Here is the September edition of… ,
    • 'Now that the Thames is too fast-flowing to freeze, its spirit’s devotees ... have found other climes for their pri… ,
    • 'Bythell glowers past his till at a world in slow free fall.' on the travails of a second-hand book… ,
    • 'It is a scent of animal wrath, of instinctive need, of brutal life which affects the cultured nostrils of our civi… ,
    • 'The day produced countless stories of chance, of people taking one route or another without realising that the dec… ,
    • In this month's 'Silenced Voices', looks at the case of Azimjon Askarov, the journalist and human rights… ,
    Follow Us