I don't remember buying Gestapo, but I'm glad I did, as it was quite an interesting read. Crankshaw's goal with the book was not to give a full history of the Gestapo and its activities (although he did give a very good summary of the history) but rather to show the extent of the Gestapo's crimes and the extent to which the Gestapo was integrated with other elements of the SS, the Wehrmacht, and German society in general. Crankshaw's point in doing so was to show how widespread the crimes of Nazi Germany really were, and to prevent the guilty from pointing at the Gestapo and claiming that they were solely responsible for all of the crimes that occurred.
Perhaps the biggest strength of the book lies in how well Crankshaw outlined the key figures of the Gestapo as well as the structure of the organization and how it fit in with other Nazi organizations. The formation of the Gestapo, SS, SD, and other Nazi groups was very complex as various people jockeyed for power, but Crankshaw does an excellent job in showing exactly how the Gestapo was formed, who was in control of the various aspects of it, and how it was interconnected with other parts of the Nazi power structure, therefore implicating each department in the crimes of the others.
I definitely appreciated how Crankshaw refused to subscribe to the myths of Wehrmacht innocence that are still prevalent today. He showed quite clearly that the German generals had ample opportunity to stop Hitler from reaching power in the early days but chose not to (even after seeing his brutality in dealing with the SA) because they believed that regaining their weapons and military was the most important thing for them. Crankshaw also does a good job of refuting the popular theory that the Wehrmacht was not involved in carrying out the Holocaust. To the contrary, they were well aware of what was going on, were under orders to facilitate the SS in carrying it out (providing accommodations, transport, etc), and in some cases participated in the slaughter. On the rare occasions in which a Wehrmacht officer did protest, it was often more because he was concerned for his own mens' mental well-being than for the lives of the Jewish people being murdered.
Crankshaw also advanced the interesting theory that in Germany people were willing to carry out the orders of the sadists in power because their education system had drilled into them from childhood that they should obey the instructions of those in authority without question. He says that this is a more plausible explanation than the theory which believes that teaching Germans that Jews were subhumans allowed them to justify to themselves killing them, since in America black people are regarded as subhuman and in Britain many of the colonized peoples are regarded as subhuman (the book was originally written in the 1950s), but in neither case is there genocide directed against them. I would disagree with that slightly and say that in America and Britain in the 1950s those people were regarded as inferior humans, but not subhumans, and that in cases where others were regarded as subhumans (such as the attitude in America towards Native Americans several centuries ago) there were in fact widespread slaughters that were seen as justified. I believe that Crankshaw's argument about the rigidness of German education helps to explain the mechanics of the Holocaust but cannot be seen as the sole contributing factor.
Overall, I very much enjoyed Gestapo. It does an excellent job of proving its main argument, that of the guilt of people and organizations outside the SS/Gestapo, and was very interesting to read. I would highly recommend it.
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