In “Die Betreffenden sind zu vernichten,” a reworking of his doctoral dissertation, Markus Günnewig sets himself the goal of writing “a history of Gestapo violence on the home front with a particular focus on the last months of the war” (23). This is certainly a daunting task given the large body of scholarship that already exists on the Gestapo’s criminality during this era, but it immediately becomes clear that this work will offer a genuinely new approach to the subject. In the current historiography, Gestapo crimes can often appear remarkably detached from the wider historical events of those days (as part of crimes of the final phase, in which the radicalization of the actors involved is often just a given), and Günnewig immediately pushes back against this notion by firmly tying Gestapo crimes to the war itself. To argue his point, the author brings together hundreds of reports from across Germany. Given the mass destruction of official documents during the war’s closing months (a process he also chronicles), it is not altogether surprising that most of these stem from Western Germany, but it is equally clear that Günnewig did everything possible to incorporate cases from Eastern Germany, such as Stettin, Breslau, and Königsberg, too. The simple yet profound point of departure of this work is that the regime remained reluctant to turn against its own citizens and instead expected its police apparatus to focus on Nazi-Germany’s traditional enemies. These enemies were present on all fronts—land, water, and air; the domains of the army, Kriegsmarine, and Luftwaffe respectively—with the Gestapo designating itself the guarantor of the “fourth front”: Germany itself, Innendeutschland (35). To Gestapo officials, Germany was a “home front,” a Heimatfront, in its truest sense.

To explain the sharp increase of Gestapo violence in the final year of the war, Günnewig draws attention to the “self-radicalizing” nature of its personnel, especially with regard to Eastern laborers, the Ostarbeiter. Their large presence—by 1944 every tenth person in Germany was a foreign laborer—was menacing enough to give rise to deep suspicion, and since Gestapo groupthink deemed it inevitable that these men and women would harbor communist ideas, ever larger numbers of foreigners were imprisoned. Many of them would subsequently be tortured so as to reveal their accomplices or to confirm the existence of city- or province-wide resistance groups which, more often than not, were mere figments of self-induced paranoia (94). Parts of this paranoia were imported. The author convincingly shows how the Gestapo’s retreat from abroad shaped conduct back home: many officials that were previously posted in the Soviet Union, Poland, and beyond now returned to Germany, bringing with them radicalized ideas and practices they had developed in the years prior. As a result, these men, as well as their new domestic colleagues, came to believe that merely policing German society was not enough—they considered themselves to be engaged in something much bigger, and readily engaged in focused and feverish paramilitary anti-partisan warfare, or Bandenkampf, practices thus far only seen abroad (179). And they were not alone in doing so: like before, they could rely on the cooperation of local military commands, with which they coordinated military patrols (180), and large-scale police raids (98). Especially in cities that were designated as fortresses (Festungen), where the sense of beleaguerment was most acutely felt, this collaboration could quickly turn grim for those targeted (257).

Concentration camp inmates as well as Jews and Mischlinge who had thus far not yet been deported were other obvious targets for the Gestapo at the war’s closing months. The notion that these groups constituted a “security risk” and could use Germany’s chaotic state to cause another “stab in the back” was to a great extent almost self-evident among Gestapo officials and was often pretext enough to make them the target of extra-legal killings (227). Eventually the Gestapo would also turn against its own citizens, and Günnewig shows how its personnel ended up roaming the streets: after their offices cleared out, Gestapo officials were ordered to stick around as long as possible to “maintain order” (264). It was at this point that they definitively broke with the laws they were meant to enforce, and here the author makes an interesting point: as they are asked to spy on and terrorize their own population, and sabotage the means of existence in areas that were about to fall to the enemy, they effectively became the very threat they were ordered to combat (331). More than just a work about the nature of its crimes, Günnewig’s book also serves as a valuable institutional history of the Gestapo in its final year. We find voices among the perpetrators expressing the “unconditional will to persecute” (153), but there were also those who took part in executions simply because they were invited to attend them or just to learn the trade of policing, with one junior official reporting that it had been a “jolly good affair” (208). These behaviors fully align with conduct recognizable across the field of perpetrator studies. Günnewig’s truly original research has culminated in a deeply inciteful book, and “Die Betreffenden sind zu vernichten” will surely become the go-to work for Gestapo criminality during the war’s closing months.