The 20th century will remain in history as one of bloody and criminal dictatorships. Here we discuss Nazism, a racist ideology based on pseudo-scientific studies of a supposed superior being. To establish his dictatorship in Germany, Hitler resorted to a police state.
Every aspect of public life had to be known to this police, which served a regime where man was no longer an individual but an element of the machinery the state had become. Thus, the very idea of individual freedom was abstract. Fundamental rights disappeared in the name of the State. Jacques Delarue demonstrates the mechanisms of this Gestapo that applied its reign of terror first in Germany and then spread it across Europe, at least to the countries that fell under German rule and occupation.
The Gestapo was thus the tool of a genocide where anything that did not meet the standards of the Nazi ideal had to be eliminated. The crimes committed by Germany are indelible, inerasable; the country bears moral responsibility for them. The author describes the mechanisms of this Gestapo, an army within the army, a state within the state.
This book is a valuable witness of that period; it will prove, regardless of what some may think, that the Nazi genocide is not a detail of history, but the History of a period when millions of human beings were massacred for their religion, origin, or ideas by executioners obeying unjust laws, which denied the principles of law.
The concentration camps, gas chambers, executions, hostages—so many chapters of a history, that of the Gestapo, of the terror that descended upon Europe with Nazism. It is alarming today to see that this criminal ideology still has followers; it must be watched carefully to avoid reliving such a nightmare.
The democracies were cautious in the thirties; may they be firm and resolute in the face of new demons whose simplistic ideas dangerously rhyme with populism.
History of the Gestapo, a book to read or reread urgently before it’s too late.
Thierry Jan
