Fernando Alcoforado*
This article aims to show how the police state in Germany arose during the Weimar Republic when a branch of the Prussian police (region of Germany that extends from the bay of Gdańsk in Poland, the end of Courland on the southeastern Baltic coast, in Latvia, even Masuria, within what is currently Polish territory), became a political police, the dreaded Gestapo, during Nazism, as well as the political, economic and social scenario that led to its emergence. Gestapo is a German abbreviation that meant secret state police, an organization that investigated, tortured and arrested opponents of Germany’s Nazi (Reich) regime between 1933 and 1945. Gestapo was therefore the expression of the police state it became Germany during Nazism. This article also makes a comparative analysis between the Germany of the Weimar Republic and contemporary Brazil with the risks of the end of democracy and its transformation into a police state.
The Gestapo was created on April 26, 1933, in Prussia, from the Prussian Secret Police. At first, it was just a branch of the Prussian police. When the Gestapo was created by Prussian Interior Minister Hermann Goring, it was responsible for the investigation, arrest and torture of political opponents of Nazi Germany until its end with the defeat in World War II in 1945. The Gestapo’s actions were based in the Decree for the Protection of the People and the State, signed in 1933 by the German President, Paul von Hindenburg, after an arson attack against the German Parliament attributed to the Communists, but carried out by the Nazis. The Gestapo was originally created to serve as a personal guard for Nazi leaders, thus being an elite troop whose members wore black shirts.
Under the pretext of defending the country against violent acts (supposedly caused by communists), the 1933 Decree for the Protection of the People and the State restricted civil rights, such as freedom of speech and the press. Thus, under legal protection, secret agents could act as they pleased. They did not need court orders to interrogate, imprison and even send alleged political opponents of the government to concentration camps, under the control of another Nazi organization, the SS (German acronym for “protection troops”). Only later, following a political movement engendered to destroy undisciplined Nazi assault troops known as SA, was the Gestapo officially subordinate to the SS, Nazi troops led by Heinrich Himmler.
SS was a group founded in 1925, with the aim of protecting Adolf Hitler and the leaders of the Nazi Party. This Nazi army originated from the paramilitary group SA, which has operated in a semi-independent manner since 1923, in order to protect Party members. SS members were made up of so-called “elite men”, individuals who met the standards of racial “purity” advocated by Nazi ideology. These soldiers swore total loyalty to the Third Reich. The SS’s first commander was Rudolf Diels, who recruited members of professional police departments and made it function as a federal police, similar to the United States’ FBI.
Until then, the SS was made up of about 300 soldiers. Only after 1929, when Heinrich Himmler took over, did this Nazi army begin to become a powerful organization. The Gestapo was run for several years by Reinhard Heydrich. Responding only to Heinrich Himmler and Führer Adolf Hitler himself, Heydrich led one of the most feared organizations in Nazi Germany. Now without uniforms, the Gestapo contributed significantly to destroying all German political opposition in the immediate years after the Nazi rise, systematically pursuing and imprisoning unionists and communists. The Gestapo’s role as a political police was not established until Hermann Göring was appointed to succeed Diels as commander in 1934.
Gestapo had a few tens of thousands of agents spread across Europe. The secret to its success was, in fact, in the extremely rigorous training developed by Heinrich Himmler himself, in addition to the frequent denunciations of Germans in relation to compatriots who believed they were suspicious and the Gestapo’s healthy relations with other security organizations in Nazi Germany. As the totalitarian power of Nazism in Germany crystallized, the Gestapo gradually left the persecution of political dissidents and began to focus on the persecution of Jews. The organization played a central role in the so-called Crystals Night, when after two days of great violence against the Jewish community about 25,000 Jews were deported.
In the midst of the war, it would be the Gestapo chief, Reinhard Heydrich, who would systematize the so-called “final solution” to deal with the remaining Jews on German territory, at that point confined in ghettos. Soon after, however, he was murdered in an attack that unleashed a brutal wave of Gestapo violence in Czechoslovakia, which decimated the entire city of origin of the murderers. After that, the organization would assume a character of “purification”, that is, extermination of the populations deemed undesirable by the Nazi ideology. To this end, specific Gestapo-derived troops would be created, death squads, which reached terrifying numbers of efficiency.
A separate chapter should be reserved for Gestapo methods of arrest, interrogation and torture. Anyone arrested by the Nazi secret police could expect the wildest forms of torture, with the intention of snatching away any information or complaint that might prove useful. The interrogation methods included repeated drowning of prisoners in a bath of cold water; electric shocks connecting the wires to the hands, feet, ears and genitals; crushing of testicles; lifting the prisoner by the hands tied behind his back, causing the shoulder to dislocate (a practice known during the Catholic Inquisition as the pendulum); beatings with rubber batons or whips and burns with cigars or soldering iron.
Everything that has just been described occurred during the Weimar Republic, which was instituted in 1919 with the end of the monarchy after the First World War. With the 1919 Constitution, the German Reich took the form of a republic and was organized as a modern parliamentary democracy. It did not help much because the contradictions of the period put Germany in a spiral of economic, social and political crisis that ended in Nazism. Weimar ended up becoming a great example of the failure of liberal parliamentary democracy that was born with the optimistic impulse of national and democratic regeneration that ended in the darkness of Nazism. When we now speak of the “Weimar syndrome”, it is referring to the tensions that threaten to jeopardize the stability of liberal democracy with the tensions caused mainly by the revitalization of populism and by the illiberal and authoritarian turn as occurs today in Brazil.
Does Brazil’s current situation resemble the turbulent 1930s in Germany during the Weimar Republic? There are similarities and differences. The similarities are of an economic nature with the stagnation of the economy, of a social nature with the lack of adequate social coverage for the most needy and of a political nature with the endeavor of the extreme rightwing to destroy democratic institutions. The difference lies in the fact that, unlike Germany, the political forces of the left or extreme left in Brazil do not clash with those of the extreme right as they did in Germany and that there are no psychosocial problems in Brazil such as the humiliation of national feeling by Versailles treaty and the war reparations suffered by Germany. The Weimar Republic came to an end with the implantation of Nazism when Germany became a police state. Will the democratic Republic established in 1988 in Brazil have the same end as the Weimar Republic?
One fact is evident: there is a linear relationship between economic and social crisis and democratic collapse. There can be no democracy without liberalism, nor without social protection. A democracy without aspirations for social justice like that of the Weimar Republic could not survive. The same can be repeated in contemporary Brazil in the face of huge economic and social problems. History never repeats itself following the same script, but neither does it need to fall into fascism or conventional Nazism for the breakdown of democracy to occur. This was the scenario that led to the formation of the Gestapo in Nazi Germany that needs to be avoided in Brazil.
From the above, the dark history of the Gestapo in Nazi Germany shows the risks of transforming the police like that of Prussia into an instrument of the interests of those in power, like Adolf Hitler in 1933. It is necessary to avoid at all costs that what happened in Nazi Germany to repeat itself in Brazil with the transformation of the Federal Police into a Gestapo. Esse risco precisa ser evitado, dado o interesse de Bolsonaro em controlar a Polícia Federal e suas ameaças contra o Estado de Direito democrático.
REFERENCE
HITLER, Adolf. Minha Luta. São Paulo: Moraes, 1983.
MICHEL, Henri. “O Nacional-Socialismo”. In: Os Fascismos. Lisboa: Publicações Dom Quixote, 1977.
RICHARD, Lionel. A República de Weimar. São Paulo: Cia. das Letras, 1988.
* Fernando Alcoforado, 80, awarded the medal of Engineering Merit of the CONFEA / CREA System, member of the Bahia Academy of Education, engineer and doctor in Territorial Planning and Regional Development by the University of Barcelona, university professor and consultant in the areas of strategic planning, business planning, regional planning and planning of energy systems, is author of the books Globalização (Editora Nobel, São Paulo, 1997), De Collor a FHC- O Brasil e a Nova (Des)ordem Mundial (Editora Nobel, São Paulo, 1998), Um Projeto para o Brasil (Editora Nobel, São Paulo, 2000), Os condicionantes do desenvolvimento do Estado da Bahia (Tese de doutorado. Universidade de Barcelona,http://www.tesisenred.net/handle/10803/1944, 2003), Globalização e Desenvolvimento (Editora Nobel, São Paulo, 2006), Bahia- Desenvolvimento do Século XVI ao Século XX e Objetivos Estratégicos na Era Contemporânea (EGBA, Salvador, 2008), The Necessary Conditions of the Economic and Social Development- The Case of the State of Bahia (VDM Verlag Dr. Müller Aktiengesellschaft & Co. KG, Saarbrücken, Germany, 2010), Aquecimento Global e Catástrofe Planetária (Viena- Editora e Gráfica, Santa Cruz do Rio Pardo, São Paulo, 2010), Amazônia Sustentável- Para o progresso do Brasil e combate ao aquecimento global (Viena- Editora e Gráfica, Santa Cruz do Rio Pardo, São Paulo, 2011), Os Fatores Condicionantes do Desenvolvimento Econômico e Social (Editora CRV, Curitiba, 2012), Energia no Mundo e no Brasil- Energia e Mudança Climática Catastrófica no Século XXI (Editora CRV, Curitiba, 2015), As Grandes Revoluções Científicas, Econômicas e Sociais que Mudaram o Mundo (Editora CRV, Curitiba, 2016), A Invenção de um novo Brasil (Editora CRV, Curitiba, 2017), Esquerda x Direita e a sua convergência (Associação Baiana de Imprensa, Salvador, 2018, em co-autoria) and Como inventar o futuro para mudar o mundo (Editora CRV, Curitiba, 2019).
Site Title 