I was listening to the radio a month ago and I heard the host talking about Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. They referenced a term named Gestapo and I never heard of this term before. It turns out that the Gestapo were the state police for Nazi Germany. After I read a few articles on how they operated I made a few comparisons between our military police force that operate today and the Nazi Police from less than a century ago.
- The Gestapo police took over state after state in Germany. Today, 26 states in the US have a local or state police force that are militarized.
- In 1936 the German passed the Gestapo Law, which gave them total immunity from judicial review. Today, our police were given access to all communications without any need for consent by us or a judge(H.R. 4681 sec. 309).
- Schutzhaftbefehl- This term was used when a person voluntarily( I mean that loosely) pleas guilty. According to USC New only 2% of federal cases go to trial and 4% of state cases go to trial. The rest plead guilty, according to District Judge Hon. Jed Rakoff a lot of these individuals are innocent and got coerced into the system. “We have hundreds, or thousands, or even tens of thousands of innocent people who are in prison, right now, for crimes they never committed…..”
- The Gestapo was met with opposition and from students groups like White Rose, churches and the general public. These groups had to be careful since informants for Gestape were very common. In Oakland,CA in Dec. two undercover policemen were involved in an incident of violence when one of them pulled a gun on protestors. There’s been a rumor that the undercover’s were trying to incite a riot. That has not been confirmed.
- The Gestapo used political and intelligence units to spy on anyone who opposed the state and kept tabs on oppositional leaders. Ever since the Occupy Movement a few years back, the police had been able to use social media sites, such as Twitter and Facebook in attempts to monitor their activity and arrest them even though there were no laws broken.
